Six to one is not a decision.
Propose runs the Core Protocols Decider inside Slack. A proposal carries only when every objection is resolved — never by majority vote. The two people you outvoted were not convinced; they were counted.
Adapted from the Decider and Resolution protocols, the Core Protocols by Jim and Michele McCarthy.
Move deploys to Tuesday mornings, starting next sprint.
“What will it take to get you in?”
Mika: “A rollback path if a Tuesday deploy breaks.” Amendment adopted — ship behind a flag for the first two weeks. No withdrawn.
Decision Record posted in-thread, every ballot named.
The whole protocol fits in the message.
Nobody reads a manual. The audience votes in seconds, because every message teaches the rule it enforces at the moment of use.
Propose
One concise, actionable item.
/propose posts your Proposal to the channel. The audience is fixed at post time, and only its members can vote.
The proposer picks a voting window from 15 minutes to 72 hours. The clock is real: deadlines survive restarts.
Vote
Yes, Support-it, or No. Nothing else.
Ballots stay hidden while voting is open, so nobody anchors on the early count. At close, every ballot is named.
Silence never becomes a vote. Absent members are bound by the result — never counted in it.
Resolve & carry
Every No is a conversation, not a defeat.
A No opens a Resolution: “What will it take to get you in?” The proposer can adopt the answer as an amendment.
The proposal carries only with zero standing objections, and closes with a named Decision Record. There is no vote-count path past a standing No.
A poll counts hands. Propose resolves objections.
When a decision passes five to two, the two were not convinced. They were outvoted. The decision gets relitigated in hallways and slow-rolled in the work, because a majority can compel a result — it cannot manufacture commitment.
The Decider protocol removes the shortcut. A standing No cannot be out-counted, only resolved: the objector says what it would take to get them in, and the proposer decides whether to take it. What carries is what the whole team actually agreed to do.
- No arithmetic past a No
- There is no vote-count path to Carried over a standing objection. An unresolved objection withdraws the proposal; it never loses a tally.
- Silence is not consent
- People who do not vote are bound by the result but never counted in it. Nobody's inaction is converted into a Yes.
- Hidden ballots, named close
- Votes are private while the window is open, so nobody anchors on the early count. At close, every ballot is named, so everybody owns theirs.
Make the next decision one that sticks.
Install Propose, type /propose in any channel, and let the protocol do the rest.