Meet WASHI. Team Alignment Made Easier.

Our new team alignment software project has a name.

WASHI (www.washi.com)

The name is inspired by nemawashi - a Japanese business practice of team alignment.

And while you may not be familiar with nemawashi, you may have heard of another team alignment concept - “Disagree and Commit.”

All teams have disparate, sometimes conflicting ideas. These differences can drive innovation - or create friction that hurts your bottom line.

This is why business leaders such as Jeff Bezos, Reed Hastings, Satyaa Nardella, Patrick Lencioni, Jim Collins, and others stress the importance of productive disagreement leading to commitment to a unified direction.

Yet, we all know how hard this is in real life. WASHI is designed to make it easier.

How?

- By lowering the playing field for all stakeholders to engage.
- By letting stakeholders be  anonymous, which creates psychological safety and reduces politics and bias.
- By providing a step-by-step, convergent process that the whole team can trust.
- By making commitment to decisions explicit.
- By being highly efficient and integrating with existing collaboration tools such as Slack and Teams.

WASHI is ready to demo. I’m excited to share it and get your feedback, so let me know if you’d like to check it out.