# The Second Order of Meetings: Why Team Software Stopped Too Early
## First Order: Record What Happened
Every meeting tool does this now. Transcription, summaries, action items, shared notes. Zoom, Teams, Otter, Fireflies — they all capture what was said. This is table stakes.
But recording a meeting doesn't mean anything was decided. Half the "action items" are vague. The disagreements get glossed over. Everyone leaves with a slightly different understanding of what was agreed upon.
The transcript is a record. It's not a resolution.
## Second Order: Resolve What Was Discussed
What should happen after the meeting:
1. The system identifies where people **actually disagreed** — not just what was said, but where positions conflicted and no resolution was reached.
2. Those open questions get shared — with the people in the meeting AND the people who weren't there but are affected by the decision.
3. People respond asynchronously. Voice, text, whatever. On their own time, with time to think instead of being put on the spot in a conference room.
4. The system synthesizes the responses. "4 of 6 agree on this approach. Here's why the other 2 disagree."
5. This repeats until there's actual consensus — not "silence means agreement" but explicit acknowledgment from the people who need to weigh in.
6. The decision gets locked. The reasoning gets recorded. The dissenting opinions get preserved.
That last part matters more than people think. When a decision turns out to be wrong six months later, you can trace back to who argued what and why. Organizations that don't do this make the same mistakes repeatedly because nobody remembers the context of the original decision.
## Why Team Software Never Built This
Slack, Teams, Asana, Monday, Notion — they all stop at first order. They'll help you take notes, assign tasks, and share documents. None of them track whether a decision was actually made, who agreed, who didn't, and why.
Three reasons:
**It's hard to model.** A task has a status. A document has a version. But a *decision* has positions, stakeholders, quorum rules, and a resolution state that evolves over time. Most product teams don't even know how to spec this, let alone build it.
**It requires AI now.** Identifying disagreements in a transcript, synthesizing multiple async responses, determining when consensus is reached — this wasn't automatable until recently. You'd need a human facilitator doing this manually, which doesn't scale.
**It threatens how companies operate.** Many organizations run on ambiguity. Decisions are deliberately left vague so nobody is accountable. A system that forces explicit consensus and records who disagreed makes it very hard to play politics. Some companies don't want this — which is exactly why the ones that adopt it will outperform the ones that don't.
## The Switching Problem
This is also why it's so difficult for companies to change their team software. They aren't just switching tools — they'd be switching how decisions get made. Their entire workflow is built around the ambiguity that current tools allow.
Moving from "we had a meeting and here are the notes" to "we had a meeting and here are the 3 unresolved questions that need answers by Friday" is a cultural change, not a software change. The software just makes it unavoidable.
Companies that are already disciplined about decision-making will adopt this immediately. Companies that aren't will resist it — not because the software is wrong, but because it exposes how broken their process is.
## What This Looks Like
A meeting ends. Within minutes:
- Participants see a summary with **open questions flagged**
- Non-attendees who are affected get notified with context
- Everyone can respond on their own time
- The system tracks positions and synthesizes where things stand
- When enough people align (configurable — majority, unanimous, specific roles), the decision locks
- If assumptions later prove wrong, the system links back to the original reasoning
No more "I thought we decided X." No more "Nobody told me about this." No more making the same bad decision twice because nobody remembers why it was made the first time.
The meeting is just the starting point. The real work is what happens after.