What to do
The limits of sorting
Four things this method does not do, one way it can be misused, and the honest size of what it is worth.
Claims this part is about, and what each was answered with
Showing up for each other is part of what a team is
Value→A statement of what mattersAnswered in its own kind, which is why it went somewhere
People should be free to choose where they live
Value→A principleNew starters take longer to become productive remotely
Empirical→Evidencethree claims · one empirical and two value · every one of them was answered in its own kind
The three claims on this record that were answered in their own kind.
A method that is only described by its advocates is not being described accurately. Four things sorting does not do.
It does not tell you who is right
A claim correctly sorted as empirical may be false. A value claim correctly identified is not thereby good. Sorting tells you what would bear on a claim, and nothing at all about whether to accept it.
This is worth saying because the sorting can feel like analysis, and a person who has sorted an argument can come away believing they have evaluated it. They have organised it.
It does not make people agree
The ten value claims on this record are not going to converge. Sorting them changes them from a stalemate dressed as a factual dispute into an honest disagreement, which is better and is not agreement.
If the measure of success is consensus, this method fails. The measure it offers instead is narrower: that the empirical part gets answered, the costs get stated, and the values get named before anybody decides.
It does not neutralise power
A disagreement accurately located is still resolved by whoever decides. Sorting gives the person being overruled a better record and a clearer understanding of what happened. It does not give them a vote.
Anyone offering this as a way for the less powerful party to win an argument is overselling it. What it offers is the difference between being overruled on your actual position and being overruled on a position nobody understood.
It does not work after a certain point
Once a discussion has reached the stage where both sides are reading each other for motive, a correctly sorted reply is received as a technique. The method depends on sincerity being credited, and there is a point past which it is not.
On this record that point arrived in about week seven. Everything useful on this site would have had to be done before it.
| What it does | What it does not do |
|---|---|
| Tells you what would bear on a claim | Tell you whether the claim is true |
| Locates the disagreement | Resolve it |
| Improves the record of a decision | Change who makes it |
| Works early in a discussion | Work once motives are in play |
The way it gets misused
As a device for dismissing claims.
"That is just a value claim" is the sentence to watch for, and the damage is in the word just. A value claim correctly identified is still owed an answer; the answer is simply of a different kind. Using the sorting to file something as unserious is a worse move than not sorting at all, because it has the appearance of rigour.
The test for whether you are doing this: have you ever sorted one of your own claims into the value column and then still argued for it? If not, you are using the taxonomy to score.
What it is actually worth
On the only record this site has: of twenty-four claims, seven were answered in their own kind, and those seven produced two trades, one measurement and one recorded disagreement. The other seventeen produced nothing.
Four outcomes from seven exchanges, none from seventeen. That is one organisation and one sorter and it is the whole of the evidence here. It is offered as that and not as more.
Three things it is sometimes credited with and should not be
Neutrality. This site has a position: that the costs in this argument are unevenly distributed and systematically unstated. The sorting method is not the source of that position and does not establish it; the count of who bears what does, and that count comes from one organisation.
Novelty. Distinguishing facts from values is not new and is not this site's invention. What is offered here is one application and one record, not a discovery.
Generality. Everything here comes from a single consultation in a single organisation over eleven weeks. The method may travel. The numbers certainly do not.
The question to hold against all of it
If somebody applied this to your own argument and found that your central claim was a value you had been stating as a finding, would you accept it?
If the answer is no, then nothing on this site will be any use to you, and that is a fair outcome. The method's only real requirement is a willingness to have it applied to your own material, and it is genuinely unpleasant the first time.
That requirement is also why it will not spread far. A technique whose first cost falls on the person adopting it does not propagate quickly, whatever its merits.
What would make this more than one record
Three things, none of which this site has.
More records. Twenty-four claims from one consultation is a case, not evidence. Ten such records, sorted by different people, would start to say something about whether the pattern generalises.
Independent sorting. Every claim here was sorted by one person, who also wrote the site. Two independent sorters disagreeing on three of twenty-four would be far more convincing than one sorter being careful.
A comparison. There is no second consultation here that did sort its claims, so the counterfactual — would it have gone better? — is unavailable. The seven in-kind exchanges are the only internal comparison and they are not a controlled one.
Those are the honest gaps, stated so that nobody has to find them.
The claim this site is actually making
Narrower than it may have seemed over fifty pages:
That in one argument, over eleven weeks, half the exchanges could not have worked whatever anybody said, because the answers were of a kind that cannot settle the claims; and that noticing this is cheap.
Everything else here is elaboration.