Kitchen Table

The problem

The big questions in a household rarely get settled in one sitting. Where to eat tonight is easy. Whether to move, what to do about the car, or how to raise the kids gets talked about in pieces, across group chats and dinners, and nobody remembers who thought what or why.

How it works

Start a conversation with your team, the people you talk things through with. Everyone weighs in with their position, brings articles and clips that have shaped their thinking, and updates where they stand as the conversation goes. When someone changes their mind, they can say what changed it, and anyone following their take hears about it.

Three kinds of conversation

• Decide together. Talk it through until the group lands on one answer, then conclude it with the decision. Everyone’s final position is saved alongside it.
• Everyone decides. Each person reaches their own view. When it wraps up, you can see where everyone landed.
• Evergreen. Some questions never really close: faith, politics, how to raise the kids. Evergreen conversations stay open so everyone’s position can keep evolving, with the reasons for each shift kept alongside.

Fair to the undecided

Until you’ve taken a position, other people’s full takes stay hidden, so you make up your own mind first. Once you have, you can read them, follow them, and see how they change.

Questions worth asking

Not sure where to start? A library of questions people have argued over for centuries comes with reading to start from. A queue can send them out a few at a time, beginning with the simplest and moving each person up once they’ve taken positions at their level, so the table never gets swamped.