January 16, 2026
Excel-lent or Excel-splosive?
The Alignment Game
Execs try to settle office wars with a spreadsheet — commenters cry ‘show your work’
TLDR: An exec made a Google Sheet “game” to rank priorities and expose tradeoffs so teams can align. Commenters split: some praised the simple process, others demanded a worked example, and one invoked [Arrow’s theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem) to ask what happens when no stable order exists — proving consensus is hard.
An exec turned office squabbles into a “game” in a Google Sheet, using the Kemeny–Young “compromise” ranking to surface tradeoffs and make priorities clear. The crowd? Deliciously split. One camp cheered the simple ritual: write your list, reveal, compare, align — Nevermark basically said, “independently create an artifact… share and discuss.” Another camp rolled their eyes and demanded receipts. kayo_20211030 wanted a worked example — loud calls of “show your homework!” echoed through the thread.
Then the chaos crew arrived. thedudeabides5 asked what happens when choices loop forever — cue Arrow’s impossibility theorem, which says sometimes there’s no perfect way to rank things. Cue memes: “Excel couples therapy,” “off-site Hunger Games with tabs,” and calling Kemeny–Young the Switzerland of office politics. Fans loved the transparency: you can see who disagrees with whom and where the fights are. Skeptics warned the “compromise” could put everyone’s favorite at the middle and make nobody happy. The spiciest take? This isn’t marching orders; it’s a conversation starter. But the internet demands proof — a worked example, a demo, something in cell A1 — before trusting a sheet to referee executive drama. Also, yes, we absolutely want to try it on chore lists and friend trips
Key Points
- •The author created a Google Sheet–based process to align team priorities via ranked lists.
- •Voting theory is used to aggregate multiple stack rankings, acknowledging no algorithm always works due to potential preference cycles.
- •The Kemeny-Young method is employed to find the ordering that minimizes total pairwise disagreements.
- •The method serves as a conversation tool, highlighting contentious items and misaligned voters rather than dictating actions.
- •The approach was successfully applied at company off-sites and quarterly planning and is available to try in a Google Sheet.