How gymnastics scoring changed how we think about resourcing our team in Asana.
How do you assign work:
- Based on who is available.
- Based on who is capable.
What if everytime, we based it on both?
Like the whole country, I’m usually glued to the Olympics, and somehow, someway, gymnastics is always makes our country proud with their achievements, although we’ve let them down in our collective character and care for them as individuals.
Something that’s always caught my eye is the scoring for gymnastics events. If you don’t know how it works, my summary:
- Difficulty is a set score you go into an event with based on your routine. These scores usually range in the 6–7 area based on a standard set of criteria.
- Deductions are taken from a max of ten, also pre-determined based on various ‘faults.’

So going into a particular event, an athlete is forced to balance their capability to perform a given action along with their ability to executed it as expected. This is dynamite logic that can be applied to any scenario, but especially in my context — how our staff can stretch their limits while also bringing their best within the time allotted.
Note on Simone Biles’ greatness: Her combination of difficult routines and flawless execution is why she’s probably the greatest gymnast who has every lived. Her ‘starting score’ is so much higher than anyone else’s, it would take catastrophe (which has happend like once ever) for her to lose.
So how can we apply this concept to our teams? Asana has a really dynamite function in its Portfolio feature called ‘Workload.’ How it helps us lead our teams better:
- Empowers our team to do their best work in the time they need to make it happen while delivering a project on time.
- Establishes an outcomes based culture instead of an hours logged one.
Try this:
Map a project out by allocating effort across the timeline. The example below shows the estimated effort over the course of the preferred timeline.

Assess the ideal assignee based on capacity and determine if this is an opportunity to stretch their capabilities. You can see that this project’s timeline and required effort will stress everyones capacity (red is no bueno, blue is muy bueno) to execute well except for two specific team members.

The more I use tools like this to help our team execute more consistently by helping them balance their capacity to perform with their capability to execute, the more likely we’ll all deliver what’s expected when it’s expected. Who knows, maybe you’ll give someone a shot to knock it out of the park who you may not have considered in the first place.