Lists

A list is a group of companies a team works with together.

Most work in ASUME does not concern a single organization in isolation. Teams reason about sets of companies: a territory, a segment, a pipeline, a set of accounts, or a group of candidates for an objective.

A list is how those companies are organized so that the maintained understanding behind each one can be reused rather than reconstructed.

A list is a named collection of companies, together with the context that makes the collection meaningful.

That context may be the objective the list is being built for, the criteria used to include a company, or the stage of work the list represents.

The companies in a list are the same maintained understandings used everywhere else in ASUME. A list adds organization around them, not a separate copy of them.

A list does not freeze the companies it contains at the moment they were added.

Each entry references the company's maintained understanding, which continues to evolve as evidence changes.

This is an important distinction from an exported list of results. An export is correct only at the moment it is produced. A list in ASUME reflects the current state of each company.

As a result, a company can enter or leave the conditions a list represents when its understanding changes, rather than remaining fixed because of when it was added.

Companies can enter a list in different ways:

• added directly when a team already knows the organizations it wants to work with;
• surfaced by an objective-dependent result such as Matches and kept for follow-up;
• or grouped by shared criteria that describe the companies a team cares about.

However a company enters a list, it brings its evidence, assumptions, and reasoning with it, so the list is more than a set of names.

A list is usually built in relation to an objective.

The same set of companies can be relevant to different objectives, and the same company can appear in several lists for different reasons.

Because objectives operate on shared company understanding rather than separate representations, a list can be reused across objectives without reconstructing the companies it contains.

Because a list references maintained understanding, it responds to revision.

When new evidence changes what ASUME understands about a company, that change is reflected wherever the company appears, including in every list that references it.

A team does not need to rebuild a list to keep it current. The list stays connected to the companies it contains.

Lists are a natural place for a team to work on the same companies together, which connects them to collaboration.

Because everyone references the same maintained understanding, corrections and verified changes made through one company are visible to the whole team rather than kept in separate copies.

This helps a team share one current read of a set of companies instead of maintaining divergent spreadsheets.

A spreadsheet stores values that are accurate only when they were entered.

A list organizes maintained understandings that stay connected to their evidence and continue to change.

The difference is not that one holds more columns. It is that a list references living company understanding, while a spreadsheet holds a static record.