3 ms·

The common problem with "I told you so" is that you ignore all the other times where you told something that was wrong. So, if we went back in time and magical

The common problem with "I told you so" is that you ignore all the other times where you told something that was wrong. So, if we went back in time and magically implemented everything you ever suggested, we'd probably end up worse off. So, maybe we want something like, everyone keeps track of every suggestion and every idea they make, then once we have determined we have enough information to fully judge the quality of a past suggestion, go back and evaluate why it was wrong/right and why it got accepted/missed. Then, you adjust your processes to increase the rate of rejecting bad ideas while increasing the rate of accepting good ideas. But that sounds like it'd be hard to implement, and it's much more enjoyable to just get to act smug and superior.

lstamour 6y ago
Congratulations, you’ve invented Bridgewater’s controversial “evidence based” decision making systems as put forward by Ray Dalio. From what I’ve heard, the controversial part is that they often ignore evidence when it doesn’t suit their case/etc. and that employees can be uncomfortable/unused to being recorded all the time.
- jmchuster 6y ago
  Recording what everyone says? I can't imagine many people would go for that. If a company decided to actually be serious about trying to implement this, I'd imagine you'd first have to implement "all meetings must produce documented meeting notes", then add on "all suggestions must be brought up in relevant meetings" and then finally "all suggestions in documented meetings notes must be aggregated and then evaluated". So this might be a format that works for things like board meetings or I guess parliamentary sessions or court sessions where you have official stenographers and record keepers, but you can't really hold up every random meeting a company has to this standard. But it does seem like it would tend to work better on formalized/standardized meetings. So if we're talking about trying to handle the case where engineers need to keep on saying "i told you so" maybe something like agile would be a closer fit to this, since you already have formalized meetings at a specific cadence. Then you also have the concept of retrospectives that are supposed to be documenting everyone's suggestions, so then maybe you say that you need to document planning meetings in the same way. So you say that the planning meeting must produce documented notes, with a comprehensive list of everything that was suggested, and then a list of everything that was agreed on. Perhaps giving a formal time and space for such suggestions also helps better surface them outside of snide side conversations. Doesn't cover all cases, but maybe it has potential to fall on the 80 side of 80/20. Now, if you actually implement it all perfectly, would it actually help improve decision making? Probably? But I'd imagine that you'd then trade off for other things that are more valuable. Personally, my preference tends to be towards getting good people that you trust, having a clear shared vision for the company, then letting them run wild on their own to execute on that vision.
  - lstamour 6y ago
    Here’s a talk about some of Ray Dali’s ideas, one of the ways the Bridgewater system works is by voting and recording the outcomes of votes for longer term weighting/analysis: https://www.ted.com/talks/ray_dalio_how_to_build_a_company_where_the_best_ideas_win?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/ray_dalio_how_to_build_a_company_w...
    - jmchuster 6y ago
      Very interesting to get a data point on this. It takes a new employee 18 months to adapt to this work style, and then 25-30% never adapt. I'd imagine that is impossibly impractical for most companies, ignoring even the cost of moving your company to such a system in the first place. I could also see the much more limited decision space being a factor in this. You're talking about when to put in money, when to take it out, where, and how much. And you can clearly see how well it worked out in the end. I wonder how effectively such a system works when applied to the software space. I do believe that the principles he talks about as being very valuable, so actively stress testing all of your beliefs, and then collective decision-making (sounds like wisdom of crowds). And I guess you'll never truly reach idealized collective decision-making unless you implement a system like this. So if you decide that's the most important thing, and the majority of the impact of your work is in the decisions that you make (e.g. once you decide to purchase this stock, implementation is trivial), then I guess it makes sense. But I think in software, the ratio of decision-making to implementation is skewed heavily in the opposite direction, lots of decisions are being made in parallel by your thousands of employees, and the impact of each individual decision is much smaller than at his hedge fund. Getting into the habit of pulling multiple to a whiteboard might already get you close enough for such circumstances. There also seems to be an aspect of judging each other on the company's key values. So then you can get constant feedback from every meeting you're in, how much you live up to the values that your company believes in, and your opinion is then weighted based on how well you match those values. Again, I would question how valuable it is to do this and in what contexts. I personally tend to believe more in the idea of leaders espousing company vision and values, almost like a preacher in a church.

lstamour 6y ago

Congratulations, you’ve invented Bridgewater’s controversial “evidence based” decision making systems as put forward by Ray Dalio. From what I’ve heard, the controversial part is that they often ignore evidence when it doesn’t suit their case/etc. and that employees can be uncomfortable/unused to being recorded all the time.

jmchuster 6y ago
Recording what everyone says? I can't imagine many people would go for that. If a company decided to actually be serious about trying to implement this, I'd imagine you'd first have to implement "all meetings must produce documented meeting notes", then add on "all suggestions must be brought up in relevant meetings" and then finally "all suggestions in documented meetings notes must be aggregated and then evaluated". So this might be a format that works for things like board meetings or I guess parliamentary sessions or court sessions where you have official stenographers and record keepers, but you can't really hold up every random meeting a company has to this standard. But it does seem like it would tend to work better on formalized/standardized meetings. So if we're talking about trying to handle the case where engineers need to keep on saying "i told you so" maybe something like agile would be a closer fit to this, since you already have formalized meetings at a specific cadence. Then you also have the concept of retrospectives that are supposed to be documenting everyone's suggestions, so then maybe you say that you need to document planning meetings in the same way. So you say that the planning meeting must produce documented notes, with a comprehensive list of everything that was suggested, and then a list of everything that was agreed on. Perhaps giving a formal time and space for such suggestions also helps better surface them outside of snide side conversations. Doesn't cover all cases, but maybe it has potential to fall on the 80 side of 80/20. Now, if you actually implement it all perfectly, would it actually help improve decision making? Probably? But I'd imagine that you'd then trade off for other things that are more valuable. Personally, my preference tends to be towards getting good people that you trust, having a clear shared vision for the company, then letting them run wild on their own to execute on that vision.
- lstamour 6y ago
  Here’s a talk about some of Ray Dali’s ideas, one of the ways the Bridgewater system works is by voting and recording the outcomes of votes for longer term weighting/analysis: https://www.ted.com/talks/ray_dalio_how_to_build_a_company_where_the_best_ideas_win?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/ray_dalio_how_to_build_a_company_w...
  - jmchuster 6y ago
    Very interesting to get a data point on this. It takes a new employee 18 months to adapt to this work style, and then 25-30% never adapt. I'd imagine that is impossibly impractical for most companies, ignoring even the cost of moving your company to such a system in the first place. I could also see the much more limited decision space being a factor in this. You're talking about when to put in money, when to take it out, where, and how much. And you can clearly see how well it worked out in the end. I wonder how effectively such a system works when applied to the software space. I do believe that the principles he talks about as being very valuable, so actively stress testing all of your beliefs, and then collective decision-making (sounds like wisdom of crowds). And I guess you'll never truly reach idealized collective decision-making unless you implement a system like this. So if you decide that's the most important thing, and the majority of the impact of your work is in the decisions that you make (e.g. once you decide to purchase this stock, implementation is trivial), then I guess it makes sense. But I think in software, the ratio of decision-making to implementation is skewed heavily in the opposite direction, lots of decisions are being made in parallel by your thousands of employees, and the impact of each individual decision is much smaller than at his hedge fund. Getting into the habit of pulling multiple to a whiteboard might already get you close enough for such circumstances. There also seems to be an aspect of judging each other on the company's key values. So then you can get constant feedback from every meeting you're in, how much you live up to the values that your company believes in, and your opinion is then weighted based on how well you match those values. Again, I would question how valuable it is to do this and in what contexts. I personally tend to believe more in the idea of leaders espousing company vision and values, almost like a preacher in a church.