Page 283 - Ray Dalio - Principles

the best possible collective thinking and resolve their
disagreements in a believability-weighted way—will
outperform any other decision-making system.

Our idea-meritocratic system evolved over the decades. At

first, we just argued like hell with each other about what was
best and by thrashing through our disagreements came up with
better paths than if we had made our decisions individually.
But as Bridgewater grew and our range of disagreements and
needs to resolve them changed, we became more explicit in
how this idea meritocracy would work. We needed a system

that could both effectively weigh the believability of different
people to come to the best decisions and do that in a way that
was so obviously fair everyone would recognize it as such. I
knew that without such a system, we would lose both the best
thinking and the best thinkers, and I’d be stuck with either
kiss-asses or subversives who kept their disagreements and
hidden resentments to themselves.

For this all to work, I believed and still believe that we need
to be radically truthful and radically transparent with each
other.

RADICAL TRUTH AND RADICAL

TRANSPARENCY

By radical truth, I mean not filtering one’s thoughts and one’s
questions, especially the critical ones. If we don’t talk openly
about our issues and have paths for working through them, we
won’t have partners who collectively own our outcomes.

By radical transparency, I mean giving most everyone the
ability to see most everything. To give people anything less
than total transparency would make them vulnerable to others’
spin and deny them the ability to figure things out for
themselves. Radical transparency reduces harmful office
politics and the risks of bad behavior because bad behavior is
more likely to take place behind closed doors than out in the

open.