Page 284 - Ray Dalio - Principles

Some people have called this way of operating radical
straightforwardness.

I knew that if radical truth and radical transparency didn’t
apply across the board, we would develop two classes of

people at the company—those with power who are in the
know, and those who aren’t—so I pushed them both to their
limits. To me, a pervasive Idea Meritocracy = Radical Truth
+ Radical Transparency + Believability-Weighted Decision
Making.

From a small group of people arguing informally about
what’s true and what to do about it, we developed approaches,

technologies, and tools over the last forty years that have taken
us to a whole other level, which has been eye-opening and
invaluable in ways that you can read about in the tools chapter
at the end of this book. We have always been unwavering in
providing this environment, and we let the people who didn’t
like it self-select themselves out of the company.

By being radically truthful and radically transparent, we

could see that we all have terribly incomplete and/or distorted
perspectives. This isn’t unique to Bridgewater—you would
recognize the same thing if you could see into the heads of the
people around you. As explained in Understand That People
Are Wired Very Differently, people tend to see the same

situations in dramatically different ways, depending on how
their brains are wired.

Seeing this will help you evolve. At first most people
remain stuck in their own heads, stubbornly clinging to the
idea that their views are best and that something is wrong with
other people who don’t see things their way. But when they
repeatedly face the questions “How do you know that you’re

not the wrong one?” and “What process would you use to
draw upon these different perspectives to make the best
decisions?” they are forced to confront their own believability
and see things through others’ eyes as well as their own. This
shift in perspective is what produces great collective decision
making. Ideally, this takes place in an “open-source” way, with
the best ideas flowing freely, living, dying, and producing

rapid evolution based on their merits.