Ray Dalio, the founder of BridgeWater, the world's largest hedge fund, showed how the company used algorithms to make the decision of "choosing the best idea" in his speech at TED Conference. This method successfully avoids the trap of "too democratic to implement good ideas" and "one person's ideas are absolutely dominant and team opinions cannot be fully communicated" in the face of collective problems.

Bridgewater developed a set of software called "Dots" to practice this algorithm: everyone should grade the opinions put forward by others at the meeting, and when it reaches a certain level, everyone can check the evaluation of their own and others' opinions more objectively. At the same time, the algorithm accumulates the long-term evaluations obtained by everyone, and finally feeds back the real work level and credibility of this person in front of decision-making, and weights it with this person's credibility in subsequent decisions.

Ray Dalio took an internal meeting as the object to explain the specific operation form of the algorithm:

Diandian software collects everyone's thoughts on the same thing in advance and presents them on the software in different categories.

Everyone can see all other people's thoughts and directly evaluate another person's performance between 1 and 10. For example, some people in the picture give Lei a high score, while others think that his judgment is out of order and he is not ready.

The software summarizes the mutual scores of all opinions.

At this time, things began to change, and everyone naturally broke away from their personal views and began to think multi-dimensionally. "Why am I right? 」 。 Next, we will discuss the objective and credible decision-making criteria for mutual evaluation.

The key point is that for a long time, the algorithm will output a person's "credibility", which can be directly understood as the person's "weight" in decision-making. Lei himself has more than 1 1000 evaluation records in the system.

Taking a voting decision within Qiaoshui as an example, only looking at the proportion of people and calculating the "credibility" of the decision are two completely different results.

Lei believes that what hinders the team from making correct decisions and thinking is "arrogance and naivety" in human nature: we are often unwilling to put our ideas under stress test; Our brains instinctively treat mistakes as being attacked.

I believe that the algorithm's true evaluation of decision-making and employee performance can help us "surpass ourselves" in the face of decision-making.

New employees can master this system after 18 months, and not everyone can be proficient in this system, only more than 70% of them can be considered suitable for this system.

The principle of extreme transparency

Bridgewater has long claimed to pursue a culture of "extreme transparency", and almost every meeting inside them will be recorded for internal reference; Every week, the company will send employees an MPT (Management Principles Training) document, which consists of meeting videos, texts and follow-up surveys. Every week, employees will ask for an hour or so to study these meetings that are considered valuable.

Implement extreme transparency in the important decisions of the team: the CEO can receive feedback emails from employees, the content is "You only got 6 points at yesterday's meeting, I think …"; On the decision to split a team within the company, the management chose to discuss with the whole team at the first time, and made it clear that "we still have many questions that we can't answer now" instead of holding a closed-door meeting.

Reference link: