Researchers in Artificial Intelligence often use Chain of Thought (CoT) prompting as a way of getting AI models to improve their reasoning by explicitly laying out the steps taken to answer a specific question. Not only does this focus on the reasoning process help researchers better understand how LLMs arrived at their decision, it also, as it turns out, results in better results.

Like contemporary AI systems, modern governments have reached a point where the decisions being made resemble early LLM responses: it’s impossible to tell what data is being used, the reasoning process is totally unclear and they seem extremely prone to hallucinations.

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My career, so far, has been focused on decision making; not on telling people what decisions to make, but, rather, on designing the processes by which they make those decisions. Through research and practice, I have seen that through good design and by controlling for a few variables, the quality and speed of decision-making can be vastly improved, especially as our research in psychology and behaviour continue to develop while the quality and quantity of data we can use to inform our decisions has eclipsed what was available to us in the past. There are also vast international communities of practice around a host of methodologies with evidence and practical tools for supporting decision making effectively.

Which is all to say, we have never, in our history, been better equipped than we are today to make excellent decisions that draw from historical experience, weave together the knowledge and perspectives across our many domains of knowledge and are informed by a richness of data beyond anything imaginable even a generation ago.

You would expect that, given all we know and have access to now, we would be in some kind of golden age, plotting a path into the future together with nothing but the laws of physics to constrain our progress.

That, clearly, is not the situation we find ourselves in.

One of the principles we use in our practice is the idea of “designing backwards from desired outcomes”. The idea is to start with the end in mind, then imagine the sequence of conversations and areas of inquiry what would result in the outcome you’re hoping for.

I’m also reminded of another quote by Stafford Beer, which is “the purpose of a system is what it does.” I like how agnostic this statement is; it’s a great analytical prompt because it asks us to ignore what we think a system is for, and to evaluate it based on the actual outcomes, not the intent.

If I were to evaluate our political and decision-making systems using Beer’s lens, our current system’s “purpose” might be characterized by optimizing for short-term decisions that emphasize sentiment over evidence and conflict over consensus.

If I were to approach from the angle of desired outcomes, however, I would imagine that we would like a system that could craft well-informed policies that work in a unified way towards a shared vision for the country and future generations.

There is a considerable gap between these two realities, and I believe that design can play a crucial role in creating the conditions for these kinds of outcomes. But the first step in dealing with a problem is being able to name it.

I believe that the ways in which we approach decision-making in Western democracies no longer represents the best of what we know about structuring decisions, and if we want to enjoy a better future, we need to improve how we make decisions.

We need to improve our infrastructure for establishing shared truths.

We need to build processes for arriving at shared priorities.

We need to establish new norms for accountability in political speech.

We need mechanisms for inter-agency collaboration on complex issues that don’t fall neatly within one category.

We need to develop plans and policies that are responsive to evidence and respectful of future generations.

We need to adapt how we engage in democratic discourse in a way that is open, but can manage threats of foreign interference and misinformation.

We need policy decisions to have the same burden of due process that we expect of verdicts in the justice system.

We need to do all of this in ways that build on fundamental democratic principles.

We already have the tools, techniques and practices to design all of these processes. What we need is the will to put in the work and the courage to experiment. This, to me, is the essence of Process Activism: the knowledge that the decisions we make are shaped by how we make them, and only by designing a better system can we expect to have better results.

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