I have spent the better part of my career working with individuals, organizations and groups to make better decisions. There are, of course, so many ways to make a decision, and there is also a lot of lore around decision making and, by extension, leadership.

As a consultant, I found over the years that a large part of the value I could bring as an outsider was in helping a group to test and challenge assumptions that they may have become blind to. It happens to all of us. But because of the nature of consulting, and the fact that people rarely hire a consultant when everything is going great, I found that actually the ability of a group to discern the facts in front of them and to make decisions accordingly became a pretty key indicator of whether they would succeed or not - especially when they were faced with changing or challenging circumstances.

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The difficulty, in many cases, is that there is rarely an immediate and linear relationship between a decision and the result. I’ve always loved John Sterman’s paper, Nobody Ever Gets Credit for Fixing Problems that Never Happened, for its explanation of why managers that spend their time putting out fires get more credit that those that prevent them, especially because of the role that delays play in that dynamic.

We are hardwired to discern cause-and-effect relationships; it is how, from infancy, we learn to navigate the world. Where we struggle is when the effects are complex, or, when they are delayed. The results of the decisions we make might not become apparent for some time, and when they do emerge, we might even attribute them to some other cause, or write them off as “unintended consequences”. This reminds me of another classic John Sterman line: “There are no side effects—only effects.”

In very large organizations, in protected industries and in governments, there might be enough of a buffer between us and the consequences of our decisions that we might spend an entire career working on faulty assumptions and still enjoy personal success. I have worked with many organizations that managed to do well enough with the status quo, and with individuals who just hoped to retire before the bill came due.

After many years of working with startups, I found a very interesting counterpoint to that dynamic. Because many startup companies are extremely resource-constrained, the inability to test your assumptions is generally seen as an existential threat, to the point where I would often consider it a negative for a young company to have too much funding; it would keep them from having to validate their assumptions for too long, and they would have more difficulty finding traction. Many startups now use variations on rapid hypothesis-testing frameworks to formalize their ground-truthing process, as the longer they spend tuning their approach, the more likely they are to go bankrupt.

Finding Truth

Now, there are two things happening in these cases that reflect two kinds of truth. First, in the case of startups, in the initial years as they try to build teams and woo investors, they are trying to create a shared narrative, or shared truth. Shared truth is an essential element of collective action - coordination and collaboration is almost impossible without some kind of consensus reality.

There is also the interaction with objective truth, or objective reality itself. History is littered with states, companies and cults that had done a great job of convincing themselves of a truth that, in the end, did not serve them well in navigating the real world.

As far as decision making is concerned, shared truths are what bind groups together in choosing certain actions, and the delays in feedback between those shared truths and objective truths are what allow them to persist over time when there is a misalignment.

I bring this up now because I believe that we are, as a species, in an existential crisis of mounting consequences, and in Western societies, at an inflection point in whether we are able to navigate the future successfully.

Fragmented Futures

Last year, I wrapped up a project with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to explore possible futures through a foresight process. As a science-based agency, UNEP typically pursues its planning through evidence-based forecasting, essentially, by taking objective measures of the current state of the environment, making projections into the future, and planning action accordingly. They decided to undertake a foresight process because of an acute awareness that there were a host of non-scientific factors that might influence whether or not we would take appropriate action to protect our biosphere from destruction. I say that with tongue in cheek as a massive understatement.

Scientists spend their lives in pursuit of objective truth, but decisions tend to dwell in the domain of shared truths.

The exercise we undertook was to explore four possible future scenarios and to flesh them out in detail in order to evaluate the probabilities involved, the desirability of each and the actions that might be required to prevent some of the worst from happening.

The scenario I focused on was “Post-Truth Division”, which we detailed with a somewhat harrowing dissolution of democracy and collapse of Western democracies. You can find the report here if you’re interested.

As my group detailed the all-too-plausible-and-already-underway collapse in social cohesion, we came, again and again, to a single root cause: the loss of shared truth.

Democracy works when enough people agree on a version of reality and a sense of shared truth. Polarization becomes problematic because what we are seeing is not a simple disagreement on policy, but a disagreement on reality, in which various factions hold their own truths that are not compatible with others.

While my work with social media companies had already made me suspect we had a problem, playing out this scenario made me very concerned about where this path would lead us, and that concern was solidified in my work with military and intelligence services.

Because democracy requires a shared truth, our sense of shared truth has become an attack vector for adversaries of democratic societies, as I outlined last year in a post about Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) and adversarial information environments.

It also helps to explain the approaches of many nascent political movements, which specifically attack traditional sources of knowledge, expertise and authority. Donald Trump’s MAGA movement has been tremendously successful because it has created a compelling and strong sense of shared reality among its adherents that has allowed them to achieve power through concerted, coordinated action across a very motivated base of supporters. It is no mistake that his own social media platform is called Truth Social.

Design, Neutrality and The Future We Want

I obviously hold my own, rather strong views on the direction that politics are going. But the designer and facilitator in me is more interested in building the tools we need to shape our decision-making and democracy to be fit for purpose in navigating current and future challenges. And because of my background in strategy, I have a bias towards frameworks that translate explicit intention into desired outcomes.

I believe that sustainable action comes from a group that is both bound together by a set of shared truths that are reliably connected to objective truths.

I am aware that as a species we can go along to construct our own reality, which, in very tangible ways can become “real". Yuval Noah Harari makes a compelling case around the role of imagined realities as a way of coordinating human action. Without going into a semantic rabbit hole, I would say these imagined realities largely fall within the “shared truth” category, but I recognize that things can get fuzzy in the political application of these concepts, as what is “true” in a certain case - like “tariffs won’t cause inflation” - exists within layers of our own creation. The distinction that matters for me here, then, is between the things that we say and believe to be true, and the actual tangible, verifiable outcomes and context for those beliefs.

With social policy and economics, even though our choices play out in a system that is also of our creation, there are, at some point, very real consequences. People have food or they don’t, have housing or they don’t. So while we are playing with abstractions within abstractions, eventually there is likely a real result.

With environmental and health policy, for example, we might be bumping up against reality in a more direct way; maybe your shared truth is that vaccines don’t work or that climate change isn’t real, but there are still actual viruses and your crops might fail.

So, if I were to withhold my personal opinion of something like MAGA and evaluate it from the place of professional neutrality, my questions would focus on how well the stated aims of the movement direct the actions of the Trump administration, how well the actions of the administration translate into outcomes that match the stated aims, and how well those outcomes serve the long-term interests of all parties involved.

Democracies are messy and imperfect, and it is always possible that they produce results that we don’t like. But the way that we are practicing democracy now seems like a kind of procedural malpractice.

Rebuilding the practice of collective decision making requires us to bolster, build and protect a few key functions.

Getting from Here to There

Making collective decisions about where we want to go requires us to achieve a few basic things:

* Agree on the current conditions we are in

* Agree on some general goals for how we would like things to be

* Understand how things could be given our constraints

* Agree on principles that should guide our choices

* Initiate actions that will get us from where we are to where we want to be

* Repeat in a cycle to evaluate that our actions change our conditions as expected

If this sounds overly basic, that’s because it is. But we are somehow in a place where we have general dysfunction in all of these areas. Our current political discourse:

* Chooses conflicting or false measures of our present conditions

* Obfuscates or generalizes goals to conceal priorities

* Avoids specifics on limiting factors

* Does not connect principles to actions

* Initiates action without context

* Undertakes evaluation primarily as an opposition exercise

While this is a simplification, my point is that where the above dysfunctions happen, there is no longer any sense of shock at the lack of coherence.

In a very basic model of getting from “here” to “there”, I think we need some first principles thinking applied to rebuilding function across a few areas. To know where we stand in the present, we should have a coherent approach to making observations, applying existing knowledge, designing experimental actions and interpreting results.

To define where we want to go, we should be defining probabilities of how current conditions might extend into the future, define possibilities that could be created through concerted action, and defining clear principles for what our expectations are of the outcomes of our actions.

I feel almost awkward writing this, as it seems terribly simplistic given the scope of the challenges that we’re facing. But if we accept that these are the basic building blocks of establishing shared truths in pursuit of collective progress, you can see how attacking the norms as well as formal and informal information infrastructure we have around these things puts us in an untenable position.

Attacks on basic science, defunding statistics, undermining academia, attacking media all work to erode the basis for any trust around the elements of knowledge required for complex decision making.

But just as we have established due process around judicial proceedings, I think we need to do the same for collective decision making and political process. A court case that involves false or inadmissible evidence or violates due process is declared a mistrial. What expectations should we have for truth and process in our politics?

As an exercise in design, then, that means building coherent process and infrastructure around each of these areas in ways that respect democratic principles. At a startup scale, a successful founder wouldn’t dream of ignoring these kinds of signals; bankruptcy would come quickly. But at the scale and complexity of governments and countries, the feedback loops and delays become so weak and long that only deliberate, multi-disciplinary, multi-stakeholder efforts can plot a way forward.

As a last thought, this brought to mind a conversation I had with Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, many years ago as part of a project. I was creating a series of visual models that would express the essence of how various leaders were approaching change. I was intrigued by what Wales had defined as the core of his efforts; Wikipedia was intended as a trusted, shared source of truth meant to allow reasoned, informed debate in society.

I think that’s a start.

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