A believability-weighted idea meritocracy is the best system for making effective decisions.

Unlike Lombardi, whose success depended on having his players follow his instructions, I needed my players to be independent thinkers who could bang around their different points of view and reach better conclusions than any one of us could come up with on our own. I needed to create an environment in which everyone had the right and the responsibility to make sense of things for themselves and to fight openly for what they think is best—and where the best thinking won out. I needed a real idea meritocracy, not some theoretical version of one. That’s because an idea meritocracy—i.e., a system that brings together smart, independent thinkers and has them productively disagree to come up with 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.
