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.

Most people initially find this process very uncomfortable. While most appreciate it intellectually, they typically are challenged by it emotionally because it requires them to separate themselves from their ego’s attachment to being right and try to see what they have a hard time seeing. A small minority get it and love it from the start, a slightly larger minority can’t stand it and leave the company, and the majority stick with it, get better at it with time, and eventually wouldn’t want to operate any other way.
