While operating this way might sound difficult and inefficient, it is actually extremely efficient. In fact, it is much harder and much less efficient to work in an organization in which most people don’t know what their colleagues are really thinking. Also, when people can’t be totally open, they can’t be themselves. As Harvard developmental psychologist Bob Kegan, who has studied Bridgewater, likes to say, in most companies people are doing two jobs: their actual job and the job of managing others’ impressions of how they’re doing their job. For us, that’s terrible. We’ve found that bringing everything to the surface 1) removes the need to try to look good and 2) eliminates time required to guess what people are thinking. In doing so, it creates more meaningful work and more meaningful relationships.

Here are the forces behind Bridgewater’s self-reinforcing evolutionary spiral:

1. We went from one independent thinker who wanted to achieve audacious goals to a group of independent thinkers who wanted to achieve audacious goals.

2. To enable these independent thinkers to have effective collective decision making, we created an idea meritocracy based on principles that ensured we would be radically honest and transparent with each other, have thoughtful disagreements, and have idea-meritocratic ways of getting past our disagreements to make decisions.

3. We recorded these decision-making principles on paper and later encoded them into computers and made our decisions based on them.

4. This produced our successes and failures, which produced more learnings, which were written into more principles that were systemized and acted upon.

5. This process resulted in excellent work and excellent relationships that led us to having well-rewarded and happy employees and clients.

6. That led us to be able to bring in more audacious independent thinkers with more audacious goals to strengthen this self-reinforcing upward spiral.
