There’s a lot of literature on what we do wrong, but not a lot of ready-made “techniques” just sitting there to help us get it right—only a scattering of disconnected traditions in things like management or family therapy or politics.
Given the unfortunate state of social science, my guess is that the best sort of evidence re: group rationality is observing which companies succeed in highly competitive industries without having any special advantages, especially those that attribute their success to their corporate culture. This Amazon reviewer thinks Koch Industries is such a company. I haven’t read Koch’s book, but this interview has interesting quotes like:
...we try to model our company around is what a philosopher scientist [Michael] Polanyi called “The Republic of Science.
My read of the interview is that Koch succeeded by solving the problem of exploration neglect.
I read The Science of Success a while ago, and thought it was very good; I was somewhat surprised by how simple their approach seemed to be. (Roughly, management is compensated based on the net present value of what they manage, rather than whether they hit metric targets or so on; this both encourages creativity and makes sure the actual goal flows through all decision-making.)
This also matches with much of modern company valuation being due to intangible rather than physical assets. Companies of course have some advantages as organizations, with much clearer boundaries and death conditions than communities have. This seems to conform with the idea, though, that successful businesses are the best places to look to understand how to run successful orgs of any type, though the challenge remains to figure out what is specific to these businesses and what can generalize to other orgs.
Given the unfortunate state of social science, my guess is that the best sort of evidence re: group rationality is observing which companies succeed in highly competitive industries without having any special advantages, especially those that attribute their success to their corporate culture. This Amazon reviewer thinks Koch Industries is such a company. I haven’t read Koch’s book, but this interview has interesting quotes like:
My read of the interview is that Koch succeeded by solving the problem of exploration neglect.
I read The Science of Success a while ago, and thought it was very good; I was somewhat surprised by how simple their approach seemed to be. (Roughly, management is compensated based on the net present value of what they manage, rather than whether they hit metric targets or so on; this both encourages creativity and makes sure the actual goal flows through all decision-making.)
This also matches with much of modern company valuation being due to intangible rather than physical assets. Companies of course have some advantages as organizations, with much clearer boundaries and death conditions than communities have. This seems to conform with the idea, though, that successful businesses are the best places to look to understand how to run successful orgs of any type, though the challenge remains to figure out what is specific to these businesses and what can generalize to other orgs.
(decision theory quality * tightness of feedback loops)/proxy divergence = winning
Related.