Decision Making

We are living through exactly what we read about in periods like summer 1914 — a structural blindness of dominant political-media-academic elites about core features of the system they participate in all day. We read history books about summer 1914 and ask ‘how could the entire Cabinet week after week not probe exactly what our military commitments

You need a complex mix of centralisation and decentralisation. While overall vision, goals, and strategy usually comes from the top, it is vital that extreme decentralisation dominates operationally so that decisions are fast and unbureaucratic. Information must be shared centrally and horizontally across the organisation — it is not either/or. Big

Universities need new inter-disciplinary courses. For example, in March 2014 Stanford announced new undergraduate degrees such as Computer Science and English. It would be great if Oxford created alternatives to PPE such as ‘Ancient and Modern History, Maths for Presidents, and Coding‘. Instead of bluffing through essays on competing views of macro

Our brains have not evolved much in thousands of years and are subject to all sorts of constraints including evolved heuristics that lead to misunderstanding, delusion, and violence particularly under pressure. There is a terrible mismatch between the sort of people that routinely dominate mission critical political institutions and the s

If a 20 year old could both study Bismarck’s critical decisions in the 1860s (and the principles underlying them) and be given practical experience in some of the best managed organisations in the world, they would be much, much better prepared for senior jobs than our leading politicians are now.

“You’ve studied being head of a country for fifty years,” JFK said to him. “Have you found out anything I should know?” De Gaulle advised him to hear the advice of others but to decide matters for himself and live by his own counsel.

Cummings also continuously talks about decision making – it is government’s job after all. Most of all, his point of focus is on the level of people in decision-making positions within Government who have never had to make decisions before in their life, have never started and succeeded at a project of their own, and never led anyone, himself inclu

Extreme transparency and communication, horizontally as well as hierarchically … Break information and management silos — a denser network of information and commands is necessary and much of it must be decentralised and distributed between different teams, but with leadership having fast and clear information flow at the centre so problems are see