Dear lawmakers and leaders
Why and how we should and could do better at making decisions
I’m baffled by the complexities of allocating governmental budgets, let alone the creation of new laws or rules at any level. For me, as a citizen, each and every choice seems ‘weird’ and is easy to target at first sight. However, the deeper you try to understand the rationale behind these choices, the more hidden layers emerge with their own complexities.
For example, the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF short) (The JSF is a hi-tech next generation Fighter plane). Now, I live in the Netherlands. Small country, small army, not at war, not near countries that are at war. What is the exact reason we should invest in these massively expensive fighting machines?
As a citizen I’ve never been informed why we are buying these. And, superficially it doesn’t seem to make any sense. The worst thing about this all, is that I don’t have any possibility to understand why the government made these decisions, and I think that exactly that has to change.
Difference of opinion
People have different opinions all the time it seems. But I argue that it’s actually rarely an actual difference of opinion, but rather a difference of perspective and knowledge. We generally pursue the same noble goals and want to do the best we can for the entire population. When everybody knows all details and relevancies on a subject, there is often a clear vector towards tending to the issue at hand.
Perspectives are also usually interlocking each other to broaden the generally acquired knowledge. Together they create an entangled web of knowledge that can exactly explain why choices are — or should be — made. By talking to each other we learn more about the situation. What we miss is a way to document these discussions.
The truth
There is no such thing as an absolute truth. But by maintaining a structured way of writing down the majority of our perspectives, we can create something we perceive as the truth, and can reason about. Especially when we think it should be different.
So where does the book of law fit in?
The book of law is basically an enumeration of decisions we’ve made. These cumulatively steer the community into the direction we want to go as society. But they don’t offer an explanation on the rationale behind them. We often find law in conflict with our current ambitions, but change is slow because it’s hard to understand how changing them will influence the bigger picture.
That right there, can be addressed. We see the law as a two dimensional enumeration of decisions, where it’s actually intertwined with reality, reason, cause, dependencies, and so many more complexities and layers that matter.
A systematic approach
I propose to store all our laws, decisions, reasons, core values, cultural values and so forth in a graph. Graphs are a mathematical construct, basically consisting of two elements. There are Nodes and there are Edges. A node can be one of the aforementioned concepts (laws, decisions, etc). An edge simply tells which nodes are connected, and why they are connected.
An example
One graph you know about is for example the road system. Think of the places as nodes, and the roads as edges. It now also becomes evident, that an edge can have properties that are helpful. In the case of a road it could be
- length
- max speed
- current delays
- name
- type (highway, country road, etc)
A node can have properties too. In the case of a place these could be:
- type (city, village, home, etc)
- name
- [… fill in the myriad of properties of a place]
How to apply that to our case?
Each node could for example consist of these properties:
- type (law, reason, cultural value, and so forth, solution, warning, etc)
- title
- but also an anchor for direct feedback from the market (more on that later)
- scopes (which people can see this information if it’s under embargo)
and each edge could look like:
- type (because, requires, contradicts, enables, etc)
- percentage relevancy
An example
Now this example doesn’t match reality for a bit, but what you see here is that we abstract from the fuzz and have clear, specific pieces we can reason about. All new information can be added to the diagram, and so forth, until it is super clear, to all involved where we should pivot or proceed in our activities.
Because this model is digitalised, we can easily extract perceptions from this. A perception could for example be a document geared to the reader and abstracted in the right way for read optimisation.
Oh the possibilities
Now we’ve written everything down in our graph, how beautiful would it be if we could ask questions to a system to obtain entirely new perspectives on the matter at hand. Things like:
- We say we value core values [X,Y,Z] the most, but which[law, decision, budget] contradict these?
- If we supply budget [JSF], how does this pay back, materially and immaterially?
- What are the reasons for this actual budget size?
- Is this budget size in correspondence with the actual cost further down the chain?
- With what intent was this law made?
- If we do this because of reason [x], and we value that reason greatly, are there other things we can do as well to execute that reason better? (reverse reasoning)
Feedback
Because we store this information in a relational and digital way, we can anchor these nodes to realtime feedback loops from the market. E.g. the exchange rate of the British Sterling to the Euro. Once the Brexit is through, this will likely be impacted. By dynamically updating this information in the graph, we can discover old trades or decisions we should stop, and new ones we can make.
The same goes for any piece of information. Once new real feedback comes into the graph, we can validate our choices thus far. That doesn’t mean we should rely on solely these factors evidently, but at least for a certain percentage. How that would work, can -again- be discovered from the information in the graph.
Conclusion
What I’m proposing for decision makers here, I already proposed in the company I work in. You can read about it here. I work in a fairly large company (I think by now some 80k employees of which some 400 tech), and I’ve started this initiative in order to bring transparency in our technical decision making process with regards to our online commerce platform. There, it seems to gain traction in a rapid pace and it is starting to work on a bigger scale (and has worked on several occasions).
To be honest, I haven’t seen anything like this before. But it just makes so much sense. That article was geared to a more technical audience but I definitely am a firm believer that it can be applied to a much, much broader scope.
The way the world communicates has progressed extremely the past years with the uprising of the internet; but the way we steer our countries and inform the people has not. This, my dear readers is a huge driver behind the consistent decline of trust that our fellow humans have in the government and its systems. They work so hard to make the system work, but the system seems just out of date and unable to serve the demand. Maybe this love letter could help in that aspect?
Interested to read more on how this practically works? You could read this blogpost, or contact me via LinkedIn, Medium or other ways you can find me :-).
