Brad Dunn

First, how and why I made this game I spent several years working as the chief product officer of a software company in Melbourne, and during this time, there was a point where I raised some money for the company with the aim of using that money to double the size of the company, and hire more engineers. During this period, as we were growing faster and more and more cross functional teams came online, there was this behaviour I noticed emerging where I would get asked to chime in on things—should we build this thing this way or that—and, as was my sentiment at the time, I believe that decisions were best made closer to the action. I was not close. So, I wanted to encourage people to make decisions on their own. So eventually I made this proclamation. I said, you can make whatever decisions you want moving forward, so long as they have the highest probability of getting us to our goals. The actual details of this were a bit more nuanced than that, but generally speaking that was the picture. Someone asked how do we know what we’re doing has the highest probability of reaching our goals? I said I didn’t know. But I'd find out. At the time, I hired this computational neuroscientist named Brian Oakley who had completed his PhD a few years early on communication between visual cortical areas. He was very clever, and had a tendency to come up with answers to things I thought were relatively unanswerable. So I asked him… Would it be possible to start to measure decision quality in the organisation? He said he didn’t know. But he’d find out. What Brian went on to do, and subsequently, became the focus of a bunch of decision intelligence consulting I ended up doing as a part time job while I went back to university to study neuropsychology, motivated me to try and think of ways to improve decision making—particularly in cross functional teams, a space I knew well—in a way that wasn’t overly complex. I’d been a fan of this group of individuals called Management 3.0 w