The Radically Moderate Framework

By popular request and long overdue.

One of the primary requests I got from readers of the book manuscript this past June was more clarity on the precise decision rules that define a radically moderate approach. How could we tell, for example, that a certain approach to, say, criminal justice reform is more or less radically moderate than another? After all, why trust my take and not someone else’s view? How do we know that my radical moderation isn’t just sneaking some ideological perspective in under a seemingly neutral take?

I realized after those conversations that a lot of what I was thinking about internally and advocating for across a wide range of topics wasn’t clearly organized and certainly wasn’t distilled into a framework that people could start using out in the world.

So I spent some time organizing my thoughts, going back over previous blog posts and the book manuscript, and came up with what I think is a pretty good start. Like everything with this Substack, it’s a work in progress. I hope and expect that it’ll evolve over time as we work together to try it out on different concrete problems.

I also have a fun announcement tomorrow that will put this framework into practice and hopefully engage readers in the process too.

But for now, here are the major steps I’m using to think about radically moderate solutions or at least mitigations to some of our most pressing personal and communal problems. These will be adapted somewhat to fit individual-level vs. community-level concerns, as you’ll see in future posts. But this gets the principles down as a starting point.

These steps are built out of the four dimensional metaphor I’ve been playing with for the past few years. Binary thinking that gives us either/or “solutions” don’t really give us the information or perspective that we need to think about what the broader social and moral landscape looks like.

I hope this framework gets us closer to a 4D way to converse, deliberate, and decide.

The Radical Moderation Framework

There are six basic steps, but as you’ll see, the process is iterative. Because different decisions require different kinds of information, you’ll go back to different steps depending on the feedback you get from your feedback loops or from one of the other steps. But here are the basics:

1. Start hyperlocal: explore what’s going on on the ground. What are your values and goals in this situation? What does the immediate landscape look like? It almost always starts with individuals and their experiences, but hyperlocal small groups matter too in a lot of situations. This is the equivalent of exploring the first dimension.

2. Map the social and moral landscape: Who else is around? Who matters to you or to this particular decision? Who isn’t “in the room” but should be in the room? What shared goals exist? What pathways already exist and which would need to be built? This is the social element of the framework and this is where we explore the second dimension - length and width - of our shared landscape.

3. Identify, avoid and escape pits: Pits bring in the third dimension of height and depth. How free are people to move around the landscape? Are there areas you or other people are stuck? How deep are these pits? What tools might we have to get people out? What known pits exist and how can we avoid them?

4. Look backward and forward (and create feedback loops): This step helps us explore and incorporate the fourth dimension of time. We need to have historical understanding both of how the landscape ended up shaped the way it did, but also how we ended up in our particular location on the landscape. We also need to decide what timeframe matters for measuring results moving forward. Where do we want to be located on our landscape in 1, 5 or 100 years? Deciding what timeframes matter for looking back and looking forward is a crucial part of the process.

   1. As part of the fourth dimension (and this should maybe be a step all on its own) we should also open feedback loops. Pick a timeframe that makes sense for that particular decision and go back through #1, 2 and 3 again. What’s working? What’s not? What unintended consequences exist? How can we deal with them?

5. Accept and tolerate variation and pluralism: Not everyone starts with the same #1. People’s #2s will differ because their social environments differ. And their #3 will differ from their neighbors because people have varying ability to move around their landscape. People with different histories - both developmentally and generationally - will have different values and goals, so #4 creates variation too. We need to allow different people and solutions to co-exist. People will occupy different parts of the landscape and will travel on it in different ways and that has to be ok because there’s just no way around it, apart from deeply painful coercion.

6. At each step, remember that tradeoffs exist: When we move through each dimension of a particular problem, we need to assess the tradeoffs that exist in other areas. We can’t foresee all of them, but we should take a good stab at trying to identify the obvious ones. Because it’s no good pulling someone out of a pit if we accidentally push someone else into a different pit at the same time.

   1. This is also where we can look for nonzero solutions. Identifying tradeoffs is great, but can we also find a solution where everyone is better off? If we do have to accept tradeoffs in one area, can we mitigate their effects?

All this is a bit high level, but I’ll use this framework to discuss some tangible problems over the next couple weeks so we can get a better handle on how it works in practice. Depending on the complexity of the decision, some of these steps will be intuitive and require almost no thought at all, while others will require spending a lot of time in some areas or even all the areas to figure out what’s going on.

Finally, the radically moderate principle of humility applies across the board. This framework might not give us perfectly clear answers simply because not all the information we might need is accessible to us in the moment. None of us are fortune-tellers and none of us can know what other people are thinking at any given point. We do our best and make decisions the best we can.

The goal isn’t to make perfect decisions.

The goal is to escape binary thinking so we can make better decisions, for ourselves and for our communities.

What do you think? Is this a useful framework on its own for thinking about what a radically moderate process might look like? What would you add? What would you remove? Let me know in the comments!