The Blocked Signal

BlackRock manages $13.5 trillion. Their investment committees have access to every model, every data point, every analyst report on earth.

The information they couldn't access was in the room.

Thomas Mueller-Borja, who runs $25 billion of BlackRock's value-add real estate, partnered with behavioral psychologist Emily Haisley to study how decisions actually got made. What they found wasn't a data problem. It was a flow problem.

Members voted publicly at the end of meetings. When a team has spent months building a deal, the cost of saying "no" out loud is enormous.

The real assessments existed. They just couldn't survive the handoff from someone's head to the committee's record. A silent alarm with no system to hear it.

So they rebuilt the plumbing.

Anonymous votes via a link. Results routed to an independent Risk team, not the committee chair. A new "challenger" role: someone outside the committee whose only mandate is to voice the pessimism nobody else can.

The information was never missing. The system was blocking it.

Every firm builds models to capture market signals. Almost none build systems to capture the signal sitting inside their own rooms.

Go deeper: The Information Flow