PROJECT ATLAS · ACTIVE RESEARCH
Same organisation. Same facts.
Different information environment.
Does the executive make the same decision?
Project ATLAS investigates how the information environment surrounding an executive influences human judgement.
The experiment
Hold the reality constant. Change the information environment.
ATLAS examines what is noticed, what remains invisible, which relationships change interpretation and whether a different information architecture changes reasoning, confidence or the decision itself.
the viewObserve the decision
The research question
How does the view change the decision?
How do changes in the completeness, structure and synthesis of organisational information affect executive judgement when the underlying organisational reality remains unchanged?
The research landscape
We found the pieces. We did not find the complete experiment.
ATLAS touches established work in executive information systems, decision support, information architecture, behavioural decision research, organisational sensemaking, information overload, business intelligence, choice architecture, cognitive bias and human-AI decision-making.
There is substantial research showing that information availability, presentation and cognitive limitations influence judgement. That is not our novelty claim.
We have not identified an established equivalent to the complete experimental architecture being developed through Project ATLAS: holding an organisational problem constant while deliberately varying its information architecture and comparing the resulting human executive judgement.
We regard ATLAS as exploratory research into a potentially distinct intersection of established disciplines. The evidence will determine how distinctive it ultimately proves to be.
Executive Information Architecture
The layer between organisational reality and executive judgement.
Executive Information Architecture is the deliberate selection, structuring, relationship and presentation of organisational information that creates the information environment within which executive judgement occurs.
Information Architecture primarily concerns how information is organised. Decision Architecture generally concerns how decisions are structured or governed. Choice Architecture examines how the environment in which choices are presented can influence behaviour.
Executive Information Architecture asks a different question: what version of organisational reality reaches the human who must make the decision?
More is not necessarily better
A relationship can matter more than another twenty pages.
Giving an executive more data does not guarantee more understanding. Sometimes three existing facts made visible together are more useful than another report.
Profitability → Receivable conversion → Cash.
No new organisational fact has been created. A relationship has become visible.
ATLAS therefore examines four dimensions: completeness — what can be seen; structure — how it is organised; synthesis — which relationships become visible; and interpretation — what the human actually understands.
The AI question
Can AI help the human see better before deciding?
Much of the discussion around AI asks whether the machine can make the decision better than the human. ATLAS is interested in another possibility.
Modern organisations already possess extraordinary amounts of financial, operational, project, contract, forecast and risk information. AI creates the possibility of connecting those signals at a scale that historically required extraordinary human effort.
The machine does not have to become the executive. It may instead help the executive see.
Research before product
The evidence gets to decide.
Project ATLAS is deliberately separated from the commercial services of Executive Compass™. The research does not exist to prove that Executive Compass works.
A useful experiment must be capable of producing an inconvenient answer. Richer information may improve judgement. It may not. Synthesis may help until it creates overload. Conventional summaries may outperform richer representations in some circumstances.
Those are all useful findings.
Research status
Active research and development.
Experimental materials and administration procedures are designed to preserve consistency while controlling differences between information environments.
Participant-facing materials are designed not to reveal the underlying experimental conditions. Materials are frozen before administration where appropriate, and responses are captured independently.
As the programme develops, its methodology, limitations, observations and findings will be documented. No public statement should describe the work as validated, certified or scientifically proven before the evidence supports it.
The ATLAS proposition
Organisations don't make decisions based on reality.
They make decisions based on the version of reality they can see.
Project ATLAS asks what happens when we change the view.