Reason Commons

A better way to think together — and to act on it.

Structure the thinking as trees — a tree of change, and a tree of action — with every claim and every step still connected to the goal it serves. Let ordinary discussion attach where it belongs, and let AI keep the tree current. The point is that our thinking should accumulate.

Read the series See it working

There's no app to log into yet — a way of thinking, and enough built around it to judge whether it's worth adopting.

On the questions that matter most, we generate plenty of heat and not much light. There is real discussion — on the forum, in long documents, in calls — but it repeats, it scatters, and it doesn't build; you can't point at a 200,000-word strategy and improve one sentence of it. We never build the cathedral, we just make a bigger mess. Trees are a way out: break a goal into the parts it actually rests on, so the whole and the parts stay connected and you can see how a single step — or a single objection — bears on what you're trying to do. Then the hard part, getting freeform discussion connected back to the tree without anyone doing tedious filing. It has to be close to effortless or it won't happen, and AI is what makes that possible now.

The idea

Break a goal, or a claim, into the parts it rests on — a tree of change, and a tree of action — with the whole and the parts kept connected.

The AI tooling we're building

AI drafts the trees from what you already have, and folds ongoing discussion back in — so it enriches the conversation and improves the tree at the same time.

See it working

The four steps end to end — claim, tree, sources, evidence — on a worked toy example.

Grounded in the Logical Thinking Process

A rigorous method from the Theory of Constraints, forty years in the making — it came out of industry, but it applies almost anywhere. We use its rigour and drop its vocabulary.

Start here — the three-part series

The way in is a short scrolling series: why fixes don't stick, why reasoning has to be made visible, and the forty-year-old method that connects them. Then watch the method meet a real movement's strategy in The Forum Doesn't Remember. Full contents on the series page.

Demos & experiments — rough, unfinished, illustrative

DemoClaim-tree annotation

The four-step vision as an animated walk-through.

PrototypeConstraints dashboard

A read-only viewer over a full LTP analysis of one organisation's goals and constraints.

ExperimentGoal Aligner

Turning a room's scattered goals into one tree everyone can sign off on.

TalkA talk that performs the method

Five acts; the audience experiences the process before hearing its name.

The method underneath

The rigour comes from the Logical Thinking Process (LTP), part of the Theory of Constraints — a way of laying out a goal, the things blocking it, and the change that gets past them. Our Guide is a plain-language introduction, with a reading list if you want the books.

About

Reason Commons is a collaboration between Rufus Pollock and David Joseph. It has three strands: building the AI tooling; working with communities that already reason hard in public — AI governance, effective altruism, climate; and using Second Renaissance as a living laboratory. Rufus's thread: issue trees and structured problem-framing, a tool he wanted for more than ten years. David's thread: "Abductio," a proposition-decomposition process inside his Promise Protocol framework. More about the project and the people →

Stay in touch

Occasional updates as the tooling and the writing develop — monthly at most.