The Method
Strategic thinking requires compound vision
Decades of research across geopolitics, law, investment, and technology converge on one finding: those who understand complex problems best are rarely committed to a single lens. Nine dimensions shape how Dragonfly sees, each one sharpening the others as they compound.
20 years of research. 28,000 predictions. One finding.
Philip Tetlock tracked 284 experts making 28,000 predictions over two decades — the largest study of expert judgment ever conducted. The experts with the biggest media profiles were the least accurate. Single-framework thinkers did worse than random guessing.
The forecasters who consistently outperformed — including intelligence analysts with access to classified data — shared one trait: they systematically sought out and integrated multiple perspectives. Tetlock called this “dragonfly eyes.”
Anthea Roberts applied this research across two decades of academic work — and it became the intellectual foundation for Dragonfly Thinking.
The name isn't branding. It's the thesis.
Thinkers who deploy many analytical perspectives and synthesise them into a single judgment consistently outperform those who apply one powerful framework to every issue.
Philip Tetlock
Superforecasting
When leaders' thinking becomes simpler — when they stop integrating multiple perspectives — war follows. When they maintain that ability, crises resolve peacefully.
Suedfeld & Tetlock
Replicated from WWI to the Cuban Missile Crisis
Built on two decades of multi-perspective research.
Dragonfly Thinking grew out of Anthea Roberts' academic research into how people see the same problems through different lenses — and what happens when you hold those perspectives in tension rather than choosing sides. Each project below built the next layer of the methodology.
Anthea Roberts
Multi-perspective analysis
Is International Law International?
Anthea Roberts · Oxford University Press, 2017
How international lawyers in different states see the same legal questions through fundamentally different lenses — patterns of difference, dominance, and disruption.
Multi-perspective synthesis
Six Faces of Globalization
Anthea Roberts & Nicolas Lamp · Harvard University Press, 2021
Six competing narratives about globalisation, held in tension rather than choosing sides. A methodology for integrative thinking about complex, contested problems.
Systemic driver mapping
Risk, Reward and Resilience
Anthea Roberts · Journal of International Economic Law, 2023 and Foreign Affairs, 2023
How economic drivers interact systemically — mapping risks, rewards, and resilience across trade, technology, and geopolitics. The foundation for Dragonfly's driver and systems analysis methodology.
It helps us not only understand the best version of other sides' narratives, but also move beyond our own conceptual straitjackets.
Dani Rodrik
Harvard — on Six Faces of Globalization
AI doesn't replace the judgement — it creates the cognitive capacity to sustain compound vision.
Holding multiple competing perspectives simultaneously, mapping their interactions, tracing feedback loops and tipping points — this is precisely what humans struggle to do alone. AI creates the cognitive capacity to sustain compound vision long enough to produce insight.
But that only works with the right structure. Our method codifies expert thinking into structured analytical workflows — repeatable steps that AI can execute rigorously. The critical difference is between using AI and directing AI to think well.
The messy real world requires significant domain and application-specific reasoning that cannot efficiently be encoded in a general model. Enter cognitive architectures, or how your system thinks.
Sequoia Capital
Dragonfly's structured approach supports the kind of thinking that human teams often find difficult to sustain unaided.
AI CoLab pilot participant
Australian Public Service
An agentic analytical system, not a chatbot.
Lens agents
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Specialist analytical agents — actors, drivers, systems, scenarios, interventions, challenge, synthesis, and others.
Analytical skills
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Expert tradecraft encoded as readable skill files — methods, frameworks, and quality protocols agents draw on.
Frame the question. Challenge assumptions. Synthesise outputs.
The method, applied.
Two published bodies of academic work from Anthea Roberts completed using Dragonfly agents — compound vision applied to a contested AI landscape, and to the legal profession in transition.
Harvard Project
AI in the Legal Profession
Anthea Roberts — Harvard Center on the Legal Profession, 2026
An ongoing research project on how generative AI is reshaping legal practice — interviews and analysis hosted on Harvard CLP, alongside the methodology work.
Visit on Harvard CLPFeatured Analysis
AI Through Dragonfly Eyes
Anthea Roberts — Harvard, April 2026
Nine narratives about AI, mapped as mirror pairs. Seven interactive visualisations showing compound vision in action.
Read the full analysisAI tools without frameworks are just chatbots creating slop.