Rewarding and penalizing leaders based on outcomes overestimates how much variance people actually control. (This works both ways: Just as good managers can suffer from bad outcomes not of their own making, bad managers can be rewarded for good outcomes that occur in spite of their ineptitude.) In fact, the more unpredictable an environment becomes, the more an outcomes-based approach ends up rewarding or penalizing noise.
It’s really hard for me to find nuanced approach to this, especially in team settings where people automatically attach them self to outcome(including me) and want to be praised for outcome to which think they contributed.
I don’t know of any good resources to point you at, but I’ll add this comment about how I see this as it exists in the EA community.
EA has a tendency to focus on outcomes. This makes sense given the philosophy of EA, and especially makes sense when you look at the state of charitable giving outside EA, where just paying serious attention to outcomes at all would be a major change (in the sense of focusing on things like ROI, impact, effectiveness and efficiency, etc.).
But as always when you set a direction, it can easily overshoot and land you with more of what you wanted than you want, i.e. too much focus on outcomes and not enough on process. So I think EA actively has to work to make sure it doesn’t forget about balancing process with outcomes given the outcome-focused outlook of the movement. So far I think folks have done a good job of this (at least in the last few years, maybe less so in the early days), but I also feel a regular pressure when speaking with EAs to need to continually seek the balance rather than letting outcomes overtake process focus.
[Question] Outcome vs process
Good evening :), I am curious what’s EA community approach and some good resources about Outcome vs process balance.
What I mean is what for example Dan Ariely explained in https://hbr.org/2010/12/column-good-decisions-bad-outcomes:
Rewarding and penalizing leaders based on outcomes overestimates how much variance people actually control. (This works both ways: Just as good managers can suffer from bad outcomes not of their own making, bad managers can be rewarded for good outcomes that occur in spite of their ineptitude.) In fact, the more unpredictable an environment becomes, the more an outcomes-based approach ends up rewarding or penalizing noise.
It’s really hard for me to find nuanced approach to this, especially in team settings where people automatically attach them self to outcome(including me) and want to be praised for outcome to which think they contributed.
Thank you
I don’t know of any good resources to point you at, but I’ll add this comment about how I see this as it exists in the EA community.
EA has a tendency to focus on outcomes. This makes sense given the philosophy of EA, and especially makes sense when you look at the state of charitable giving outside EA, where just paying serious attention to outcomes at all would be a major change (in the sense of focusing on things like ROI, impact, effectiveness and efficiency, etc.).
But as always when you set a direction, it can easily overshoot and land you with more of what you wanted than you want, i.e. too much focus on outcomes and not enough on process. So I think EA actively has to work to make sure it doesn’t forget about balancing process with outcomes given the outcome-focused outlook of the movement. So far I think folks have done a good job of this (at least in the last few years, maybe less so in the early days), but I also feel a regular pressure when speaking with EAs to need to continually seek the balance rather than letting outcomes overtake process focus.