This is really good and I am really excited by this project. Well done on such an excellent post and all the community building work and so on.
(Some of this I put in my earlier comments on a draft but repeating here publicly, hope that is OK)
A few thoughts questions and ideas come to mind.
Did you ever consider changing the name? Maybe the name doesn’t really matter much, but if “Improving Institutional Decision Making” has been hard for people to understand then there could be better names like’good governance’ or ‘institutional reform’ etc etc.
Is it useful to try to narrow/broader or define the scope of IIDM? The borders of what exactly IIDM is will always be fuzzy, and may change with time. But it could still be somewhat helpful to try to set the scope of what you are interested in. Although maybe such an exercise is futile, will lead to unnecessary arguments and will just exclude people or ideas and we want to be as broad as possible for now. The kinds of things I am thinking about are:
Helping progress the careers of EA aligned folk (eg 80K) – you already rule this out in your post. [I’d agree]
Improving individual decision making (eg CFAR, LessWrong, etc). [My view is that this is not IIDM but maybe you think it is]
Improving organisations in ways that are not directly decision making related, such as improving their efficiency, communications, reputation, representativeness to a population, etc? [I am not sure about this one]
Creating new institution? [I think most people I know would consider this IIDM. I think the aim is not to improve a specific institution but the collective decision making of institutions]
In order to disambiguate it could be worth trying to better define IIDM – and do this in ways that draw out more of the questions that might be asked. I feel that your current definition of IIDM definition overly focuses on decision making. Asking how do we improve decision making then applying this to institutions might give a different answer to asking how do we improve institutions then seeing how that can be applied to their decision making. The way you describe IIDM seems to do more of former than the later. I think there could be an advantage to ensuring the question is approached form both angles.
That said later in the post you skew the other way and ask “what are the most important institutions in the world” not “what are the most important decisions made by institutions”, as above approaching the question both ways could be better.
These are difficult questions to tease out. I think some sort of consultative community based approach to this could be useful. Working as broadly as possible to include people who want to be involved and get their views on names, on questions of wording, on definition and on scope.
Thanks, Sam—your feedback during the draft phase was extremely helpful and I’m happy for these open questions to be aired publicly as well.
Re: the name We’ve had a number of conversations about this, and at this point I’d say it looks like the name isn’t going anywhere for the time being. There is definitely a contingent of folks who aren’t crazy about IIDM as a label, but it has its fans as well, and all of the alternatives that have been suggested have shortcomings of their own. Ultimately, I think that once some of the work we’re describing here has been undertaken, there will be more concrete outputs for people to associate with our community and the name won’t have to carry as much weight on its own.
Re: scope This is definitely a work in progress for us, and even the process of drafting this post was helpful for sharpening our sense of what our scope is and isn’t.
Regarding careers, I do want to clarify that we don’t consider career guidance to be inherently out of scope for us. In fact, we are working informally with 80K to funnel mentees into IIDM community spaces so that they can have a way to learn about relevant opportunities and resources. However, we feel it’s premature for us to try to offer individualized career advice before we have a better sense of how the priorities stack up, and before we’ve had a chance to broaden our networks to include well-placed people in key institutions. The activities we’ve laid out for this year should help us make progress on both fronts.
Regarding individual decision-making, indeed, I see this as more CFAR’s domain although there are certainly important individual decisions that take place within professional or institutional contexts. So it’s kind of on the edge of our scope, but more in than out.
On ways to improve institutions that are not directly related to decision-making: this is related to your third point, so I’ll address it below.
Your last suggestion is covered in our post—we mention new institutions in our list of levers to improve IIDM, so we do consider it in scope for us.
With all of these, it’s important to emphasize that because our ambition is primarily to provide a connecting and coordination function, it’s possible for things ro be “in scope” for us where we would still expect other parties to be the primary drivers of that thing. Individual decision-making is a good example of this; we wouldn’t try to replicate or compete with what CFAR is doing, but can still consider them as part of our community broadly speaking because of the relevance of their work to ours.
Re: whether to emphasize “institutions” or “decision-making” more I think the questions you bring up here are quite profound. I will say that I was initially drawn to this cause area and Jess’s framing of it in her 80K profile in no small part because of its explicit emphasis on decision-making. As an employee or consultant, I’ve seen the inside of dozens of mission-driven organizations over the course of two decades, so I’m reasonably well positioned to pick up on patterns of institutional structure and routines. From what I’ve seen, there are relatively mature infrastructures (by which I mean formal roles, career tracks, training programs, etc.) for organizational functions such as program strategy, operations, research and evaluation, and executive leadership. Not so for decision-making, even though it cuts across all of the aforementioned areas and is absolutely central to what an organization actually accomplishes. In all of my time in the workforce, I have never seen a phenomenon as well-studied and obviously relevant as decision-making receive so little support from the organizations on behalf of which those decisions will be made. It’s just assumed that everyone already knows how to make decisions well, even though the research clearly demonstrates that’s not the case. It’s really quite a puzzle!
Getting back to the question of whether the goal is to improve institutions or improve decision-making at institutions, I see this as something of a false dichotomy. Institutions make their mark on the world via the sum total of the decisions they make, so by improving institutions you’re necessarily improving their decisions and vice versa. I agree that some things institutions do are not as easily recognizable as decisions as others—you mentioned working to improve their reputations or communications as examples of the former. Even in those cases, however, there are still decisions to be made: about how to prioritize the time of staff, budget, and executives in service of those priorities; about which audiences are most important and what messages are most desirable; and so forth. We are making decisions all the time; right now, I am choosing which words best express my opinions to you; I am choosing to stay up a bit past my bedtime to respond to this comment; I am choosing to prioritize my engagement with IIDM over other volunteer opportunities; and the sum total of those choices helps to outline the shape of the impact I create in the world, or don’t. And that last principle applies to organizations just as well as individuals. At least that’s the way I see it.
Thank you Ian. Grateful for the thoughtful reply. Good to hear the background on the name and I agree it makes sense to think of scope in a more fuzzy way (eg in scope, on the edge of scope like cfar, useful meta projects like career advice, etc)
Just to clarify my point here was not one of “whether to emphasize institutions or decision-making more” (sorry if I was initial comment was confusing) but kind of the opposite point that: it would make sense to ensure both topics are roughly equally emphasised (and that I’m not sure your post does that).
Depending on which you emphasis and which questions you ask you will likey get different answers, different interventions, etc. At an early scoping stage when you don’t want to rule out much, maintaining a broad scope for what to look into is important.
Also, to flag, I don’t find the “everything is decision making” framing as intuitive or useful as you do.
Totally off topic from my original point, but it is interesting to note that my experience is the polar opposite of yours. Working in gov there was a fair amount of thought and advice and tools for effective decision making, but the institutional incentives where not there. Analysts would do vast amounts of work to assess decisions and options simply to have the final decision made by a leader just looking to enrich themselves / a politician’s friend / a party donor / etc.
I’d still focus on finding answers from both angles for now, but, given my experience and given that governments are likey to be among the most important institutions, if I had to call it one way or the other, I’d expect the focus on the topic of improving decision making to be less fruitful than the focus on improving institutions.
This is really good and I am really excited by this project. Well done on such an excellent post and all the community building work and so on.
(Some of this I put in my earlier comments on a draft but repeating here publicly, hope that is OK)
A few thoughts questions and ideas come to mind.
Did you ever consider changing the name? Maybe the name doesn’t really matter much, but if “Improving Institutional Decision Making” has been hard for people to understand then there could be better names like’good governance’ or ‘institutional reform’ etc etc.
Is it useful to try to narrow/broader or define the scope of IIDM? The borders of what exactly IIDM is will always be fuzzy, and may change with time. But it could still be somewhat helpful to try to set the scope of what you are interested in. Although maybe such an exercise is futile, will lead to unnecessary arguments and will just exclude people or ideas and we want to be as broad as possible for now. The kinds of things I am thinking about are:
Helping progress the careers of EA aligned folk (eg 80K) – you already rule this out in your post. [I’d agree]
Improving individual decision making (eg CFAR, LessWrong, etc). [My view is that this is not IIDM but maybe you think it is]
Improving organisations in ways that are not directly decision making related, such as improving their efficiency, communications, reputation, representativeness to a population, etc? [I am not sure about this one]
Creating new institution? [I think most people I know would consider this IIDM. I think the aim is not to improve a specific institution but the collective decision making of institutions]
In order to disambiguate it could be worth trying to better define IIDM – and do this in ways that draw out more of the questions that might be asked. I feel that your current definition of IIDM definition overly focuses on decision making. Asking how do we improve decision making then applying this to institutions might give a different answer to asking how do we improve institutions then seeing how that can be applied to their decision making. The way you describe IIDM seems to do more of former than the later. I think there could be an advantage to ensuring the question is approached form both angles.
That said later in the post you skew the other way and ask “what are the most important institutions in the world” not “what are the most important decisions made by institutions”, as above approaching the question both ways could be better.
These are difficult questions to tease out. I think some sort of consultative community based approach to this could be useful. Working as broadly as possible to include people who want to be involved and get their views on names, on questions of wording, on definition and on scope.
Thank you for all the good work and best of luck.
Thanks, Sam—your feedback during the draft phase was extremely helpful and I’m happy for these open questions to be aired publicly as well.
Re: the name
We’ve had a number of conversations about this, and at this point I’d say it looks like the name isn’t going anywhere for the time being. There is definitely a contingent of folks who aren’t crazy about IIDM as a label, but it has its fans as well, and all of the alternatives that have been suggested have shortcomings of their own. Ultimately, I think that once some of the work we’re describing here has been undertaken, there will be more concrete outputs for people to associate with our community and the name won’t have to carry as much weight on its own.
Re: scope
This is definitely a work in progress for us, and even the process of drafting this post was helpful for sharpening our sense of what our scope is and isn’t.
Regarding careers, I do want to clarify that we don’t consider career guidance to be inherently out of scope for us. In fact, we are working informally with 80K to funnel mentees into IIDM community spaces so that they can have a way to learn about relevant opportunities and resources. However, we feel it’s premature for us to try to offer individualized career advice before we have a better sense of how the priorities stack up, and before we’ve had a chance to broaden our networks to include well-placed people in key institutions. The activities we’ve laid out for this year should help us make progress on both fronts.
Regarding individual decision-making, indeed, I see this as more CFAR’s domain although there are certainly important individual decisions that take place within professional or institutional contexts. So it’s kind of on the edge of our scope, but more in than out.
On ways to improve institutions that are not directly related to decision-making: this is related to your third point, so I’ll address it below.
Your last suggestion is covered in our post—we mention new institutions in our list of levers to improve IIDM, so we do consider it in scope for us.
With all of these, it’s important to emphasize that because our ambition is primarily to provide a connecting and coordination function, it’s possible for things ro be “in scope” for us where we would still expect other parties to be the primary drivers of that thing. Individual decision-making is a good example of this; we wouldn’t try to replicate or compete with what CFAR is doing, but can still consider them as part of our community broadly speaking because of the relevance of their work to ours.
Re: whether to emphasize “institutions” or “decision-making” more
I think the questions you bring up here are quite profound. I will say that I was initially drawn to this cause area and Jess’s framing of it in her 80K profile in no small part because of its explicit emphasis on decision-making. As an employee or consultant, I’ve seen the inside of dozens of mission-driven organizations over the course of two decades, so I’m reasonably well positioned to pick up on patterns of institutional structure and routines. From what I’ve seen, there are relatively mature infrastructures (by which I mean formal roles, career tracks, training programs, etc.) for organizational functions such as program strategy, operations, research and evaluation, and executive leadership. Not so for decision-making, even though it cuts across all of the aforementioned areas and is absolutely central to what an organization actually accomplishes. In all of my time in the workforce, I have never seen a phenomenon as well-studied and obviously relevant as decision-making receive so little support from the organizations on behalf of which those decisions will be made. It’s just assumed that everyone already knows how to make decisions well, even though the research clearly demonstrates that’s not the case. It’s really quite a puzzle!
Getting back to the question of whether the goal is to improve institutions or improve decision-making at institutions, I see this as something of a false dichotomy. Institutions make their mark on the world via the sum total of the decisions they make, so by improving institutions you’re necessarily improving their decisions and vice versa. I agree that some things institutions do are not as easily recognizable as decisions as others—you mentioned working to improve their reputations or communications as examples of the former. Even in those cases, however, there are still decisions to be made: about how to prioritize the time of staff, budget, and executives in service of those priorities; about which audiences are most important and what messages are most desirable; and so forth. We are making decisions all the time; right now, I am choosing which words best express my opinions to you; I am choosing to stay up a bit past my bedtime to respond to this comment; I am choosing to prioritize my engagement with IIDM over other volunteer opportunities; and the sum total of those choices helps to outline the shape of the impact I create in the world, or don’t. And that last principle applies to organizations just as well as individuals. At least that’s the way I see it.
Thank you Ian. Grateful for the thoughtful reply. Good to hear the background on the name and I agree it makes sense to think of scope in a more fuzzy way (eg in scope, on the edge of scope like cfar, useful meta projects like career advice, etc)
Just to clarify my point here was not one of “whether to emphasize institutions or decision-making more” (sorry if I was initial comment was confusing) but kind of the opposite point that: it would make sense to ensure both topics are roughly equally emphasised (and that I’m not sure your post does that).
Depending on which you emphasis and which questions you ask you will likey get different answers, different interventions, etc. At an early scoping stage when you don’t want to rule out much, maintaining a broad scope for what to look into is important.
Also, to flag, I don’t find the “everything is decision making” framing as intuitive or useful as you do.
Totally off topic from my original point, but it is interesting to note that my experience is the polar opposite of yours. Working in gov there was a fair amount of thought and advice and tools for effective decision making, but the institutional incentives where not there. Analysts would do vast amounts of work to assess decisions and options simply to have the final decision made by a leader just looking to enrich themselves / a politician’s friend / a party donor / etc.
I’d still focus on finding answers from both angles for now, but, given my experience and given that governments are likey to be among the most important institutions, if I had to call it one way or the other, I’d expect the focus on the topic of improving decision making to be less fruitful than the focus on improving institutions.
Keep up the great work!