I think to better expand Rethink Priorities, we need Rethink Priorities to be bigger and more efficient.
I think the relevant constraints for “why aren’t we bigger?” are:
(1): sufficient number of talented researchers that we can hire
(2): sufficient number of useful research questions we can tackle
(3): ability to ensure each employee has a positive and productive experience (basically, people management constraints and project management constraints)
(4): ops capacity—ensuring our ops team is large enough to support the team
(5): Ops and culture throughput—giving the ops enough time to onboard people (regardless of ops team size), giving people enough time to adapt to the org growth …that is, even if we were otherwise unconstrained I still think we can’t just 10x in one year because that would just feel too ludicrous
(6): proof/traction (to both ourselves and to our external stakeholders/funders) that we are on the right path and “deserve” to scale (this also just takes time)
(7): money to pay for all of the above
~
It doesn’t look like (1) or (2) will constrain us anytime soon.
My guess is that (3) is our current most important constraint but that we are working by experimenting with directly hiring managers and by promoting people into management internally. We rolled out management training this summer and also used our internship program, in part, to train management capacity. From a project management perspective, we recently hired a manager and have rolled out Asana across the team and we will continue to focus on the Asana processes we’ve built and make sure they are working before scaling more.
For (4), this will occasionally become a constraint from time-to-time but we solve this by proactively identifying ops bottlenecks and hiring for them well in advance. So far this has gone well.
For (5), I think this will be our next biggest constraint once we solve (3). I think this is best solved just with time to let the current level of growth become normal as well as listening to staff and their concerns. We just launched our biannual staff survey and we are awaiting important staff feedback before hiring more.
For (6), I think also comes with time and probably can be seen in combination with (5).
For (7), I do think we are funding constrained right now—we have room for more funding and definitely need to get money from somewhere in order to continue our work. I’m optimistic that we can get money from our current institutional sources because we haven’t tried too recently to ask them for money and I think they still like us and want us to continue to succeed. But I think, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, we’d still like other people to support our work to enable us to diversify our funding sources, give us more flexible unrestricted funding that is 1.5x-2x as valuable per dollar to us, and to build us more sustainability / flexibility in the face of idiosyncratic risk.
Sorry that was seven things instead of 2-3, but I think it helps to communicate the full picture.
This is very well-communicated! Thank you for taking the time to type all that out and label the responses :-)
Regarding (3) - making each employee happy and productive
Are there any examples of organisations that you aspire to model RP’s practices after? Ie. Exemplars of how to “be bigger and more efficient” while making each employee happy and productive?
*I ask because I’d love to learn about real-life management cultures/tools to grow my skillset :-)
I’d clarify that I was inspired by that particular document—especially for the large employee ownership—but I’m much less inspired by the culture at Netflix as I hear from some employees that it is actually practiced.
I think to better expand Rethink Priorities, we need Rethink Priorities to be bigger and more efficient.
I think the relevant constraints for “why aren’t we bigger?” are:
(1): sufficient number of talented researchers that we can hire
(2): sufficient number of useful research questions we can tackle
(3): ability to ensure each employee has a positive and productive experience (basically, people management constraints and project management constraints)
(4): ops capacity—ensuring our ops team is large enough to support the team
(5): Ops and culture throughput—giving the ops enough time to onboard people (regardless of ops team size), giving people enough time to adapt to the org growth …that is, even if we were otherwise unconstrained I still think we can’t just 10x in one year because that would just feel too ludicrous
(6): proof/traction (to both ourselves and to our external stakeholders/funders) that we are on the right path and “deserve” to scale (this also just takes time)
(7): money to pay for all of the above
~
It doesn’t look like (1) or (2) will constrain us anytime soon.
My guess is that (3) is our current most important constraint but that we are working by experimenting with directly hiring managers and by promoting people into management internally. We rolled out management training this summer and also used our internship program, in part, to train management capacity. From a project management perspective, we recently hired a manager and have rolled out Asana across the team and we will continue to focus on the Asana processes we’ve built and make sure they are working before scaling more.
For (4), this will occasionally become a constraint from time-to-time but we solve this by proactively identifying ops bottlenecks and hiring for them well in advance. So far this has gone well.
For (5), I think this will be our next biggest constraint once we solve (3). I think this is best solved just with time to let the current level of growth become normal as well as listening to staff and their concerns. We just launched our biannual staff survey and we are awaiting important staff feedback before hiring more.
For (6), I think also comes with time and probably can be seen in combination with (5).
For (7), I do think we are funding constrained right now—we have room for more funding and definitely need to get money from somewhere in order to continue our work. I’m optimistic that we can get money from our current institutional sources because we haven’t tried too recently to ask them for money and I think they still like us and want us to continue to succeed. But I think, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, we’d still like other people to support our work to enable us to diversify our funding sources, give us more flexible unrestricted funding that is 1.5x-2x as valuable per dollar to us, and to build us more sustainability / flexibility in the face of idiosyncratic risk.
Sorry that was seven things instead of 2-3, but I think it helps to communicate the full picture.
This is very well-communicated! Thank you for taking the time to type all that out and label the responses :-)
Regarding (3) - making each employee happy and productive
Are there any examples of organisations that you aspire to model RP’s practices after? Ie. Exemplars of how to “be bigger and more efficient” while making each employee happy and productive?
*I ask because I’d love to learn about real-life management cultures/tools to grow my skillset :-)
I’ve seen Peter, our Co-CEO, highlight Netflix culture as something that inspired him: https://jobs.netflix.com/culture
I’d clarify that I was inspired by that particular document—especially for the large employee ownership—but I’m much less inspired by the culture at Netflix as I hear from some employees that it is actually practiced.