I’m excited that there’s now more work happening on Effective Institutions / IIDM!
Some questions and constructive criticism that’s hopefully useful:
The aim was to gauge the diversity of perspectives in the EA community on what “counts″ as IIDM. This helps us understand what the community thinks is important and has the most potential for impact. We hope that the results will shape the rest of our work as a working group and provide a helpful starting point for others as well.
It seems that you’re starting out with the assumption that IIDM is a useful category/area, and that figuring out its scope is helpful for determining what’s the most impactful. Was there a particular reason for taking the intermediate step via the scope/definition of IIDM? I personally would be curious to learn which kinds of activities people find most promising in this area, and why so. In comparison, the scope question might just track a ‘verbal dispute’ rather than opinions on ground truths. (Edit: Looks like EdoArad pointed out something similar above.)
Relatedly, the survey gives a picture of what some people interested in IIDM believe about some high-level abstract categories. I wonder if the survey also gave you any insight into the types of activities that people think we should work on. E.g., what specific things do people have in mind when they talk about “Institutional design / governance”, and why exactly do they think it’s important? Does their reasoning hold up on closer inspection? I personally would feel very excited to see more object-level discussion of that kind. Perhaps a small number of people who have thought about IIDM carefully and systematically could share their object-level arguments on which approaches seem the most promising to them.
Perhaps a small number of people who have thought about IIDM carefully and systematically could share their object-level arguments on which approaches seem the most promising to them.
Hi Jonas, I can share some personal reflections on this. Please note that the following are better described as hunches and impressions based on my experiences rather than strongly held opinions—I’m hopeful that some of the analysis and knowledge synthesis EIP is doing this year will help us and me take more confident positions in the future.
Re: institutional design/governance specifically, I would guess that this scored highly because of its holistic and highly leveraged nature. Many institutions are strongly shaped and highly constrained by rules and norms that are baked into the way they operate from the very beginning or close to it, which in turn can make other kinds of reforms much more difficult or less likely to succeed. The most common problem I see in this area is not so much bad design as lack of design, i.e., silos and practices that may have made sense at one particular moment for one particular set of stakeholders, but weren’t implemented with any larger vision in mind for how everything would need to function together. This is a common failure mode when organizations grow opportunistically rather than intentionally. My sense is that opportunities to make interventions into institutional design and governance are few and far between, but can be tremendously impactful when they do appear. It’s generally easiest to make changes to institutional design early in the life of an institution, but because the scale of operations is often smaller and the prospects for success unclear at that point, it’s not always obvious to the participants how much downstream impact their decisions during that period can have.
One of the biggest bottlenecks to improved decision-making in institutions is simply the level of priority and attention the issue receives. There tends to be much more focus in institutions on specific policies and strategies than on the process by which those priorities are determined. At the same time, institutional cultures tend to reflect their leaders’ priorities, especially if the leaders are in place for a while. Thus, I’m optimistic about interventions that target the selection and recruitment of leaders with an eye toward choosing people who understand the importance of decision-making processes and are committed to making high-quality decision-making a priority in the organizations they come into.
I think there’s a version of moral circle expansion that is very relevant to institutional contexts. Institutions tend to prioritize first and foremost their direct stakeholders, i.e. the interests of people close to the institution. If more of them took seriously the effects of their decisions on everyone, not just those who are their primary voting constituents or intended beneficiaries or paying customers, that would represent a dramatic cultural shift that would make lots of other improvements more feasible. I see this as more of a long-term strategy that will not be easy to pull off, but the potential benefits from making progress on this dimension are massive.
Thanks Jonas. We / I are also really interested in activities that people find promising within this area! The idea with the survey was partly to connect IIDM to categories which exist in other professional communities and academic literatures to help us understand what are considered promising approaches in those fields and allow us to build on existing knowledge.
I’m excited that there’s now more work happening on Effective Institutions / IIDM!
Some questions and constructive criticism that’s hopefully useful:
It seems that you’re starting out with the assumption that IIDM is a useful category/area, and that figuring out its scope is helpful for determining what’s the most impactful. Was there a particular reason for taking the intermediate step via the scope/definition of IIDM? I personally would be curious to learn which kinds of activities people find most promising in this area, and why so. In comparison, the scope question might just track a ‘verbal dispute’ rather than opinions on ground truths. (Edit: Looks like EdoArad pointed out something similar above.)
Relatedly, the survey gives a picture of what some people interested in IIDM believe about some high-level abstract categories. I wonder if the survey also gave you any insight into the types of activities that people think we should work on. E.g., what specific things do people have in mind when they talk about “Institutional design / governance”, and why exactly do they think it’s important? Does their reasoning hold up on closer inspection? I personally would feel very excited to see more object-level discussion of that kind. Perhaps a small number of people who have thought about IIDM carefully and systematically could share their object-level arguments on which approaches seem the most promising to them.
Hi Jonas, I can share some personal reflections on this. Please note that the following are better described as hunches and impressions based on my experiences rather than strongly held opinions—I’m hopeful that some of the analysis and knowledge synthesis EIP is doing this year will help us and me take more confident positions in the future.
Re: institutional design/governance specifically, I would guess that this scored highly because of its holistic and highly leveraged nature. Many institutions are strongly shaped and highly constrained by rules and norms that are baked into the way they operate from the very beginning or close to it, which in turn can make other kinds of reforms much more difficult or less likely to succeed. The most common problem I see in this area is not so much bad design as lack of design, i.e., silos and practices that may have made sense at one particular moment for one particular set of stakeholders, but weren’t implemented with any larger vision in mind for how everything would need to function together. This is a common failure mode when organizations grow opportunistically rather than intentionally. My sense is that opportunities to make interventions into institutional design and governance are few and far between, but can be tremendously impactful when they do appear. It’s generally easiest to make changes to institutional design early in the life of an institution, but because the scale of operations is often smaller and the prospects for success unclear at that point, it’s not always obvious to the participants how much downstream impact their decisions during that period can have.
One of the biggest bottlenecks to improved decision-making in institutions is simply the level of priority and attention the issue receives. There tends to be much more focus in institutions on specific policies and strategies than on the process by which those priorities are determined. At the same time, institutional cultures tend to reflect their leaders’ priorities, especially if the leaders are in place for a while. Thus, I’m optimistic about interventions that target the selection and recruitment of leaders with an eye toward choosing people who understand the importance of decision-making processes and are committed to making high-quality decision-making a priority in the organizations they come into.
I think there’s a version of moral circle expansion that is very relevant to institutional contexts. Institutions tend to prioritize first and foremost their direct stakeholders, i.e. the interests of people close to the institution. If more of them took seriously the effects of their decisions on everyone, not just those who are their primary voting constituents or intended beneficiaries or paying customers, that would represent a dramatic cultural shift that would make lots of other improvements more feasible. I see this as more of a long-term strategy that will not be easy to pull off, but the potential benefits from making progress on this dimension are massive.
Thanks Jonas. We / I are also really interested in activities that people find promising within this area! The idea with the survey was partly to connect IIDM to categories which exist in other professional communities and academic literatures to help us understand what are considered promising approaches in those fields and allow us to build on existing knowledge.