Thank you for sharing your learnings (and for all your hard work these past 7+ months!). As you say, there’s a good chance there are more crises on the horizon and hopefully posts like this can help us be better prepared for the next one.
One part I found particularly useful was:
I have gained more appreciation for the skills involved in consulting and project management. I’ve been blown away by folks with this experience, especially (1) their ability to go into messy, confusing, and complex areas and help de-confuse things and create simple summaries, and (2) their ability to dive in quickly, move a bunch of tasks forward promptly, and provide organizational and logistical scaffolding. I now think most crisis teams should have at least one person with this skill set.
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Also, lawyers who can talk trade-offs and put odds on things are golden. Most won’t.
People often criticize EA orgs for not hiring more non-EA experts. (Indeed I used to be one of them, but generally the more I interact with EA orgs and non-EA experts, the more impressed I am with the former and disappointed I am with the latter.) Obviously the truth is not as simple as “EAs are always better” or “Non-EA experts are always better” and yet I very rarely see people making concrete claims about who is better in what kind of situation to what extent and for what reason.
Thank you for sharing your learnings (and for all your hard work these past 7+ months!). As you say, there’s a good chance there are more crises on the horizon and hopefully posts like this can help us be better prepared for the next one.
One part I found particularly useful was:
People often criticize EA orgs for not hiring more non-EA experts. (Indeed I used to be one of them, but generally the more I interact with EA orgs and non-EA experts, the more impressed I am with the former and disappointed I am with the latter.) Obviously the truth is not as simple as “EAs are always better” or “Non-EA experts are always better” and yet I very rarely see people making concrete claims about who is better in what kind of situation to what extent and for what reason.