Thanks for raising these points, John! I hadn’t considered the “cash prize for criticism” idea before, but it does seem like it’s worth more consideration.
I agree that CEA could do better on the front of generating criticisms from outside the organization, as well as making it easier for staff to criticize leadership. This is one of the key things that we have been working to improve since I took up the Interim Executive Director role in early 2019. Back in January/February, we did a big push on this, logging around 100 hours of user interviews in a few weeks, and sending out surveys to dozens of community members for feedback. Since then, we’ve continued to invest in getting feedback, e.g. staff regularly talk to community members to get feedback on our projects (though I think we could do more); similarly, we reach out to donors and advisors to get feedback on how we could improve our projects; we also have various (including anonymous) mechanisms for staff to raise concerns about management decisions. Together, I think these represent more than 0.1% of CEA’s staff time. None of this is to say that this is going as well as we’d like—maybe I’d say one of CEA’s “known weaknesses” is that I think we could stand to do more of this.
I agree that more of this could be public and transparent also—e.g. I’m aware that our mistakes page (https://centreforeffectivealtruism.org/our-mistakes) is incomplete. We’re currently nearing the end of our search for a new CEO, and one of the things that I think they’re likely to want to do is to communicate more with the community, and solicit the community’s thoughts on future plans.
Thanks for raising these points, John! I hadn’t considered the “cash prize for criticism” idea before, but it does seem like it’s worth more consideration.
I agree that CEA could do better on the front of generating criticisms from outside the organization, as well as making it easier for staff to criticize leadership. This is one of the key things that we have been working to improve since I took up the Interim Executive Director role in early 2019. Back in January/February, we did a big push on this, logging around 100 hours of user interviews in a few weeks, and sending out surveys to dozens of community members for feedback. Since then, we’ve continued to invest in getting feedback, e.g. staff regularly talk to community members to get feedback on our projects (though I think we could do more); similarly, we reach out to donors and advisors to get feedback on how we could improve our projects; we also have various (including anonymous) mechanisms for staff to raise concerns about management decisions. Together, I think these represent more than 0.1% of CEA’s staff time. None of this is to say that this is going as well as we’d like—maybe I’d say one of CEA’s “known weaknesses” is that I think we could stand to do more of this.
I agree that more of this could be public and transparent also—e.g. I’m aware that our mistakes page (https://centreforeffectivealtruism.org/our-mistakes) is incomplete. We’re currently nearing the end of our search for a new CEO, and one of the things that I think they’re likely to want to do is to communicate more with the community, and solicit the community’s thoughts on future plans.
Nice!