Nice one Ozzie—I don’t see why we should take this with a grain of salt, its an important issue and you have done a lot of thinking about it. I’ve got a few comments, as I’m quite interested in this as I run a small organisation like yours. My experience comes from the “NGO” world, and I’m sure doesn’t apply so well to other kinds of orgs like AI safety or community building
I see “Low management flexibility” and “Low employee flexibility” as being a double edged sword, but from my experience more often than not net positive. First I believe NGOs, and probably most EA orgs should usually do one thing only and do it well. There’s enormous value in having expertise and understanding about one issue, and spending a lot of years focusing on that issue alone and iterating your specific way of solving it. Having some flexibility is good, but too much can lead to watering down of impact, as we’ve seen with many big NGOs
If your organisation has to massively pivot from what it is currently doing or have a high degree of flexibility, than perhaps it shouldn’t exist at all or at least think hard about its purpose.
I’m also probably in the minority in thinking that low donor trust is more good than bad. Because NGOs don’t really operate within the market, supply and demand doesn’t apply in the same way its up to the donor to carefully monitor whether what they are “doing good better” than other orgs and deserve more funding. I actually think donor trust is still too high, which is part of the reason why the “BINGOS” (world vision, oxfam, save the children etc.) continue to get stackloads of cash even while they do so little good per dollar spent.
2. I really agree with the benefits you listed of working in larger orgs, but this can also go both ways. Here in Northern Uganda the bigger NGOs are so inefficient and burocratic, and staff there learn bad habits. At OneDay Health I’m super hesitant to hire anyone who has worked in a larger NGO because they are so used to moving suuuuuuuper slowly and having low productivity expectations. So it depends on the quality of the larger org and the team within it, whether people will learn a lot or not within that org.
I agree with the potential downsides of “downsizing” and qualiyt control too some extent
I would love to hear Charity Entrepreneurship’s response on this as well.
I agree that there are situations where funders would prefer organizations to have significant restrictions. I’m hopeful that in our situation, we can find ways for funders to find sizeable organizations that they can have enough trust in that they don’t need to go through many legal restrictions.
Or, if we can develop important relationships with high levels of justified trust, then we can heavily delegate decision-making to sizeable organizations, giving them the ability to be very flexible as is best. If we can’t get to these levels of trust, then the appropriate thing is to restrict them more.
In the corporate world, big businesses have to change a lot to do well. In the startup world, pivoting is a major deal. There are a lot of best practices in how to not do this too much or too little.
I’d also agree that there are some really bad large organizations out there. I’d guess that main reason they are bad is because they are in incentive landscapes that are poorly structured or noncompetitive. I’d be curious how effective the median small nonprofit is in the ecosystems you are pointing at—I’d expect that they’re fairly mediocre as well.
If I were a strong team member in a bad organization, I could easily see myself expecting to be more effective outside, in a tiny org. But if I were a high-level decision-maker (board member or funder), and I knew that there was a very strong team member inside my big organization, I’d probably prefer to have/move this person to a top leadership role, then have them be a leader in a new tiny organization.
I think that the specific team and focus areas at Charity Entrepeneurship seem like arguably good fits for an incubator, instead of a larger organization. However, if there are other groups considering making incubators, I’d definitely encourage them to consider making startup studios as well. (I have made this recommendation to three other groups considering considering incubators.)
Nice one Ozzie—I don’t see why we should take this with a grain of salt, its an important issue and you have done a lot of thinking about it. I’ve got a few comments, as I’m quite interested in this as I run a small organisation like yours. My experience comes from the “NGO” world, and I’m sure doesn’t apply so well to other kinds of orgs like AI safety or community building
I see “Low management flexibility” and “Low employee flexibility” as being a double edged sword, but from my experience more often than not net positive. First I believe NGOs, and probably most EA orgs should usually do one thing only and do it well. There’s enormous value in having expertise and understanding about one issue, and spending a lot of years focusing on that issue alone and iterating your specific way of solving it. Having some flexibility is good, but too much can lead to watering down of impact, as we’ve seen with many big NGOs
If your organisation has to massively pivot from what it is currently doing or have a high degree of flexibility, than perhaps it shouldn’t exist at all or at least think hard about its purpose.
I’m also probably in the minority in thinking that low donor trust is more good than bad. Because NGOs don’t really operate within the market, supply and demand doesn’t apply in the same way its up to the donor to carefully monitor whether what they are “doing good better” than other orgs and deserve more funding. I actually think donor trust is still too high, which is part of the reason why the “BINGOS” (world vision, oxfam, save the children etc.) continue to get stackloads of cash even while they do so little good per dollar spent.
2. I really agree with the benefits you listed of working in larger orgs, but this can also go both ways. Here in Northern Uganda the bigger NGOs are so inefficient and burocratic, and staff there learn bad habits. At OneDay Health I’m super hesitant to hire anyone who has worked in a larger NGO because they are so used to moving suuuuuuuper slowly and having low productivity expectations. So it depends on the quality of the larger org and the team within it, whether people will learn a lot or not within that org.
I agree with the potential downsides of “downsizing” and qualiyt control too some extent
I would love to hear Charity Entrepreneurship’s response on this as well.
Wow I failed badly on the formatting front haha.
Thanks for the comments here!
I agree that there are situations where funders would prefer organizations to have significant restrictions. I’m hopeful that in our situation, we can find ways for funders to find sizeable organizations that they can have enough trust in that they don’t need to go through many legal restrictions.
I’ve written about this here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/rqo9AswmH7KRF77ko/improve-delegation-abilities-today-delegate-heavily-tomorrow
Or, if we can develop important relationships with high levels of justified trust, then we can heavily delegate decision-making to sizeable organizations, giving them the ability to be very flexible as is best. If we can’t get to these levels of trust, then the appropriate thing is to restrict them more.
In the corporate world, big businesses have to change a lot to do well. In the startup world, pivoting is a major deal. There are a lot of best practices in how to not do this too much or too little.
I’d also agree that there are some really bad large organizations out there. I’d guess that main reason they are bad is because they are in incentive landscapes that are poorly structured or noncompetitive. I’d be curious how effective the median small nonprofit is in the ecosystems you are pointing at—I’d expect that they’re fairly mediocre as well.
If I were a strong team member in a bad organization, I could easily see myself expecting to be more effective outside, in a tiny org. But if I were a high-level decision-maker (board member or funder), and I knew that there was a very strong team member inside my big organization, I’d probably prefer to have/move this person to a top leadership role, then have them be a leader in a new tiny organization.
I think that the specific team and focus areas at Charity Entrepeneurship seem like arguably good fits for an incubator, instead of a larger organization. However, if there are other groups considering making incubators, I’d definitely encourage them to consider making startup studios as well. (I have made this recommendation to three other groups considering considering incubators.)