Why I Steal (Ideas) and You Should Too
TL;DR: The EA movement has yet to fully incorporate ideas, skills, people, and knowledge from existing fields (e.g. monitoring and evaluation). You could potentially have a lot of impact just through stealing these and adapting them to our contexts.
Epistemic status: Quick informal post on something I’ve been thinking about.
I’m currently basing a large portion of my career (and more importantly, my impact) on stealing ideas, best practices, and people from existing sectors and applying them in new contexts:
Within both The Mission Motor and my previous work, we’ve been taking monitoring and evaluation (M&E) standards from global development organisations and applying them to EA and animal organisations.
I was able to step away from Fish Welfare Initiative, in part, because we hired someone with years of experience running research and programs in global development to replace my research-lead function.
I am founding a charity that takes strategies used by other agricultural development movements (e.g. the organic movements’ use of farmer co-operatives) and tests them for farmed animal welfare.[1]
Effective altruism is still relatively nascent. We also tend to attract people (like myself) who are young and don’t have much experience with best practices from other spaces. As a result, many of our projects run with a deficit of existing knowledge. This is a problem because:[2]
We risk wasting resources answering questions that have already been answered elsewhere.
We risk doing things worse than we otherwise could, given existing expertise.[3]
We risk our worse ways of doing things locking in as the norm.
So we should steal more.
This can look like hiring people with existing skillsets. But it can also look like current EAs upskilling. In my experience, even a relatively novice understanding of a relevant field or skill can quickly outpace current norms. I’ll put my advice for how to upskill in this way in a comment below.
I could imagine the main downsides here being forms of credentialism or a stifling of innovation. These are worth watching, but I suspect that we are currently (at least in my EA circles) under-indexing on existing knowledge. As a result, a moderate swing in that direction would likely be net-beneficial.
We might also worry that encouraging EAs to upskill in order to resolve these gaps invites a bastardised version of external expertise. I do think this has happened to some extent with M&E, where it has been conflated with existing EA concepts like cost-effectiveness projections. That said, I generally think that even half-informed learning is better than none. In my experience, EAs who push into these new areas often end up creating more space for existing professionals as well.
Some areas where I suspect there’s a lot more to be learned for EA and animal spaces:
Financial modelling
Science communication
Project management
Ethnography
User experience
But I’m sure there’s much more. I’d be interested to see other people’s ideas in the comments.[4]
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See my previous post for the rough idea. Let me know if you’d be interested in chatting about this!
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Also see this post: EA needs outsiders with a greater diversity of skills
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Example: EA on nuclear war and expertise
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I suspect that a good place to start looking is anywhere that freelancers are contracting a specific skill.
I’ve seen so many scenarios in which EA folks reinvent wheels that are already very well-established in the broader professional world, or in which people rely on networks of EAs for advice rather than asking a subject matter expert. I’ve mostly seen this in relation to hiring because that is an area that I’ve seen internal processes for a few different EA organizations.
More broadly and more informally I’ve seen people failed to train new managers and fail to adopt project management practices (or to even be aware that they exist). One person mentioned to me that the Project Management Institute sounded fake. I have the vague impression that a lot of people understand project management to be something like “putting tasks in a list and then ticking them off,” and simply aren’t aware of earned value management, risk management, quality control, and other major areas.
This is vague and handwavy, but it does seem to resonate with a general tendency toward insularity: rather than ask a consultant with many years of experience who is an expert in an area, EAs seem to be happy to ask a friend who has two years of work experience and who did a thing once fairly well.
Strong agree.
And I understand why this is a problem. It can be hard to independently create contacts in these spaces from scratch, and there is an aspect of not knowing what you don’t know at play. I’m almost certain I am committing the same mistake in multiple places in my work.
Would be interested to think about solutions here. Like perhaps a group such as Consultants For Impact could take on a role of knowledge dispersal, doing things like getting project management experts to give a talks at EAGs?
“I do think this has happened to some extent with M&E, where it has been conflated with existing EA concepts like cost-effectiveness projections.”—this is an interesting observation and something that has come up in some of my own recent work, where estimating and tracking impact in expectation is perhaps mistaken as M&E as typically understood by experts in M&E. Can you share some concrete aspects of/tools from M&E you think others may be overlooking?
I also generally agree with your overall thoughs, and feel that people in EA are sometimes unwittingly unaware of entire fields that address the specific problem they believe is completely neglected.
For sure!
I would say that EAs are missing large parts of M&E, including:
- The formal setting of key questions / assumptions that form the basis of what you will focus on trying to answer
- Creating formal monitoring frameworks (e.g. a log frame) that takes these questions / assumptions and identifies practical indicators and a method of measuring them
- I think EAs don’t use the full diversity of M&E tools. In my experience we tend to over-index on surveys (vs., say, interviews, focus group discussion, or observational data)
- I think considering the frequency of use of surveys, we could generally up-skill in high-quality survey design
- Using a diverse set of evaluation types (EAs generally know about RCTs, but these are such a narrow slice of the available evaluation types)
In general I think we care about M&E but lack experience in the formal processes of it, especially monitoring. So application is patchy and not generally in line with best practices.
I should perhaps clarify that I am mostly talking about the non-global development side of EA. I think their norms for M&E are significantly better.
Intrac’s M&E universe is one place to see an overview of what M&E entails. I think also The Mission Motor intends to create more resources on these topics in the future :)
Great, thanks for sharing these!
My advice for EAs who want to skill up in a neglected area:
Get a good mentor who broadly aligns with EA values but already has the skill. I’ve had three of these relationships (with experts in fish welfare, M&E, and agricultural development). In each case, it was symbiotic: I could offer EA knowledge and connections in return for them teaching me their skillset.
Book calls with as many relevant people as possible in the field. Shamelessly ask for help, even from people only tangentially related to what you’re trying to learn. The more you snowball contacts, the better your chances of finding a mentor. Also, having lots of people explain the fundamentals to you repeatedly is very useful, as it helps you learn the core ideas of the field.
Read a lot. Try to consume a lot of media from the chosen field. You know you’re doing well when you start to notice consistent underlying patterns and premises (again, the core ideas).
Start applying it before you’re ready. Look for small projects you can use as practice for the new skill.
In general, when learning a new skill, Andrea Gunn’s talk on training leaders offers a lot of good insight. I also made a one-page summary of her talk.
I have historically been able to do this upskilling as a side project to my existing job.
I’d been thinking very much the same recently, and how many tricks the movement is missing.
I started writing a blog about what EA could learn from Management Science/Operational Research—a field that is essentially EA without the A. It’s all about effective, rational decision making and has developed a wide array of tools for tackling ‘how’.
As a consequence, it often feels to me that EA is where Management Science was in the 60s with regards tools and lenses, and debates. Those have now long subsided. Trying to cover 50-60 years of a field’s voultion meant what was meant to be a short blog quickly became quite a burgeoning essay—I’ll get back to it.
Although the tools of Management Science are of immediate use, it’s actually the lenses and frameworks that have more value. Frames on pluralism, systems, emergence, reductionism, epistemology, and interpretism, even its critical turn in the 90s.
Separately, a great project management book that might interest you is ‘How Big Things Get Done’. Bent Flyjberg’s ideas of reference classes would be of especial interest to EAs, as well as much of his other writing on risk, power, rationality and the scientific method.
Look forward to reading this blog, Mark!
Cool! Would be keen to sign on to a mailing list :)