I help organizations run effectively through operations coaching, workflow optimization, and talent development. I gain a lot of personal satisfaction from making other people’s work lives more productive, satisfying, and under control. On a personal note, I’m a mom with 3 kids juggling life, work, family, and community involvement.
Deena Englander
Karma: 665
Looking at this from a systemic perspective, I wonder how we can prevent this situation from happening again. To clarify, the situation I refer to is intense criticism presented without consideration of the facts that requires significant resources to be directed towards defense in order to maintain credibility.
Writing and responding to discrediting posts consumes a lot of resources that counterfactually could have been used for more impactful purposes.
Additionally, it creates a lot of fear—I can only imagine the distress this situation caused Kat and NL. It takes a lot of personal strength and conviction to stand up to such negativity, and I fear that this kind of whistleblowing is more likely to push people away from doing the hard job of being a nonprofit entrepreneur.
I’d love to hear any suggestions about how to prevent this from happening again.
I completely agree with this. I’ve seen many worse scenarios play out in other organizations due to unprofessionalism, mostly due to lack of experience and the tendency to bootstrap and work in startup mode. While that approach is helpful in some cases, it causes a lot of dysfunction across many organizations and I’d like to see more efforts put into instituting professional norms within EA organizations. This is only a well publicized event—there are many worse ones that I’ve witnessed that aren’t highlighted here. But that brings up another point that a few other commenters mentioned—are we creating an environment that: A) encourages the “move fast and break things” lack of professionalism approach But then: B) condemns them for making mistakes It seems to me that we cannot believe both. Either we supposed the first approach and accept that mistakes will be made, or we do not tolerate mistakes, but then discourage unprofessionalism. That, it seems to me, is the systemic issue surrounding this particular one.
Thanks for bringing that up. The copy is in the newsletter—we have a lot of great providers, and it’s hard to get the formatting right here also, so we just direct everyone to the place where all the information is. Did you take a look at the link?
There are so many things wrong with this post that I’m not entirely sure where to start. Here are a few key thoughts on this:
-EA preaches rationalism. As part of rationalism, to understand something truly, you need to investigate both sides of the argument. Yet the author specifically decided to only look at one side of the argument. How can that possibly be a rationalist approach to truth-seeking? If you’re going to write a defamation article about someone, especially in EA, please make sure to go about it with the logical rigor you would give any issue.
-I’ve been working with Kat and Nonlinear for years now and I heard about the hiring process, the employment issues, and the nasty separation. I can guarantee you from my perspective as a coach that a good number of the items mentioned here are abjectly false. I think the worst mistake Kat made was to not have a contract in writing with both of her employees (Chloe’s agreement was in writing) detailing the terms of their work engagement.
-I’m not seeing information collected from other Nonlinear employees, which makes me wonder why there’s a biased sample data here. Again, if you’re spending the amount of time and effort as was put into this post to defame someone, choose an appropriate data sample.
-Have you ever been through or seen people go through a divorce? Nasty splits happen all the time, and the anger can cloud retrospective judgment. Yet when we hear someone complain about how bad their ex was, we take it with a grain of salt and assume that personal prejudice is clouding their impression of the person (which is usually true). Why isn’t that factor taken into account?
-In general, I think it’s not a good idea to live with the people you work with. It destroys relationships. So it probably wasn’t a good position to start with. I’m not surprised it went sour—how often do people not have great relationships with their roommates? And when you compound that with a built-in hierarchy of employee and boss, it can make it more challenging. It’s possible Alice and Chloe didn’t know what they were getting themselves into. But that brings me back to Kat’s mistake of not getting it in writing for both of them. Their mistake does not give them an excuse for libel.
Honestly, I’m very disappointed in the author for writing a non-rigorous, slanderous accusation of an organization that does a whole lot of good, especially when I know firsthand that it’s false. It makes me lose faith in the integrity of the rationalist community.
To me, a fellowship implies a higher degree of training and involvement than just a course. It’s a combination of education and experience, and it seems to me to be the best word for it. And yes, the fact that it’s something EAs tend to understand easily makes it a better word to use for that purpose. But I’m open for suggestions if you have better ones!
I like that phone metaphor better.… I think I’ll switch to that! Thanks for the idea.
Thanks for posting this—in my sessions with varying EA orgs, I’m finding myself trying to prove the point of why they should be investing in branding and marketing as an effective way to increase funding potential and impact. In order to function like a non-profit not exclusive to EA funding, this is vital for the organization’s survival. I’ll definitely refer people back here as it comes up!
Do you have any insight into what type of efforts these funds are allocated towards?
I think you’re quite right—and if we’re going to port it over to the analogy, I would venture to say that if you know you’re I’m going to need to run a high resource task at some point, you need to conserce capacity to be able to extend the limits as needed. I don’t normally need to process and analyze gigabytes of data, but I need the ability to be able to on my device.
Not yet, no. That comes next, once we have the articles of incorporation.
I very often encourage people to do exactly that—find out what their unique personal strengths and talents are optimize for a job that uses their strengths. It’s better to find a job that uses your talents in a cause area that you only like than to find a job that doesn’t utilize your skills in a cause area that you love. The latter tends to lead to burnout, failure and frustration, while the former helps you be happy, productive, successful and impactful. I personally use the Gallup Strengthsfinder to assess talent.
It’s not a necessity to have these within EA. It is a necessity to have good resources. There are also some cases, such as with finances and legal matters, that having a specialized service provider will allow more people to be helped effectively since they’ll have a greater degree of familiarity and expertise with common EA org problems. And if we do have an EA that does a good job providing those services, I’d rather prioritize using those folks and if we don’t know of them I’d like to.
In general, I’m finding that there are many similar patterns to what most EA orgs need, and the objective needs to be finding them quality resource providers and making them easily accessible.
I totally agree with you.
The other problem with outside experts is the same that anyone faces—who do I use? Which company is good? Pre-covid, I had been working on a problem in the small business community that created something very similar because of the hesitancy of humans to trust, especially when a lot of providers aren’t as good as they claim to be. So I do think there’s a trust factor that’s important regardless, and if we don’t have the talent in EA, I would consider bringing people out of EA into the community to fill those gaps.
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There are lots of software needs and types of service providers that are needed. Anti Entropy also provides great support in addition to Altruistic Agency. But right now, if I need Salesforce or Smartsheets or Dynamics setup, those usually have specific consultants. Or sometimes we need larger-system research and implementation plans, and that’s not something we currently have a resource for in EA. I do have good resources out of EA.
It’s your second point that we’re addressing-
EA orgs are making a mistake by not wanting to pay for these things even though they would be worth paying for.
Although your first point is also true. I don’t think that’s a problem, though. Most businesses have diverse audiences and I don’t think EA is large enough to support most business models independently.
It’s based on our collective experiences working with EA orgs. We all interact with a large volume of EA orgs, and we keep getting similar questions for providers in certain areas.
And to your point, I personally refer in non-EA specialists as needed, but I would prefer to use EA folks (if they exist) to strengthen the business support services in the community. And some services are better provided when the provider is at least familiar with EA. All the people I bring in get a short introduction of what to expect before they start with EAs. Believe it or not, EA orgs have a VERY different mentality than most other organizations out there and it can be challenging for providers to understand and navigate if they don’t have prior exposure.
Another reason why we are focusing on EAs now is that we’re building a directory of EA service providers, so we’re just noting the gaps that exist within EA. Part of the goal is that anyone who needs help with something has an easily accessible resource to find access to trusted advisors and partners. So it’s not that someone outside of EA provides “worse” software implementation than someone within EA—it’s just noticing that our community doesn’t have that resource available now. And potentially, it might be that none of us are aware of a provider that does that, in which case, we’d like to know about it.
There were a number of people who were interested in one particular set of skills and knowledge. We’d have to develop those courses, which is our bottleneck right now. Delivering the courses isn’t the issue—it’s creating the new programming and then packaging, marketing and organizing the courses. Along those lines, I think webinars will be helpful as well, but they do take the initial time investment. We are currently seeking funding to help alleviate the resource bottleneck so we can create these.
I think another bottleneck is the unwillingness to hire outside of EA. It’s not so hard to find good ops people who have experience outside of EA, and as long as it’s a good personality fit, I’ve seen that working out well. Also, your typical EA is not a great ops person because they’re happier working on the big picture. To find people who are good at implementing, you have to look outside the group since they’re not naturally drawn to EA.
Fiscal sponsorship and/or operations support go a really long way in bridging the gap between ideation and implementation, especially when the majority of executive directors don’t have management experience. I highly support these types of services!