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
3 Basic Steps to Reduce Personal Liability as an Org Leader
Introducing EASE, a managed directory of EA Organization Service Providers
The Productivity Fallacy
5 Proposed Changes to the Funding System to Increase Org Survival and Impact
Introducing WorkStream EA: Providing support, training, and consulting for EA organizational development
A Belated Post-Mortem of My Entrepreneurial Journey
How WorkStream EA strengthens EA orgs, leaders and impact: our observations, programs and plans
The supply gap of EA org service providers
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.
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.
Hi all! I’m new to the EA forum. My husband’s been involved in EA for years, and I am finally in a place to want to join in as well. Specifically, I’m an efficiency consultant, specializing in operations and productivity improvement. I would love to take my talents to the EA world to make charities and the people involved more impactful.
Do we know success rates for organizations/initiatives?
Effective Org Planning for a Calm, Growth-Oriented and Impactful 2024
Time Estimate for Starting a Non-Profit
Applications Open for the Next Operations Fellowship Cohort
My experience starting a 501c3
Applications Open for the Next Nonprofit Org Accelerator Cohort
Embracing Minimalism in the Workplace
Anti Entropy focuses on providing short-term operational resources to supplement an organization and get them past specific obstacles. They provide “things” to support orgs, which is extremely valuable. WorkStream provides talent and personnel development and ongoing coaching. We focus on upskilling people and guiding them through growing their organizations.
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.