Private equity investor (E2G)
Co-Treasurer @ EA UK
Trustee @ EA for Christians
Trustee @ ICM UK
Director @ EA Good Governance Project
MBA @ INSEAD
Grayden šø
Karma: 1,532
Two quick points:
Yes, legal control is the first consideration, but governance requires skill not just value-alignment
I think in 2023 the skills you want largely exist within the community; itās just that (a) people canāt find them easily (hence I founded the EA Good Governance Project) and (b) people need to be willing to appoint outside their clique
Thanks, Ben. I agree with what you are saying. However, I think that on a practical level, what you are arguing for is not what happens. EA boards tend to be filled with people who work full-time in EA roles, not by fully-aligned talent individuals from the private sector (e.g. lawyers, corporate managers) who might be earning to give having followed 80kās advice 10 years ago
Thanks for this! You might be right about the non-profit vs. for-profit distinction in āoperationsā and your point about the COO being āOperatingā rather than āOperationsā is a good one.
Re avoiding managers doing paperwork, I agree with that way of putting it. However, I think EA needs to recognise that management is an entirely different skill. The best researcher at a research organization should definitely not have to handle lots of paperwork, but Iād argue they probably shouldnāt be the manager in the first place! Management is a very different skillset that involves people management, financial planning, etc. that are often skills pushed on operations teams by people who shouldnāt be managers.
Most organizations do not divide tasks between core and non-core. The ones that do (and are probably most similar to a lot of EA orgs) are professional services ones
Administration definitely sounds less appealing, but maybe it would be more honest and reduce churn?
I donāt work in ops or within an EA org, but my observation from the outside is that the way EA does ops is very weird. Note these are my impressions from the outside so may not be reflective of the truth:
The term āOperationsā is not used in the same way outside EA. In EA, it normally seems to mean āeverything back office that the CEO doesnāt care about as long as itās done. Outside of EA, it normally means the main function of the organisation (the COO normally has the highest number of people reporting to them after the CEO)
EA takes highly talented people and gives them menial roles because value-alignment is more important than experience and cost-effectiveness
People in EA have a lower tolerance for admin, possibly because they elevate themselves to a high level of importance. Iāve worked with very senior and very busy company executives in the normal world and they reply to my emails. Yet in EA, it feels like once you have 2 years of experience in EA, you are too important to read your own emails and need somebody with 1 year of experience to do it for you
EA has so many small organizations and there seems to be so much reinventing the wheel, yet when it comes to specialists there are none
Managers within EA donāt seem to realise that some things they call operations are actually management responsibilities, and that to be a manager you need to be willing to less or maybe none of the day job, e.g. the CEO of a large research organisation should probably not do research anymore
There are some very competent leaders within EA so I donāt think we should make sweeping assumptions. I think we need to make EA a meritocracy
There are so many parallels to the Christian church
@Jack Lewars is spot on. If you donāt believe him, take a look at the list of ~70 individuals on the EA Good Governance Projectās trustee directory. In order to effectively govern you need competence and no collective blindspots, not just value alignment.
Thanks, Joey. Really appreciate you taking the time to engage on these questions.
To be clear, Iām not seriously suggesting ignoring all research from before the decision. Iām just saying that mathematically, an independent test needs its backrest data to exclude all calibration data.
It strikes me that there are broadly 3 buckets of risk /ā potential failure:
Execution riskāthis is significant and you can only find out by trying, but you only really know if youāre being successful with the left hand side of the theory of change
Logic riskāhaving an external organisation take a completely fresh view should solve most of this
Evidence riskāeven with an external organisation marking your homework, they are still probably drawing on the same pool of research and that might suffer from survivorship bias
Thank you for writing this and for all the work you (and others) have put in over the years.
My question is to what extent you think CEās impact measurement is tautological. If you determine something to be a high impact opportunity and then go and do it, arenāt you by definition doing things you estimate to be high impact (as long as you donāt screw up the execution or realise you made an error). To full adjust for selection effect, you would have to ignore all research conducted before the decision was made and rely solely on new data, which is probably quite hard to come by.
The 40% seems very high. For-profit start-ups have a much higher failure rate. If thatās true, thatās incredible, but Iād expect to see more like 5% of charities and 50% of funds.
what qualifies as a ātaskā
Basically anything that involves actually delivering the organizationās goal. Itās probably easier to define as everything thatās not governance or advice.
why does it reduce independence for the board to do it
If board members are doing it, then board members become part of the organization rather than separate from it.
why does it impede governance
The most important function of a board is to provide accountability for the CEO (and by extension the team below them). If they are involved in something, they cannot also provide external perspective.
why is either of those effects necessarily (or in expectation) bad?
It means you donāt have a system of governance that has been shown repeatedly to lead to better organizational performance.
how do you differentiate between āimportant strategic decisionsā and ātasksā or āadvice strongly recommended by the boardā
In terms of āimportant strategic decisionsā vs. ātasksā, thereās no black and white rule about what decisions are strategic vs. what decisions are tactical. For example, āshould we double in size?ā is a board-level decision, whereas āshould we apply for this grant equivalent to 1% of our annual income?ā is probably not. Each board needs to gauge where the balance is.
On the other hand, there is a big difference between decisions and advice. If the CEO chooses to ignore the advice, then they are accountable for the outcomes. Do also note that decisions are typically taken by the board collectively[1], whereas advice is frequently given by individual board members. An individual board members does not have the authority to speak on behalf of the whole board unless a decision has been taken.
Why is it better for the trustees to evaluate performance than the staff
Iām saying the board[2] must evaluate performance as one of its core duties. Iām not saying trustees are the ones collecting the data or doing the analysis.
Staff have a conflict of interest (they are paid to do something that may or may not be worthwhile) and lack independence (they are close to the action so their objective judgment may be impaired).
a) a small charity that doesnāt have sufficient funding to hire a CEO?
The advice above refers to organizations that have at least 1 member of staff (whether paid or unpaid).
b) a charity that has enough funding for a CEO, but far more work than that CEO can plausibly deal with, while having trustees who are willing to take some of the workload off them? (and no-one else who can credibly commit to doing so)
My advice refers to āWherever practicalā, i.e. having this set-up is not ideal and may impair the effectiveness of your board but is better than the organization not doing the work it needs to do.
ļThe Role of a Non-Profit Board
In the early days, it was hard to get people who were sufficiently āvalue alignedā with experience. I donāt think thatās the case anymore. For example, there are many value-aligned highly-experienced people on the EA Good Governance Projectās Trustee Directory. The issue is that many people donāt want to give up partial control of something to somebody outside their clique and/āor prior to October didnāt have an easy way to find them
I think thereās no substitute for role models and experience. Whenever I advise people in EA on careers, I always suggest spending some time in ānormalā organisations first
Bad AcĀtors are not the Main IsĀsue in EA Governance
Thanks for sharing
EA is too insular and needs to learn from other fields
Definitely!
business can be thought of as the study of how to accomplish goals as an organizationāhow to get things done in the real world. EA needs the right mix of theory and real world execution
Well put! I used to pitch EA as the ābusiness approach to charityā, but that view has fallen out of favour with the rise of the philosophers
If only there were some kind of measure of an individuals contribution. Maybe we could call it something like PELTIV
Thanks for the nudge. Iāve just posted an update here: https://āāforum.effectivealtruism.org/āāposts/āānEnDvu2Ha9HLguvK8/āāupdate-from-the-ea-good-governance-project
I also found these charts a little confusing. A single value for each or a clustered column chart might be clearer