Thanks so much for posting about your experience, I anticipate your tips will help me improve my strategy for incorporating EA concepts at the large corporation I work in. I’ll chime in with my own experiences in case they are also helpful to others.
I work in a Canadian company with 50k employees. In early 2019, I reached out to our company’s charitable giving team, expressing an interest in helping run events to increase charitable giving engagement within my part of the business. This invitation was met with enthusiasm and support, over 2 conference calls and several emails. I didn’t explicitly mention EA, just that I was well connected and had a fun systematic way for looking at charitable giving.
As we approached the giving campaign period in the fall, I reached out again with an exciting proposal to run a Giving Game, and asked if it could be included as an official charitable giving campaign event. This didn’t end up working out (reasons are opaque to me, a few emails went by without response), but I’m hopeful for 2020. Instead, I invited folks from my network to attend, and we had a really good 10 person Giving Game.
This was the first one that I’ve run, and it seemed to land really well with the attendees. One key aspect was to show employees how they could donate to effective charities through RC Forward, directly from their paycheck. I hope to leverage their testimonials to support whatever proposal I come up with this year.
I think there is a lot of potential to incorporate EA concepts into a greater conversation at my company, and see two paths forward:
1. Grow a grass-roots conversation by finding people who are enthusiastic enough about EA to actually form a core team. Currently it’s just me by myself, and this seems like a work-intensive long-term goal.
2. Shortcut the process by building a stronger relationship with our charitable giving team. Changes made by this team could be very high leverage—anything from changing the company matching program to include high impact charities (we don’t), to tweaking default donation options and search functionality, to a paradigm shift in how folks view doing good.
I’m also playing with system-wide influence through a new role that I’ve taken on, which could transform the company culture. It’s still early days, but I’m making meta-moves to create a community that increases empathy, connection, and systematic (rational) thinking.
Hoping my story is helpful for folks here. I’m interested in hearing more anecdotes from anyone else who’s looking at EA from the context of a corporation.
A Metamodern Approach to “Leveling-up” Humanity
ThinkBetter was founded by five EAs in Toronto with the mission of creating a scalable rationality training program, and the goal of materially raising the global sanity waterline. Through a series of rapid-prototyping and OODA loops, we ended up ‘transcending and including’ our initial curriculum and strategy, and are now working with a deeper understanding of the complexity of the challenge.
I’d be interested in starting a discussion to share:
Our journey
A new approach to learning that we are finding highly effective
The emerging ecosystem of individuals, teams, and communities that are all working on different parts of the human development stack
And of course—how our perspective on EA is shifting as we learn to ‘see’ higher levels of complexity