Hmm. Obviously, career advice depends a lot on the individual and the specific context, all things equal, I tentatively agree that there is some value in having seen a large "functioning" org. I think many of these orgs have also dysfunctional aspects (e.g., I think most orgs are struggling with sexual harassment and concentration of formal and informal power) and that working at normal orgs has quite high opportunity costs. I also think that many of my former employers were net negative for some silly which I think are highly relevant, e.g., high-quality decision making 

Thanks for clarifying! I think Training for Good looked into "scalable management trainings", but had a hard time identifying a common theme, which they could work on (This is my understanding based on a few  informal chats. This might be outdated and I am sure they have a more nuanced take). Based on my experience, different managers seem to have quite different struggles which change over time and good coaching and peer support seemed to be the most time-effective interventions for the managers (This is based on me chatting occasionally to people and not based on proper research or deep thinking about the topic) 

What do you specifically mean by "maturing in management, generally"? I noticed that people  tend to have very different things in mind when they are talking about "Improving management in EA" so could be worth clarifying

Some shameless self-promotion as this might be relevant to some readers: I work at cFactual, a new EA strategy consultancy, where one of our three initial  services is to optimize ToC's and KPI's together with organizations. Illustrative project experience includes the evaluation of the ToC and design of a KPI for GovAI’s fellowship program, building a quantitative impact and cost-effectiveness model for a global health NGO,  internally benchmarking the impact potential of two competing programs of an EA meta organization with each other, doing coaching with a co-founder of a successful longtermist org around Fermi-estimates and prioritization of activities as well as redteaming the impact evaluation of a program of a large EA organization.

Thanks for highlighting this offer again and sharing your feelings, Catherine! 

I like how you highlight that the forum is just one element of EA. Personally, I also distinguish quite strongly between EA  as a question and set of evolving ideas and the EA community (which is obviously a part of EA). 

Historically, I found it super valuable to talk with you through various sensitive community-building considerations and benefited a lot from your experience managing countless tricky situations I wasn't even aware of. Thanks for doing that important and hard behind-the-scenes work! 

Thanks for sharing, Catherine! I apply many of your tips and agree that they are super useful. Additional questions I ask myself quite often:

1. What is the goal I want to achieve? This is the question which helps me to structure my thinking and approach the most 
2. Am I asking the right question? Next to regularly not thinking through all the options I have, I also realize often that I am not asking the question I really care about in the first place
   1. Can I make a prediction about my decision? This helps me a lot to keep track of my decisions e.g., at cFactual we have a "prediction of the week" to calibrate ourselves on outcomes we expect to see,  identify differences in reasoning about important topics among team members, ...
3. Do I weigh all arguments/considerations equally or do I believe one argument is 10x more relevant than others?

Some tools for group decision-making we use:

1. Our google doc company template has as default drop-downs to always indicate the status of the document, time spent, what the stage of the document is (Strawmen, key arguments or flashed out document) and a section for a few words on epistemic status ("braindump/ 5min of desk research/ I am an expert/..."). This helped us a lot to remain focused and have higher quality discussions with a time investment of 20sec
2. We try to quantify our preferences, e.g., Instead of saying: I am in favour of option A, we aim to write: I am 55% in favour of A. This helps us quite often to make a judgement call without forward and backward writing of comments

If there are larger decisions I want to think through more rigorously, I quite often use this mental structure as a starting point (and then adapt it): Recommendation/conclusion incl. my certainty in the conclusion, alternative options, my arguments for the recommendation, my arguments against, key uncertainties, key assumptions, downside risks and predictions

Probably stating the obvious for many here: I think the CFAR handbook also has great prompts for people who are interested in the topic

Quick update: we launched an EA-aligned strategy consultancy, partly motivated by this post and the feedback we received from our pilot projects: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/a65aZvDAcPTkkjWHT/introducing-cfactual-a-new-ea-aligned-consultancy-1

Thanks! Yes, feel free to DM me, if relevant.

Thanks for the question, Merlin. Please note that we have a small sample size and are still refining our models of what skillsets are most relevant for more EA-aligned consulting. 

Three things that have been useful: 1) Structuring problems, projects and meetings well, 2) Being able to switch quickly between different levels of abstraction quickly and constantly: Thinking carefully about a key assumption in an excel model in one moment and thinking about how the results change the big picture for a CEO in the next moment 3) More vaguely: Just having seen and worked with a lot of organization, projects and leaders, probably shaped our intuitions 

Three things that were less useful than I thought: 1) Executional speed - On the margin, we care much more about what we work on and getting it right compared to getting things done; 2) Qualitative data selection e.g., interviewing - during the pilot project we did a lot more independent thinking and then specific testing of key uncertainties with key stakeholders. In traditional consulting, we would have conducted interviews earlier to develop our hypotheses (which has the cost of becoming potentially an echo chamber); 3) Project planning - during all pilot projects we adapted our activities quite a lot based on our updated models, what would be most impactful

Thanks for sharing and your great work during the last year. Having talked to you several times, I was and am impressed with your systematic approach to finding product-market fit/high expected impact opportunities, your ability to build MVPs to test ideas quickly, and your courage to discontinue programs that do not meet your bar.  

I think the latter is hard especially after investing weeks of work into programs and it is easy to trick oneself into motivated reasoning, about why it might be worth continuing the program. I admire you for having the courage to make tough judgment calls. Probably most of us should stop mediocre activities (earlier)