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Others with more experience of unintentionally-values-misaligned-orgs: I’d love critiques of my thinking!

@metaviv

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· Jul 30, 2021

This tragedy—where well-intentioned people build something values-misaligned—often gets blamed on the profit motive and investors. But I think it's just as bad (in some ways, worse) at nonprofits. So: what's really going on?

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Andy Matuschak

@andy_matuschak

Aug 2, 2021

Two key issues along these lines hit KA: 1. Big-$$ funders were obsessed with seeing large impact numbers go up and to the right; the org ended up serving proxy metrics which became poorer and poorer approx of its values over time.

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2. Employees / teams / products create their own inertia, have their own local proxy metrics, often for good reasons. Hard for them to see / propose "lay off these three teams and merge these other two to be more values-aligned" when they are themselves part of those teams.

5:20 PM · Aug 2, 2021TweetDeck

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What do you think an ideal org would do about #2? Is there a process change that might help? (I think what we teach would help a lot with #1)

Andy Matuschak

@andy_matuschak

Aug 2, 2021

I don't know! Key examples that come to mind mostly involve founder-driven command-and-control, which is probably not what you'd like to see.

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