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Joe Edelman
@edelwax
Others with more experience of unintentionally-values-misaligned-orgs: I’d love critiques of my thinking!
@metaviv
@andy_matuschak
@RichDecibels
@marazepeda
@vgr
@JamesTamplin
@jim_rutt
@Conaw
@Austen
@patio11
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Joe Edelman
@edelwax
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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
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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Andy Matuschak
@andy_matuschak
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.
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Joe Edelman
@edelwax
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)
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Aviv Ovadya 🥦
@metaviv
Replying to
@andy_matuschak
@edelwax
and 8 others
I'm imagining a process where at a regular cadence, everyone across the company can propose alternative visions, metrics, structures, etc. But lots of messy details about how time and resources are allocated to that, and mitigating harmful political dynamics around it.
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Joe Edelman
@edelwax
Replying to
@andy_matuschak
@metaviv
and 8 others
One thing some of my alums at Facebook tried was making an internal court system to solve values vs team metric / bonus comp disputes in a way that let people meet their promotion / bonus targets while opting out of the problematic metric. Don’t really know if it worked out.
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