This is inspired by Jamie Harris’ post on creating your own roles, which I found an insightful read and one you might also find valuable. I would like to expand on this theme a bit about what might be valuable once you’ve done this, in particular about resource creation and retrospectives. A quick one today given the theme of the week, and one which I will likely expand upon later (see my blog, where this will be crossposted), but I feel some people may find this useful in the meantime.
In short, resources are a useful capacity building tool. When you do something, creating resources can:
- Allow people to learn from or use (parts/all of) of your approach and/or reflections, that they can then use for themselves or adapt as a starting point
- Inspire others that changing the world and working on impactful cause areas is possible for them
- Normalise certain aspects (yes, trying to improve the world is hard, and sometimes hard things are hard, that’s part of it!)
Perhaps to give some brief context: I run Oxford Biosecurity Group, and I’m course lead for the initial online version of the Introduction to Biosecurity course. Beyond this, I’ve worked at or contracted for various other organisations such as Cambridge Effective Altruism CIC (now Bluedot Impact, Meridian Cambridge, ERA Fellowship), Charity Entrepreneurship (now Ambitious Impact), and Pivotal Research. See my LinkedIn for more. However, I feel that talking about my own career is not always the most useful in helping other people in theirs given different situations/timelines/resources/etc, whereas general learnings they can look at, assess and take parts of that are useful for their situation. In that spirit, I’m going to share some resources below.
Personal effectiveness:
- Advice on Advice: how to go about evaluating the advice you receive and how to apply it given your situation (also presented as a lightning talk at the EA Student Summit: London)
- Resources, Constraints and Having an Impact: Assessing your resources and constraints, and using your (current) resources to achieve your goals and have an impact
- Upcoming: recovering when risks don’t pay off, including identifying when you are in a hole, stopping digging, how to climb out, and making sure you don’t fall back in
Creating/running programmes:
This post can act as the pre-announcement to the launch of the Introduction to Biosecurity course Substack. The following resources are being created through running the course, and will be made available in the coming months.
Approach to creating/running the course:
- Initial content creation
- Content iteration/feedback
- Application process
- Scheduling (this took much longer than expected so will be its own!)
- Course retrospective & impact evaluation
Lower priority as more similar resources exist (maybe public in future):
- Facilitator guidance
- Session plans (however, you can find Bluedot Impact’s excellent ones on their website)
The course is intended as a community resource for different groups to run, and if you are interested in running a future version, please fill in this form.
Important Caveat: Choose your Failures and Limit Downside Risks
I encourage people to create resources, but I’ll put an important caveat on it. Sometimes you will fail, but of course not all failures are equal, and you want to avoid the worst potential failures and minimise the consequences of the failures you do have. This is particularly true in field building where actions may have substantial field impacts.
Mitigations (depending on the resource) include things like making sure you have relevant knowledge in advance, creating resources with other people, putting contingencies in place for certain situations, getting input and feedback, and/or generally not being a unilateral actor. Of course, sometimes unexpected things occur that then need to be dealt with, and which mitigations are appropriate depend on the type of resource that you are creating.
I hope to see many more resources created in the future, and please reach out here via DM or on LinkedIn if you are interested in future collaboration.
I would like to thank many people in the EA community for inspiring me and for their help in my impact journey so far. I’ve found that if you are doing great things, you rarely stand alone for long, and the good thing with having a community is that you do not have to.
