hey Leonie, many thanks for reading and your comment! Glad it resonated. 

I'm happy to hear you've found unemployment useful to your progress! Good luck with your role search! And many thanks for the kind sabbatical wishes :) 

Love this! I think speed of deployment is a really big issue in current funding in the space, with projects often waiting for 3-12 months before a funder can make a decision (plus many only have RFPs running once or twice a year, and it can take another month of so to receive funding), and given how urgent AIxAnimals projects are, we really need faster decisions and implementation. Thanks for starting this! 

Cool work! So happy our post on Building Impactful communities was useful to you folks! Good luck with your endevours! 

Happy birthday Mitchell! Sorry about the existential dread. I promise the next 10,000 hours include cake!

Hey Richie, many thanks for reading and your comment! Appreciate it. I basically agree with you on most of the points. 

Really like the additional detail on how engagement should be clearly for the engagement’s sake and not advertised as leading to employment, if it’s increasingly rarely the case, or in the future, when we use it as a tool to keep people in the movement without employment.

Re: management and mentorship: I think I mostly agree with you, but I may be using “management” in a slightly broader sense.

I agree that high-performing, motivated people usually need much less direction and oversight, and that hiring for autonomy matters a lot. In that sense, great people absolutely reduce the need for micromanagement.

Where I still think management remains important, even with very strong people and very advanced AI, is around coordination, prioritisation, decision-making under uncertainty, and looking after the human side of work. Once you have more than a handful of people, someone still needs to hold the whole picture, notice misalignment early, make trade-offs explicit, and ensure people aren’t burning out or duplicating effort.

I also think mentoring and management can blur a bit. Helping people understand context, giving feedback, supporting growth, and creating the conditions for good work are often framed as mentoring, but they’re also core parts of good management.

So I’m less convinced that we’ll “need less management” so much as we’ll need a different kind of management: lighter-touch, more relational, more focused on sense-making and coordination rather than task assignment. AI may reduce some parts of the job, but I’m not sure it replaces the human judgment and care elements that show up as soon as teams scale beyond a few people.

Very much enjoying thinking through this topic and grateful to you for starting the conversation! 

How much of a post are you comfortable for AI to write?

Seconding what @huw wrote: I’d be happy for an AI to write a draft, but (at this time) I will never publish something without a thorough review and strong work to put it in my own voice. I will never let a single AI-written word go unreviewed.

Also I usually also ask humans to review my drafts even after I have a first/final pass, and the ideas that I input into the prompt are mine, not just something I asked AI to create. Also, my AI tools know my voice quite well at this point and I'm constantly tweaking the instructions. 

thanks a lot Shanil, appreciate you reading! Founder/Ed distinction is quite useful as not all founders should be EDs and not all EDs should be founders. They are definitely very different roles and have different personal fit and skills requirements, even though they often seem to appear together on someone's job title. 

Many thanks Lorenzo! Appreciate the read and agreed that it can be useful to separate the movement role from the job market, especially considering how competitive the roles can be! 

Many thanks Dilan! I really appreciate your posts on farmed animal advocacy and I think you are a good example of having a movement role along with your job role!