The Value of Being Flexible

When considering which charity idea would be the best one to create, we accounted for standard factors such as cost-effectiveness and the strength of the evidence that goes into the cost-effectiveness estimate. However, this analysis still left us rather uncertain, with a nagging feeling that we could be somewhere between mildly inaccurate and terribly wrong. What if we picked an intervention that turned out not to be very cost-effective or we picked an intervention that was effective generally speaking but beyond our ability to implement correctly?

The fear that we could be wrong drew us to our favorite metric for evaluating ideas -- flexibility. This is “keep your options open” applied to charity. How easily could we shut down this project and move to another project if this project turned out to not be very good?

The Value of Flexibility

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When considering which charity idea would be the best one to create, we accounted for standard factors such as cost-effectiveness and the strength of the evidence that goes into the cost-effectiveness estimate. However, this analysis still left us rather uncertain, with a nagging feeling that we could be somewhere between mildly inaccurate and terribly wrong. What if we picked an intervention that turned out not to be very cost-effective or we picked an intervention that was effective generally speaking but beyond our ability to implement correctly?

The fear that we could be wrong drew us to our favorite metric for evaluating ideas -- flexibility. This is “keep your options open” applied to charity. How easily could we shut down this project and move to another project if this project turned out to not be very good?

The Value of Flexibility

We’ve been wrong a lot over the years, dramatically changing our beliefs, values, and career paths several times as we update on new information. It’s unlikely that the first thing you stumble upon will be the highest impact thing to do, any open minded person would experience a fair degree of change. While we’d like to think things are more stable now, chances are good that we will change our beliefs again as time goes on and that this will require yet another change.

Lastly, even if we don’t change our minds, the world itself is constantly changing. New laws and regulations could make our previous plans untenable. New opportunities could open up that didn’t exist when we first started putting our plan into action. New competitors could arise implementing our intervention just as well or better, rendering our work obsolete.

The more likely it is that change will occur and the more important you think the change will be, the more value you should put on flexibility.

Flexibility Over Robustness

Flexibility is the ability to change if circumstances change. Robustness is the ability to withstand change. For example, if there’s a flood in a village, a flexible population might move to another village. A robust population would have built flood-protecting walls around the village so that it’s not harmed by the flood. If there’s a disaster that prevents farming corn, a flexible population might switch to farming beans, whereas a robust population would have already known to genetically engineer their corn ahead of time to be immune to the disaster.

We definitely see the merit of robustness and would like to be as robust as we can. However, we see robustness as requiring stronger predictive ability about how things may go wrong plus the ability to create effective mitigation strategies, whereas flexibility can be reactive without needing to anticipate. In our examples, the village would have already needed to know to build flood-protecting walls and genetically engineered corn, which may have been hard to know in advance and costly to implement. For instance, maybe they worry about a flood so they build walls, but the disaster that actually strikes is a drought. Since we believe that anticipating and mitigating problems would be nearly impossible given that we face so many unknown unknowns, we think flexibility beats out robustness, at least for us.

Flexibility and The Lean Non-Profit

Flexibility is discussed a lot as a value for start-up for-profit companies. This philosophy, emphasized by Eric Ries’s book The Lean Startup, strongly encourages building just the minimum viable product (MVP), testing for user demand before scaling, and pivoting if your initial idea doesn’t work. The start-up world emphasizes that you are frequently wrong about the world (called “product-market fit”) and that you will fail many times before you succeed. Thus, the most successful start-up teams are the ones that are the most flexible.

We think this philosophy should equally apply to start-up non-profits too, though we seek “skills - capacity for impact” fit rather than “product-market fit”. While this idea has not taken off as much in the non-profit world, Luke Muelhauser wrote in 2013 about how the Machine Intelligence Research Institute was operating as a lean non-profit that emphasized MVPs, A-B testing, and pivoting. Since then, there have been two articles in the Stanford Social Innovation Review showing one particular experience implementing lean methodology in the non-profit world and another advocating for the benefits of pivoting and the lean methodology.  Charity Science has also followed this model since 2013.

The Many Kinds of Flexibility

How can we increase flexibility? We found that flexibility can be increased in a wide variety of different ways. Here are some of them:

Intervention flexibility

A flexible intervention can be adjusted at a moment’s notice and doesn’t require that much upfront cost before seeing results.

Technique	Difficulty	Importance	Explanation
Picking a population that is in need of many interventions (e.g. India, Africa)	Easy	High	This way, if one intervention doesn’t work we can work on a different intervention without having to move and learn an entirely new area.
Picking an intervention conducive to quick RCT testing	Mid	High	We could test small changes more quickly and know if we are making mistakes sooner
Having fewer long term public commitments / limiting contracts	Mid	Mid	The more commitments we make, the harder it is to evolve.
Control the direct line of communication / distribution channel with beneficiaries	Hard	Mid	With fewer partners, we can adapt more quickly and adjust at our own pace
Picking an intervention that has multiple models / options	Hard	Mid	For example, CCTs could be done on a wide variety of health interventions. If one doesn’t work, we still have a framework to work off of.
Prefer intervention with some immediate positive effects	Mid	Mid	If we decide to change the intervention its effects will have already worked on some people and we won’t have lost as much potential.
Preferring interventions with low initial financial costs and time costs	Mid	Low	Running lean and use minimum viable products allows quicker changes.

Organizational flexibility

A flexible organization is able to quickly act differently based on new evidence.

Technique	Difficulty	Importance	Explanation/notes
Flexible branding	Easy	High	The organization is not branded as only being able to do one particular idea (e.g., the Against Malaria Foundation can only work on malaria, but GiveWell can work on anything related to giving well).
Flexible management	Mid	High	Management has core values and epistemology, but is not attached to any particular ideas or interventions. Management is dedicated to the end result and whatever works works. Management is okay with changing techniques to get the desired result.
Flexible and aligned people in senior roles	Mid	High	Staff or board member positions have the same flexible mindset
Have a culture that encourages pivoting	Easy	Mid	Encourage MVPs and rapid changes based on quick feedback loops so the organization changes when needed.
Avoid premature scaling	Easy	Low	The organization is not caught up or committed too early, and can change.

Staff flexibility

While we already have flexible senior staff and management that can pivot from one project to another, we’ll also need to hire additional staff and ideally these people could fit into our flexible mindset. The following are a few ideas to increase our chances of coming into contact and hiring such people.

Technique	Difficulty	Importance	Explanation
Front load time and energy into hiring	Easy	High	Finding a great person now might carry many long term benefits even if it takes longer at the start
Put effort into retaining the good quality staff we have	Mid	High	Think about/ look more into staff retention strategies
Spending the time it takes to come to consensus on different issues.	Mid	High	High upfront time cost but allows synced updates and smooth org transitions
Offer a lot of internships	Easy	Mid	Interns are a good, low commitment way of finding more great people
Skills training for existing staff	Easy	Mid	Train senior staff to have a broad skillset and on how to delegate
Advertise job positions widely and often	Easy	Mid	Creates an ongoing flow of possible hires
Prefer charities that will allow us to hire many generalists	Mid	Mid	The higher number of generalized and flexible staff, the more can move on to other projects
Prefer charities that will allow us to hire many people	Mid	Mid	People are more flexible than programs

Funding flexibility

A lot of funding in the charity world is tied to particular ideas. But this is bad for the charity that wants to be able to change quickly, as changes will result in disruption of funds, which disincentivizes flexibility.

Technique	Difficulty	Importance	Explanation/Notes
Aim for foundations that are broadly utilitarian instead of focused on just a single cause.	Mid	High	A foundation like GiveWell, the Rockefeller, Foundation or the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation might be willing to engage with us if we dramatically change strategies, whereas other, more limited foundations may not.
Emphasize unrestricted funding and connect with donors who agree with the mission of flexibility	Easy	Mid	This is the normal way charities structure funding and likely the way most non-EA donors will give
Use emotional appeals for fundraising instead of appeals to reason	Mid	Mid	Allows more flexibility but goes against our effectiveness-focused branding
Be able to fundraise for ourselves, perhaps through existing work in Charity Science Outreach	Mid	Mid	Ideally this would be getting a GW recommendation but might involve major changes in CS fundraising model
Have charity under a larger umbrella charity	Easy	Low	Charity Science can be an umbrella organization to multiple charities that can be scaled up or down as desired, similar to Evidence Action
Deliver a range of services to appeal to a wider audience	Hard	Low	Good long term goal but could spread us too thin in the beginning
Aim for broad brand loyalty	Hard	Low	Hard given our effectiveness-focused branding and emphasis on the EA community

Other Areas

We think it is important to be flexible in other areas as well, such as with connections (e.g., people on the board, contacts in public and private sectors, relationships with academics) and with personal situations (e.g., location independence, being independently wealthy).

Conclusion

Overall, improving organizational flexibility by iterating quickly, building a culture that improves pivoting and open-mindedness, by putting a lot of work into hiring and skill training, and by building a broad, diversified funding base looks to be a relatively easy and high-value way of improving an organization’s potential for making an impact.