📚 Quinn's Highlights

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An important reason why, despite the rise of asynchronous communication via services like [Slack](https://slack.com/), [Teams](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/group-chat-software) and [Trello](https://trello.com/), synchronous meetings remain so prevalent is that asynchronous dialogs often suffer from the same lack of thoughtful time and attention management that are necessary to make synchronous meetings successful. Approaches like Polis, Remesh, All Our Ideas and their increasingly sophisticated LLM-based extensions promise to significantly improve this, making it increasingly possible to have respectful, inclusive and informative asynchronous conversations that include many more stakeholders.

Plurality

E. Glen Weyl, Audrey Tang and ⿻ Community

Perspectives on Organizational Strategy & Coordination: Optimizing for Few Coherent Goals v.s. Many Incoherent Goals Transcript: Speaker 1 I think one of the things where the corporate world is actually much better at this than the academic world or the educational world, because their goal is profit. So it's very clear. It's much harder to say what the goal of an educational institution is. It feels like it should be obvious, but within the general goal of like we want to produce successful, well-rounded people, there's a lot of disagreement about what the goals are. And so shaping the institutional incentives around those goals becomes extremely difficult, because not only do we have to worry about perverse incentives, but we have to worry about Vigorous disagreement about the kinds of things that are valued in the first place. And I think exactly what you're talking about, T, is something that if you went to a bunch of university administrators, let's say, or medical school administrators or doctors, and You said, what is the point to what you're doing? Is it to produce wise, well-rounded people? Is it to minimize costs to insurance companies? Is it to increase donor contributions? What is it? And there are all these competing goals. And so there's this constant infighting about among different people who have different versions of what the best version of their institution is, and it's so difficult to articulate What that is. Speaker 2 I wonder if we're in different sides of this, because are you like worried about the hardness of it? It sounds like you think it's a problem that it's hard to come to agreement and articulate a goal, where I actually prefer the university that disagrees, has many incuit and plural goals, And worry that when it articulates an outcome clearly and starts orienting around that outcome, that's when it starts shedding a lot of what was good about the kind of pluralistic more. So let me just give you this is like from my life, right? So a university I've been employed at has started moving toward orienting everything around student success, where student success is defined as graduation rate, graduation speed, Salary after graduation. When you define that outcome, it becomes really easy to target, and the people that are targeting it, as you say, the people that target it well tend to rise, people that are willing to Go all in on targeting that stuff instead of caring about all the other weird shit that education might be for, tend to have better recordable outcomes and tend to rise in the university Structure. So I actually am happier for something as complicated with education, in which different groups have different conceptions of values about what they're doing, and we don't actually Try to settle it, and we don't hold them all to a high articulability constraint, because I think the business school and the CS department have more easily articulable outcomes than The creative writing department, art history department. A lot of the stuff that I'm writing right now is about like this defense of the inarticulable. Speaker 1 It's a hard question to answer because I think that there are multiple levels of organization going on here. There's like a top administrator level, because these institutions tend to be pretty hierarchical. I think at the top of the hierarchy, there has to be some sort of reasonably well-defined goal, even if it doesn't specify what every individual component of the organization or institution Would do it. And I think that that trickles down to those levels though, and creates incentives. Regardless of whether or not it's a good thing, I think there has to be some sort of coherence at the very top level, even if it doesn't dictate what each individual component is doing.

Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems With Value Metrics & Governance at Scale

COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life

Level's Company Onboarding Process Summary: The company has a well-guided onboarding checklist for all employees, which spans over a full month. Each new employee is guided to take onboarding seriously, and not expected to start producing for the first month. There is emphasis on reading specific documentation that outlines the company's culture, which is highlighted as significantly different from past experiences. The company eases new employees into the transparency of operations and has a unique practice of requiring employees to update the onboarding process at the end of the month, reflecting the value that 'everything's written in pencil' and is subject to change. Transcript: Speaker 1 And we have an onboarding checklist in notion. We have a template. We copy it for each new person that joins and they have a set of tasks that they do each day. It's pretty well guided. I can share the template with you if you're curious. That'd be amazing. Speaker 2 I would love that. Is this for all employees or EA specifically? All employees. All employees. Okay. Speaker 1 And there is a video of me at the start of each week. It's a loom where I specifically say, Hey, at this point, people usually want to skip onboarding and start jumping into their tasks. Don't do that. It's always a mistake. Really take onboarding seriously. Our onboarding process is a full month. And we don't expect people to start producing for a month. It really does take that long for a lot of people to get fully up to speed. And we help guide them in more slowly. Read these books. Read this documentation that we have about how we built our culture, especially for our case, because the way that we operate is very different than a lot of people's previous experiences. And so it's pretty jarring when you see a lot of the transparency of when your first one on one gets published to the rest of the company, it's pretty jarring. Speaker 2 And so we try to ease people into these things. You know, it's also going to be jarring is if you become a public company, yeah, totally. Things will have to change a bit. Probably. But yeah, continues. All right. That's a job. Speaker 1 That's true. And over time, people get used to it over the course of about a month. I think the biggest thing is the cultural assimilation. In our case, has been the biggest hurdle over the course of onboarding is getting people reading the memos, practicing some of the things. One of the cultural values that we have is everything's written in pencil. But also you can change things here. And one of the things that we do is at the end of onboarding, everybody is required to update the onboarding process for something that was out of date, and then post to a channel confirming What they changed and just giving a list of what they changed. And it's pretty weird for people, especially those who come from larger companies, like when they've had, you know, the same onboarding process that the company's had for 20 years, And then they go in the actual files and edit it themselves. I'm a new employee.

#694 — Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go

The Tim Ferriss Show

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