Small organisations are often fast and nimble. Large organisations are often slow and bureaucratic.
At 80,000 Hours, we’ve recently been puzzling over the opposite effect: as we’ve grown, we’ve felt more agile.
The podcast team, now with 4 hosts and a stronger production function, has been able to experiment more with different formats and release pieces quickly to keep up with the news cycle. Two members of the senior leadership team are spending this quarter thinking about strategy and new programmes to spin up, we launched our AI career advisor, and we’re trying out a second video programme.
What’s going on here?
Let’s define being nimble as being able to change the work you’re doing, or to execute on work which you weren’t previously doing.
To do that, you need:
Staff who are flexible enough to execute on a change.
The strategic capacity to notice that there should be a change, and to design that change.
The organisational skill and will to make the change. This includes cultural norms around disagreeing and committing, enough clear authority that decisions aren’t ‘made by committee’, and willingness for staff to make and execute on calls which might relatively advantage or disadvantage some staff or worldviews.
To me, this gives clear insight into why large organisations tend to be less nimble:
1. Team members are not selected for flexibility. Founding teams are extremely flexible — to a first approximation, the founding team should be able to do (or cause to happen) ~everything required for the org. As you grow, you can hire folks who are more specialised and less able to do ‘whatever comes up’.1
2. Strategic capacity can fall, because senior staff carry large management loads. (Though of course, the total number of people who could do strong strategy work with their time increases. So if organisations can preserve that, then strategic capacity could increase as they get larger.)
3. Organisational skill and will tend to decline. The average staff member will be less attached to the mission, trust throughout the org will fall, committees will tend to pop up, etc.2
Where does this leave a large organisation?
A large organisation should never expect to be as nimble as a recently founded one:
Not all of 80k’s staff could (for example) pivot to running an AI safety fellowship, and we’d be making a mistake if we only hired people who could (though it continues to be very useful to hire flexible staff).
Not all of our staff’s time can be reallocated to other work (and we’d be making a mistake if we dropped some of the highest-value work we have access to, like if the job board stopped posting jobs).
However, they should value their ability to be nimble, and cultivate it. Here’s what we’re aiming for at 80k:
Celebrating not just when people raise thoughtful objections, but also when they disagree and commit.
Celebrating when we cut down bureaucracy.
Being particularly proud of our finance procedures, which don’t limit teams to a set spending amount, and which usually allow people to use their judgement rather than waiting for sign-off.
Transparency, strategic clarity, and high ownership: people can choose to approach their responsibilities in whatever way will best advance 80k’s mission.
Encouraging people to take on more responsibility and move to higher ownership.
Preserving leadership time for strategy and new initiatives.
I know of places which have chosen to stay small in order to preserve agility. I expect some people might hesitate to work at large organisations as we approach the singularity, for fear that their bureaucracy will slow them down too much to react well. Our experience at 80,000 Hours, and the arguments above, make me more sceptical that they are making the right decision.
Note that this is a feature of large organisations which expect to do something repeatedly. Flexible staff are rare and valuable — so having them when you don’t need them will have some ‘cost’. You might pay that cost in higher salaries or by constraining your hiring. For example, if the only finance lead you’re willing to hire also has to be able to switch to running a fellowship in AI safety, then your pool will be reduced — hiring will take longer or you’ll hire someone who is worse at finance. An org which doesn’t expect to pivot doesn’t need to hire finance leads who can also run AI safety fellowships.
One interesting cause of reduced organisational will is that more established organisations tend to have bits of ongoing work which are extremely valuable. For example, the ~10 hours a week we spend updating our job board causes ~4 placements. It’s among the very most valuable work in the ecosystem, so for those staff to pass up that work, the other work would need to be incredibly valuable. A lot of essential operations work is like this too.
Man, this blog is a treasure trove! I just got into a rabbit hole and I feel like I updated a bunch from this article plus:
- Slot hiring vs bar hiring
- My favourite moves during initial discussions with candidates
- Operations teams have to make a surprising number of hires to keep pace with a growing org
Some of this is validating some choices we've made but also I feel like I have a much better ontology to think about these problems. It is not surprising that a bunch of your wisdom transfers to Kairos but I didn't expect it would all be neatly explained in a substack!
Great post and useful examples! I think you are right that being highly intentional about staying nimble while scaling is quite possible. Some of the big consulting firms are also good examples of nimbleness at scale. Somewhat counterintuitively, I think that, over time, doing this well can sometimes require slowing down or adding rigor to a few particularly important processes (like hiring). My sense is that retaining flexibility and delegating ownership remain very much the exception rather than the norm as most organizations scale, because control, consistency, and risk-minimization are often valued more highly by leaders.