One frame I want to lay out is that it seems like you’re not accounting for the organizational cost of how you treat employees/collaborators. An executive director needing to mostly not talk to people, and shaping hiring around social pain tolerance, is a five alarm fire for organizations as small as MIRI. Based on the info here, my first thought is you should be in a different role, so that you have fewer interactions and less implied power. That requires someone to replace you as ED, and I don’t know if there are any options available, but at a minimum I think you/MIRI should be treating the status quo as potentially extremely costly, and taking steps to assess the total cost and potential fixes.
I could be wrong here, 98% of my information is from this post + comments, but I get the sense you/MIRI haven’t looked sufficiently hard to even assess what the costs are. It sounds like you have asked people, which is great and more than most orgs do, but I get the sense you haven’t grappled with the magnitude of the costs beyond the personal and social.
Nate stepped down as ED shortly after [edit: actually before] our project ended, the website just hasn’t been updated. I’m not sure what exactly the organizational structure is now, but you can probably message @lisathiergart for an update.
One frame I want to lay out is that it seems like you’re not accounting for the organizational cost of how you treat employees/collaborators. An executive director needing to mostly not talk to people, and shaping hiring around social pain tolerance, is a five alarm fire for organizations as small as MIRI. Based on the info here, my first thought is you should be in a different role, so that you have fewer interactions and less implied power. That requires someone to replace you as ED, and I don’t know if there are any options available, but at a minimum I think you/MIRI should be treating the status quo as potentially extremely costly, and taking steps to assess the total cost and potential fixes.
I could be wrong here, 98% of my information is from this post + comments, but I get the sense you/MIRI haven’t looked sufficiently hard to even assess what the costs are. It sounds like you have asked people, which is great and more than most orgs do, but I get the sense you haven’t grappled with the magnitude of the costs beyond the personal and social.
Nate stepped down as ED shortly after [edit: actually before] our project ended, the website just hasn’t been updated. I’m not sure what exactly the organizational structure is now, but you can probably message @lisathiergart for an update.
Edit: there is now an announcement.