Operating Values at Open Philanthropy

This page summarizes four of the qualities Open Phil values most in employees across all roles at the organization: ownership, openness, calibration, and inclusiveness.

Ownership

Ownership means taking responsibility, holistically and personally, for our work.

At some companies, the ideal employee executes the instructions their manager gives them, exactly as specified. At Open Phil, by contrast, the ideal employee seeks to understand the reasoning behind an assignment and how it fits into Open Phil’s mission as a whole, then does a better version of the assignment than what the manager had in mind. Employees at all levels of the organization are very often in a position to notice that a project can be done better or faster in both big and small ways—or, perhaps, that the project is ill-conceived and shouldn’t be done at all.

Ownership includes:

• Focusing on the mission of improving the world as much as possible: the best employees consider the mission more important than Open Phil the organization, and more important than their standing within Open Phil.
• Asking questions: doing your best to understand the full context of your work, to the point where you actively believe in what you’re working on, rather than simply doing it because you were asked.
  • There will be times when your manager asks you to proceed with the assignment despite disagreement, but these should be explicit “agree to disagree” cases, rather than cases in which you simply follow instructions without flagging disagreement.
• Pride in your work: aiming for outcomes and work products that are excellent and pride-worthy according to your own judgment, not just outcomes and work products that conform to the specific instructions you were given. Even better than asking yourself, “does this answer seem right?” is asking yourself, “is this answer the one that I would generate from scratch if I were thinking this all through myself?” If you don’t feel you’re on track to do this, you should let your manager know and make changes to the project and/or your role as needed.
• Valuing your time: constantly asking whether there’s a less time-consuming way to get the desired outcome. In our view, working excessive hours rarely increases productivity by more than 25-50% (and even this is rarely sustainable), whereas making good decisions about what steps are essential to complete and which can be skipped, approximated, or shortcutted can often result in severalfold (or better) improvements in productivity.

Openness

Openness means constantly seeking, incorporating, and sharing new information.

Openness includes:

• Giving, seeking, and receiving feedback: we strive for a culture where feedback is open, honest, clear, direct, and frequent—while also being delivered respectfully and supportively—across all levels of the organization. 
  • Critical feedback can be challenging to give and receive, but we consider it essential. 
    • This includes feedback in many directions—to colleagues on or outside your team, your manager, the leadership team, etc. We recognize that it can be uncomfortable to give critical feedback, but we explicitly endorse and value sharing it.
    • In turn, we expect people to value critical feedback they receive. This doesn’t mean the feedback always can or should be actioned (people receiving feedback should assess its value before acting on it), but means that feedback should be actively sought and treated as a gift. Managers in particular should take care to actively encourage upward feedback and foster useful disagreement.
  • Positive feedback is essential as well. Positive feedback sometimes feels “optional” in the sense that there’s rarely a clear change in actions or policies that results from it. Unfortunately, this can lead to a dynamic in which even people doing excellent work get more critical than positive feedback, which can lead them to a skewed picture of their performance and value. All team members should find themselves regularly giving positive feedback to others across levels.
• Checking in: Open Phil tends toward a collaborative and iterative working style with frequent checking in and course correction (though the specific frequency varies by the role and by how long someone has been at Open Phil). The practice of checking in frequently with relevant people applies to everyone at the organization, including the Executive Director; the goal is not to maximize control of managers over their reports, but rather to save time and lead to better output by getting outside perspectives early and often.
• Openness to errors in our worldview or high-level strategies: we strive to be open to the possibility that our basic assumptions about philanthropy, philosophy, or how the world works are mistaken, and open to the possibility that programs or grants we fund will be failures. We value it when people seek to be open and accepting of whatever is true, even when resistance to or suppression of information about failure would make their work or worldview look better.
• Risk and mistake tolerance: we believe that failures and mistakes are inevitable if we’re taking appropriate risks, challenging ourselves, and appropriately “cutting corners” to make decisions efficiently. We try to judge people by their long-term value-added, not by the mistakes they might make along the way. And we try to judge decisions by whether they were the right decisions given the information available at the time — not just by how they turned out.
• Making space for new ideas: while we ultimately want to act on well-vetted views, we also need the ability to explore new ideas even when they might be not-yet-fleshed-out and/or highly unconventional. We encourage people to distinguish between “idea generation mode” and “idea evaluation mode” and to make use of both. We encourage people to engage with unfamiliar arguments on their merits, even if they appear to have unusual implications.

Calibration

Calibration means thinking and communicating clearly about our state of uncertainty: recognizing and flagging what we know vs. what we don’t. (In this document, we mean something broader by “calibration” than the narrow sense described here.)

Calibration includes:

• Transparent reasoning: we give a full and honest picture of what we believe, how confidently we believe it, what our reasons are, and why one might reasonably disagree. For example, we try to use forecasting practices (such as giving quantified probabilities) to communicate about our state of uncertainty.
• Quantitative and systematic frameworks that can help locate key assumptions and disagreements.
• Empirical and logical reasoning: for important decisions, we seek out evidence and argument that bears as directly as possible on key decision-relevant questions, and we aim to ground our thinking in documented empirical facts and logical arguments that we can follow directly. We are unlikely to put much weight on a study’s conclusion unless we understand the methodology that was followed, the logical and empirical content of the study, and how strongly it bears on the decision before us. We don’t necessarily defer to the views of credentialed people on a topic, and often seek to understand at least part of their reasoning.
• Weighing others’ views and deferring as needed: at the same time, we won’t always be able to understand the full reasoning behind someone’s view; sometimes we need to weigh their view heavily nonetheless, especially when they’re positioned to see something that others (including their manager) don’t.
• Accurate self-assessment: we strive for an accurate picture of each employee’s strengths, weaknesses, and room for improvement, so that we can put the right people in the right roles. Employees that have, and present, an accurate self-assessment are helpful in this endeavor, and more likely in the long run to end up in roles where they can thrive.

Inclusiveness

Open Phil strives to be an environment where anyone who embodies the above values can do their best work and succeed.

Inclusiveness includes:

• Avoiding bias: we strive to avoid bias in our hiring and workplace environment. We ask that all employees consider which behaviors of theirs might be implicitly rewarding or punishing characteristics that aren’t directly relevant to the work (an example might be an employee’s talkativeness or lack thereof in a meeting providing a larger update about their idea quality or abilities than is warranted). We also ask that employees point out places where they notice a potential bias, such as against coworkers from particular backgrounds or demographics, or other characteristics not relevant to work performance.
• Flexibility: we believe that people flourish when they feel supported in working in ways that suit them best. We offer flexible working hours and remote work options wherever possible, reimburse expenses that enhance productivity, and encourage staff to let us know what they need to excel.
• Respect: all employees should be able to do their work and be evaluated on its merits, free from any kind of harassment, unwanted attention, or inappropriate behavior. We expect employees to treat each other with respect.
• Collegiality: we want people to feel genuinely welcomed and valued at Open Phil, and to take time to build authentic connections across teams and roles. We balance our focus on outcomes with attention to the human elements of collaboration — offering support during challenges, celebrating successes together, and bringing good humor and infectious enthusiasm to our interactions.