EA - Psychological safety as the yardstick of good EA movement building by Severin

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Psychological safety as the yardstick of good EA movement building, published by Severin on May 10, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.I recently learned about the distinction between "movement building" and "community building": Community building is for the people involved in a community, and movement building is in service of the cause itself.A story I've heard from a bunch of EA groups is that they start out with community building. They attract a couple people, develop a wonderful vibe, and those people notoriously slack on their reading group preparations. Then, the group organizers get dissatisfied with the lack of visible progress on the EA path, doubt their own impact, and pivot all the way from community building to movement building. No funny pub meetups anymore. Career fellowships and 1-on-1s all the way.I think this throws the baby out with the bathwater, and that more often than not, community building is indeed tremendously valuable movement building, even if it doesn't look like that at first glance.The piece of evidence I can cite on this (and indeed cite over and over again) is Google's "Project Aristotle"-study.In Project Aristotle, Google studied what makes their highest-performing teams highest-performing. And alas: It is not the fanciness of degrees or individual intelligence or agentyness or any other property of the individual team members, but five factors:"The researchers found that what really mattered was less about who is on the team, and more about how the team worked together. In order of importance:Psychological safety: Psychological safety refers to an individual’s perception of the consequences of taking an interpersonal risk or a belief that a team is safe for risk taking in the face of being seen as ignorant, incompetent, negative, or disruptive. In a team with high psychological safety, teammates feel safe to take risks around their team members. They feel confident that no one on the team will embarrass or punish anyone else for admitting a mistake, asking a question, or offering a new idea.Dependability: On dependable teams, members reliably complete quality work on time (vs the opposite - shirking responsibilities).Structure and clarity: An individual’s understanding of job expectations, the process for fulfilling these expectations, and the consequences of one’s performance are important for team effectiveness. Goals can be set at the individual or group level, and must be specific, challenging, and attainable. Google often uses Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to help set and communicate short and long term goals.Meaning: Finding a sense of purpose in either the work itself or the output is important for team effectiveness. The meaning of work is personal and can vary: financial security, supporting family, helping the team succeed, or self-expression for each individual, for example.Impact: The results of one’s work, the subjective judgement that your work is making a difference, is important for teams. Seeing that one’s work is contributing to the organization’s goals can help reveal impact."What I find remarkable is that "psychological safety" leads the list. While some factors in EA actively work against the psychological safety of its members. To name just a few:EA tends to attract pretty smart people. If you throw a bunch of people together who have been used all their lives to being the smart kid in the room, they suddenly lose the default role they had in just about any context. Because now, surrounded by even smarter kids, they are merely the kid. I think this is where a bunch of EAs' impostor syndrome comes from.EAs like to work at EA-aligned organizations. That means that some of us feel like any little chat at a conference (or any little comment on the EA Forum or our social media accounts) also i...