Transcript

Robert Wiblin: Hi listeners, this is the 80,000 Hours Podcast, the show about the world’s most pressing problems and how you can use your career to solve them. I’m Rob Wiblin, Director of Research at 80,000 Hours.

Today is our second episode about the broad set of positions we are calling operations roles – it follows on from the previous episode with Tara Mac Aulay which attracted some strong reactions.

Tanya and Tara have somewhat different views so if the topic interests you may want to listen to both.

If you’re interested in roles like this, the Centre for Effective Altruism is still accepting applications for an Events Specialist, EA Grants Evaluator, UK Operations Specialist and US Operations Specialist. But applications close this Monday so you’ll want to act on that right away. You can learn about those roles at centreforeffectivealtruism.org/careers.

You may also remember my episode with Owen Cotton-Barratt a few months ago. He is hiring early-career researchers for a Research Scholars Programme at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford. Applications for that are closing very very soon. You can find out more at fhi.ox.ac.uk/rsp/

We also list a wide variety of other operations roles at 80000hours.org/job-board/

Without further ado – here’s Tanya Singh.

Robert Wiblin: Today, I’m speaking with Tanya Singh. Tanya is the executive assistant to Professor Nick Bostrom at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute. Tanya has an MBA and engineering degree with a major in computer science. In the past, she’s worked in HR consulting, business development, user growth, and data analytics, including running a monthly P&L sheet of up to $100 million. Over the last six years, she has worked at companies including Mercer Consulting, the world’s largest human resource consulting firm, Indian E-commerce company, Snapdeal, and online education nonprofit, Khan Academy. Thanks for coming on the podcast, Tanya.

Tanya Singh: Thank you for having me. I’m very excited to be here.

Robert Wiblin: We planned to talk about the social impact of careers in operations and how listeners can potentially do a lot of good by pursuing one, but first, it’d be good to find out a whole lot more about your background, so tell me just about the story of the work you’ve been doing since you completed your studies.

Tanya Singh: Sure. I did my computer science engineering and then, without having a very good idea of why I wanted to do management or what sort of management did I want to get involved, and I very quickly did an MBA in HR right after my engineering degree. Then after that, I joined the consulting firm, Mercer, for a couple of years where I was working either at Mumbai or Delhi working with M&C clients who had operations all over the world, but mostly focused on their Indian and Southeast Asian operations, being a part of projects that involved change management, org design, designing competency frameworks, performance management systems, etc., and I think that gave me a bit of an insight into how organizations function, how you’re like a part of a larger system and trying to make something happen. I felt that I could possibly have more impact, be happier if I moved closer to business rather than coming in to do an intervention with this organization that’s dealing with its issues. I’m getting a very partial picture of what the actual issues are and proposing a solution and walking away or helping implement some of it. I think that’s sort of a … the consulting world does that sort of engagements largely.

Something about that was unsatisfying, so I moved closer to business and I got an opportunity to work with Snapdeal which was an Indian eCommerce homegrown giant competing with Flipkart. After I joined Snapdeal, I think Amazon entered the Indian market like a force. My year and eight months with Snapdeal were very educational but very activity laden and a lot happened. Snapdeal grew to be a 12,000 people company after I joined them. I must have been like a thousand something sort of employee. Even when we had like all operations in-house that time, customer calling team, etc. Then they grew to 12,000 people then they cut back to 6,000 people or something at the time during the time I was leaving. It was a wild ride with a lot happening, a lot of good learning from there, a lot of good learning about what not to do from there.

After working in Snapdeal, I realized that it’s important for me to feel that what I’m doing is very meaningful. That element was sorely missing. I used to fantasize about working for an organization where like I really cared about the change that they were trying to bring in the world. After completing the second project, it’s a premeditated decision, I left.

I’d requested my manager back then, who I worked really well with, learned a lot from him, to connect me to someone in Khan Academy, because Khan Academy was a very inspiring to me. I’ve used their produce for my own MBA prep. I’d heard about the founder story, very inspiring. I was actually lucky enough to join that company because they had just started operations and then that’s why I’d read about and hence made the request. It was an eye-opening experience because it was a team of a hundred people who … I did not get to interact with all of them, but it was very clear that they were very inspired in their mission. Everyone had focused on education from one angle or the other in their past work and had come together under the Khan Academy umbrella to do something. It mattered a lot to everyone. You could see that in the way they were interacting and the way they were expressing disagreements, so it felt very right. I thought that I also wanted to work in a organization like this in a cause area that really mattered to me.

Meanwhile, my life was going through a bunch of changes. We’d move to London because my partner wanted to shift to working in AI safety. I reached out to a few of these organizations. A few of them being like OpenAI, DeepMind, MIRI. I saw FHI’s website. They only had research roles that time, but I remember seeing MIRI’s website to be very encouraging of people with ops skillset to sort of reach out. I reached out and then Matthew Graves from MIRI put me in touch with Neil and I came to FHI. That’s like a overview of my work journey.

I should point out because I think I’d want to dive into something on these lines, but I’ve held very different roles. I was an HR consultant and then I was doing business development, setting up a category for an eCommerce company which involves defining the product somewhat because it required slightly different product features from Snapdeal’s regular eCommerce platform, because you were buying cars and bikes online. Then working on this huge intervention project to sort of make the unit economics work better. You’ll be working with the customer team, seller team, training, a bunch of different teams. Then I did data analytics and user growth for Khan Academy which is absolutely something that I’d never done before, but that was what they wanted, some very quick upscaling. I only worked with them for seven months, eight months, and focused on that. Then I very briefly joined as a product head of a tech company in London before coming to FHI and doing everything that we couch under the umbrella of operations in FHI.

Robert Wiblin: Okay, so you weren’t that happy in these roles in the end, so you wanted to move into something different, I guess now you’re kind of in a university.

Tanya Singh: Yeah. I wasn’t very excited about working in eCommerce. I realized it after a year and a half of having work there.

Robert Wiblin: What was the reason? Just that it wasn’t that meaningful?

Tanya Singh: Yeah, it wasn’t that meaningful. I really liked the one person who taught me probably the most that I know about running a business or running a project tightly, Badal Malick. I worked with him on the second project that I worked with on Snapdeal. I think the pull for me was to continue learning from him and working rather than being associated with this organization. I think he left after we’d completed our project, and that was when I decided that I’m sort of done with Snapdeal. I’m also done with eCommerce in general. Yeah, I wanted to very actively move away from eCommerce, or I wanted to continue working with technology, or maybe even startup kind of companies because I think the exposure that you can get in a startup is way more than what you would get in something that’s like a very well-oiled machine where you have your fixed role and probably not much elbow room unless you establish yourself to go outside the remit of your role.

Startups for smaller companies give you that flexibility and that’s something that I would have definitely preferred. But I did not want to work towards consumerism of sorts, because I was also getting to a point where I thought that digital advertisements and … Part of my job was to make sure that people clicked on my ad rather than anyone else’s ad. I find our land ads annoying and have blocked them. I sensed this certain level of hypocrisy in what I was generally doing and that made me really sad, so I decided … It was a premeditated decision that after I’m done with my project, I will leave. I was pretty clear about that.

Robert Wiblin: What were you doing at Khan Academy?

Tanya Singh: I joined them to launch a user growth plan for them. They were launching operations in India, had launched operations in India. Sandeep who is India Khan Academy head was setting up his team, so I joined them to figure out who are the people who are using Khan Academy. Even without focusing on their user base, they had 400,000 monthly active users. That’s a lot. This was with no focus on the market. These were people who were of their own accord, god knows where they’ve heard about Khan Academy from, were using the platform and using it quite extensively. What I did was I did a qualitative and a quantitative analysis of its data set. I joined them just to sort of focus on what will lead to more user growth. Then that was a very broad kind of a project. It resulted into concrete pieces of work where I did a user research survey of sorts. So I looked at the data quantitatively, sliced the users into four categories depending on their usage habit, time spent on platform, and things like that, the parts of the tool that they were using and things like that.

Then interviewed some sample users from all of these categories and came up with some recommendations of how to grow, which user base to focus on to grow, and what are the kinds of things that we could be doing to grow them. Then some digital marketing initiatives just to see what are some low lift things without pumping any money or energy that you could do to keep them engaged or inform them about other things. Some really interesting insights came out after we spoke. Since this was the first initiative to speak to people who are actually using the product in India, interesting insights were called out of that. Finally, I submitted a year long growth management plan that kind of got me … something of that has been implemented in 2017. I think from 400,000, they’re now 1.5 million users per month, unique users per month, just in India, so that’s quite phenomenal. But yeah, much of that has to … It’s not to be credited to my growth plan, it’s to be credited to the amazing product that they have going there and some really good initiatives that they’ve taken to improve the engagement with that product.

Robert Wiblin: You’ve worked in, I guess, quite a mature international corporate, a startup that’s scaling really quickly, a nonprofit, and now a university. Do you want to have any comments on the range of different cultures that you’ve worked in and which ones you like, which ones you don’t?

Tanya Singh: Yeah. I suddenly have a strong bias towards really liking FHI and Khan Academy for the kind of things that they’re focused on. I think that resonates heavily with me, speaks strongly to me, more FHI because I really care about these cause areas. But Khan Academy was a brilliant working experience and if we had not moved to UK or can’t have, actually I can say that I would probably never have left Khan Academy unless they’d kick me out because I was so happy working with them as a team and the mission that they were focused on. Yeah, I think all organizations function fairly differently. They have problems that you can see same themes in those problems, but they deal with very different demons depending on what their size is, what they’re trying to accomplish, the kind of people they attract, which leads to this larger, this cultural thing which is so hard to encapsulate, so hard to change or intervene and get set by the will of the head of the organization. There’s so much nuance there, so I think all organizations are very different.

But in terms of the kind of people who would work well there or the kind of people who’d find joy in working with Snapdeal versus Khan Academy, that’s I think something some people should explore for themselves because the experience can be really different. This is not to say that working at FHI is all … it’s awesome, it’s all fun and play, and there’s nothing hard about it because I love what they’re doing. I think unequivocally, FHI is the hardest role that I’ve ever done in my life, like across the board, if I compare FHI to Snapdeal or Khan Academy, it’s really hard. I will hopefully explore why it’s hard.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, tell me. What do you do with FHI?

Tanya Singh: I’m coming up to a year in FHI now. I joined as a temporary administrator. I joined a team of five people then focused on different bits of operations, so website, there was an associate director that we had, one person was functioning as Nick Bostrom’s EA, Kyle Scott. There was this team that after two to four months of my joining, everyone sort of moved on to different roles. I got to whatever I could and wanted out of all this, and I think in September I started focusing on being a full time EA to Nick Bostrom and then doing whatever I could which was in the gamut of all the other roles.

Robert Wiblin: That’s executive assistant, not effective altruism.

Tanya Singh: Yes, executive assistant to Nick Bostrom, yes. I think I’ve done like a wide variety of things. I’ve handled some website and social media last few months. I’m handling the HR process. I handle the HR processes for quite some time. For five, six months, I was the only ops person around, so only ops person along with the web incomes person. Yeah, I’ve done a fair few different projects within FHI. The only constant of my role is working as Nick’s EA, so churning through his email, doing his media arrangements, booking his travels, sort of trying to be a force multiplier to him, and then making sure that I pass along information that’s relevant. I take an input on organizational priorities and then try and push out projects which are important for FHI, given that we were going through the spirit of churn, now we again have almost four people. The fourth due to join in a month or so. Four people ops team in place, so there’s been a bit of a change in this. I can answer it simply.

Robert Wiblin: What is it like being the only ops person in an organization of something like 20 people? I mean, isn’t that just insane?

Tanya Singh: It’s hard, yes. That’s why I said FHI was hard. It’s also because I think there’s a lot of self-impulse pressure that I had. I’ve seen other people in the effective altruism community who work in operations or across the board. But basically, the ones that I can sympathize with their situation, empathize with their situation, sorry, work in ops because you feel that you are directly responsible for making sure that these people are working towards this cause area that you really care about, can do their work very efficiently, and anything that’s very inefficient is probably because operations aren’t running as smoothly as they should. There’s a lot of self imposed pressure towards not destroying value in the future or not being a part of something that is actively not able to contribute to the value that you can generate for the future, so hence probably a negative contribution, so that’s the hard part which brings you sort of down.

Then not everyone at FHI or an organization like FHI interacts with, is bought into your ideology to the extent and the level that you are. So if you’re dealing with Oxford University who have many institutes like FHI and all focusing on all sorts of important and different and eclectic issues, the communication between you and them needs to be taking into account that they don’t think that you’re saving the world or whatever, that you’re doing these things which are probably one of the most important things that people should be focusing on. So tempering that side of you down, making sure that you’re communicating what’s relevant to be communicated. You’re not getting disheartened by things not moving, being okay with that, especially if you’re the only ops person. When I was the only ops person, all the things that did not happen in FHI were my fault, and no one told me. People here are pretty kind, so they would tell me that it’s alright and we’re in a special situation. But it’s hard to keep taking comfort in that for months that we’re in a special situation. Things need to happen. If they’re not happening, you’re probably dropping some very important balls.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. I’ve heard that you work pretty insane hours, so maybe you could make that kind of thing work for … I mean, is that typical among people in ops? Kind of the work drives you forward to …

Tanya Singh: No, I don’t think it’s a ops specific thing. I also don’t think it’s a required thing to be able to do what you’re doing well. I think some people are obsessive and some people aren’t. I’m fairly in the obsessive people category. I’ve always worked hard even arguably where I shouldn’t have spent so many hours because I did not add any additional value by spending three extra hours, but it’s a bit of a your own nature and working style kind of thing. That’s why I do it, but I don’t think that’s … You need to have that orientation. I think you can balance out your work and make sure that your prioritizing right and having a support system in place, like a big team can take on a lot of things. If one person’s trying to do everything, then yeah, they’ll be faced with a different challenge. I found that a bit challenging when I was the only person, but some things also had to be said about like the comfort you draw from the knowledge that you’re plugging some hole that might actually be sinking the ship right no. That thing drives you also or at least drove me.

Robert Wiblin: Okay. Let’s back out from what you’re specifically doing to thinking about operations more broadly. What kind of roles are operations? Is this kind of a natural group thing, or is it just a group thing of kind of everything that’s not perhaps research in FHI’s case?

Tanya Singh: Yeah, depending on the industry in which you’re operating, different things would be grouped under operations, but if I talk specifically about FHI, anything that’s not research is operations like you said. I think that would be true of any largely research focused organization, like any academic institute or a research organization of sorts. But if you look at philanthropic organizations, etc. They might have like a separate legal team and a separate team to look at, I don’t know, their website and marketing and things like that, if they are focused on those things. Operations would probably only include running the office smoothly, HR management of sorts. I like to look at it this way that historically, operations, COOs were people who were the right hand person of the CEO, making sure that things happen while the CEO is focused on some specific initiative or something where the CEO is zoomed into something specific or trying to be a thought leader in the industry, but someone needs to be focused full-time on the fact that this a company that needs to be working efficiently and effectively, achieving whatever its stated objective is. Those were operations roles. People who would probably take up CEO-ship after the CEO in many companies, in many cases, and people who are there to make sure that everything runs smoothly, so whatever, then they control in order to make sure that that happens, it became operations.

In eCommerce it’s supply chain and logistics that are ops. In for profit companies, different functions become important enough or big enough that they’re siphoned off as their own department, sort of marketing and sales. But in a research setup where it’s about good research that needs to reach policy makers or the larger populace and audience, anything that supports the core value chain of thinking the thoughts and putting them out there, anything that supports this whole process is operations.

Robert Wiblin: What things do you think people sometimes confuse for operations that you wouldn’t classify that way?

Tanya Singh: Yeah. It might be useful to talk about this in the context of a specific type or in the context of a specific industry or type of organization. I think for EA orgs, largely what constitutes operation is anything apart from, let’s say, FHI’s research case or some functions might be separate, but everything else that culminates into the organization delivering their core product or their core expertise to the people they want to reach out to, anything that facilitates that process as operations. Now I think there is an important distinction to be made which I don’t have the right terminology for it. It’s not very fleshed out in my head or in the couple of people that I’ve spoken to this about, but there’s something to be said about a distinction between what I would like to call administration and operations. What I call administration is when you’re dealing with a preset system that you don’t control, that you can’t innovate, or radically overhaul, whether it’s interacting with some government department that you have to push some forms through, some policy body that you have to engage with and they pre-date you by many decades and you know are set in their ways. You have to play ball with their rules, get entrenched in their system, and then operate.

If you’re doing something like that, I think that’s largely administration where economies of scale kick in because you’re doing the same sort of tasks. You’re doing fairly repetitive tasks interacting with the system. It’s hard to make this more efficient on your terms. Those are admin bits. Then everything else, making sure that the organization’s very effective, and even sort of figuring out how much of your workflow or anything that you’re dealing with needs to be interacting with this maybe slower administrative setup versus how much often can you directly control and speed up or change at will. Those decisions as well would be ops. That’s how I think this community should be looking at operations. There’s an element of administration to it and then there’s an element of making things happen.

Robert Wiblin: So operations are also the ones where there’s a lot more opportunity for creativity and innovation, redesigning things, whereas administration is once that starts to kind of already been fixed in place, then you just need to go through the process that exists.

Tanya Singh: Yes, at least I’d like to believe that that’s the right way to make a distinction, because then you can attract people who want to be creatively solving problems, dealing with putting innovative frameworks in place, thinking sort of out the box, willing to deal with a lot of rapid change testing. You can attract them to operations and then you can attract people who like to work with a system and like continuity and stability and have them do administration.

Robert Wiblin: Before we go on, we should probably give some examples of the kinds of roles that we’re actually going to be talking about in the rest of the interview, so we’re going to have a concrete vision of that. The kinds of operations roles that people are looking to fill, things like the Partnership on AI is looking for a chief operating officer. GiveWell is also looking for a director of operations or is looking for a chief operating officer or it being an AI forecasting group, the Open Philanthropy Project. We interviewed Holden a couple of months ago, has been looking for a director of operations but they recently filled it with someone who had a senior role in the Hillary Clinton campaign. Then there’s a whole bunch of other roles. We’ve got the operations associate at Open Phil. I think they’re still looking to fill that and a grants associate.

The Future of Humanity Institute until recently was looking for a senior administrator. Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative is looking for a project manager. The Center for Applied Rationality is looking for a workshop operations lead. There’s really quite a lot of these. The list in our article goes on. We’ve got Founders Pledge is looking for personnel and development assistant. Copenhagen Consensus is looking for an executive assistant. There’s a bunch of other roles as well. I think some of these might have been filled by the time this episode goes out. But they give you kind of a taste of their other positions that are available. Do you want to add anything to that?

Tanya Singh: Yeah, just how across the spectrum of the board like senior to junior, all sorts of vacancies are available for people who might think that they want to be trying their hand at ops kind of stuff. At FHI, we’re also going to be opening more program manager sort of positions, like at least a couple of more program managers who I would say are like mid level ops roles which we’d like to fill with people who have some experience of project management under their belt already, so all sorts of roles in the community, operations focused available, depending if you think that you’re going to be excellent at modeling someone’s preferences, you’ve got executive assistant sort of roles open. If you think you have some experience and would be a good person to set the strategy and direction, you’ve got director of ops sort of roles open for Ought and GiveWell and everything, so yeah.

Robert Wiblin: Are there any other positions I didn’t mention that FHI or the Global Priorities Institute might be hiring for in the next couple of months?

Tanya Singh: I think Global Priorities Institute will hire for our head of research operations of some sort. FHI will also open a head of operations, a couple of program managers. We also would probably open another couple of executive assistants or administrative assistant sort of roles. In our organization priorities, we are looking for strengthening, bringing more hands on deck for our ops team, it’ll be kind of across the levels for now. Maybe three to four more roles from FHI and GPI only focused on operations, three to five over the course of this year.

Robert Wiblin: Whenever this goes out, I’ll stick up a link to our job board and the latest list of operations roles that are available in our article about operations roles specifically, so people can check those out and see if there’s any that they’d like to apply for now. Just tell me more about what a COO does relative to a CEO. I guess a CEO is kind of setting the strategy for the organization, but then they don’t have any time to actually make sure that it gets done, so the COO is the person that actually implements it?

Tanya Singh: Yeah, I think a COO is closer to the pulse of the organization than the CEO. CEO of a large for profit company might be focused on how to keep the stakeholders happy, talking to a few of the key people rather than interacting across the board with a bunch of people, doing things like mergers and acquisitions, or focusing on expansion and sort of putting on these meta strategic level hats, and thinking through how the next five years, 10 years, or two to five years should pan out. The COO on the other hand is very tuned into this ideology, this direction, and then is trying to make it happen, trying to move step by step the organization from where you’re at and where you’d want to be two to five years from now, focused more on making that plan materialize while that plan is evolving. Ideally you would want to stay a couple of steps ahead of and have thought through contingencies and sort of things that could potentially go wrong and proactively move in the direction that you want to move, and keeping in mind that that direction might change a little bit, which I think is something that effective altruism’s community, we’ve experienced a bunch of change and at change management, I think the COO, it’s on their shoulders to do it smoothly, so to say, for the rest of the organization.

Robert Wiblin: Are there any kind of particularly famous COOs that people work in operations kind of look up to and admire? Or any kind of companies were operations was like particularly important to them in getting dominance?

Tanya Singh: Yeah, there’s a lot of interesting literature if one tries to understand what are some of the cool things to be doing in operations and what are some of the strategies that have gone right. At my talk at EAG, I talked about General Leslie Groves. I think he’s a very good example of an operations person who made a sea of difference to the whole project, Manhattan Project, and was extremely instrumental in making some really interesting things happen. If something is to be said about him as individual there, I don’t think it’s a role thing. Someone else in that role might not have been so effective, so it’s his buy in into the project and his understanding of everything important and his ability to optimize things because he knows everything that’s happening. Something like that is inspiring. A lot of this has been studied for the corporate world, like what are the best practices, what are the things that have worked, some business case studies that are, like HBR publishes a bunch of these case studies.

I think there are some very famous case studies of people in Dell who’ve done interesting operational innovations. People in Walmart, I think Walmart introduced something like a cross docking, the minute the product comes in, it’s sort of shipped out to where it needs to finally be displayed on the shelf. These are the kind of success stories you hear about ops, but it’s a very interesting fact that operational innovation is the least tried form of innovation, least doubled in form of innovation. I’m not sure about this, but yeah, I remember having read this somewhere in some HBR article. That’s where least innovation is attempted because it’s not sexy. It’s not very glamorous to say that, “Oh, we’re the whole process in.” Look at these three small changes that are leading to, I don’t know, .6% more efficiency or .6% less defects or .2% more engagement. It’s hard to communicate the achievement. It’s less fancy than have acquired that or we’ve done this or we’ve done that. It’s harder to do because only very few people in an organization are equipped to take a look at everything that’s happening and take a very metasystems level view of how to optimize. At least in larger organizations, that’s harder.

But there are a bunch of companies who’ve done very innovative things in an operations including companies like Uber, Toyota. Toyota production management system is known as Toyota production management system which is like their whole expertise on how to do operations better. There’s an element of efficiency to it, there’s an element of innovation to it. The innovation is less, it’s harder to do, fewer people are equipped to do it. Even after sort of massive innovation or something, very few people will appreciate what you’ve actually done. It’s less sexy to talk about, it’s less glamorous to be boasting about .2% increase in something, something.

Robert Wiblin: I’ll try to stick up some links to some of these different case studies. Is this the Toyota just-in-time system where they figured out how to store almost no inventory because everything was moving?

Tanya Singh: Yeah, Toyota’s just-in-time system. Even Walmart’s cross-docking system was basically to make them inventory light so that they don’t have to be storing all the products in one place and then some other container will come and then ship everything.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. There was this famous economics paper showing, as I recall, just the improvements in Walmart’s logistics during the ’90s. That alone drove several percent of all US economic growth.

Tanya Singh: Yeah, wow.

Robert Wiblin: Just from managing to move a lot more product much more cheaply because it’s, I mean, Walmart I think is the biggest retail in the world still. Then I guess also this, did you have any other details on the Manhattan Project story? As I understand that the Manhattan Project actually was absorbing several percent of GDP during that time period.

Tanya Singh: During that time period, yeah.

Robert Wiblin: Yet they still managed to keep it secret because people were making all of these materials. I mean, obviously, and in fact a million people were working on it, but I just didn’t know what they were contributing to.

Tanya Singh: Yeah, it was running a very siloed kind of way to make sure that it wouldn’t leak out, it’s supposed to be secret, a bunch of it was supposed to be secret, which I think is a testament to how expertly was it managed, how tightly was it managed at some levels that all these other bits and parts of it could afford to be so siloed and so unaware of what the other arm is doing. I think that was a masterful execution sort of case study which I don’t know too many details about to be honest. I’ve just heard about it. I think yes, yeah, that makes sense. That is one way of showing that person who’s not a scientist had a great impact and in a largely researched project where he wasn’t really equipped to have much of an impact if he stopped to find the facility, sourced the raw material, and then just step away, let the scientist do what they want to do. He took initiative and was very proactive and a bit of taskmaster. I think he managed a great deal.

We’re talking about innovations and operations are sort of case studies of ops work done well. I think the fact that COO is often a stepping stone to becoming CEO in the corporate world goes on to show that heading operations prepares you for knowing what are the true business challenges. If you are such a person who’s sort of has deep knowledge about all the aspects of running the business. It’s a very good position that primes you for leading the organization in some way. Tim Cook was the COO and Sheryl Sandberg’s the COO. These are famous COOs, you know. Most companies don’t have very famous COOs. Just because I think what they facilitate for the CEO is that CEO can become a media figure, become like a figure for the organization for people who are looking towards learning more about the organization. The COO is a bit in the background and works. Then some of them become famous because some of them do extraordinary things.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. As I understand, Tesla doesn’t have a COO. But I think I guess Elon Musk kind of fills that role as well. He’s like so deep into the details being in the factory all the time that he kind of …

Tanya Singh: I think they might be calling some things differently. The roles are fancy titles, director of XYZ, but there would be people who are focused on operations. Yeah, I’ve in places that Elon Musk is very, very hands on. He might be doing many of those things himself. I’m sure he has a team of people who are managing his projects and making sure that all the information is synthesized and right people are made aware of the right things, so that is the team that works with him, his program director, project managers, those are largely the people who are running the organization in the sense that I think they are instrumental in making things happen, making sure that Elon Musk’s will is translated to the rest of the organization, their feedback is fed back to him. They are essentially the operations, whatever they call themselves. They might be calling themselves something else.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. Let’s think about how relevant this stuff is I guess to existential risk reduction and the effective altruism community. I guess for organizations like Against Malaria Foundation or Deworm the World Initiative or Schistosomiasis Control Initiative, I mean, those are extremely operations heavy kind of projects. In fact, I mean, almost most of the operations because they’re moving a product to people or distributing it like checking it or … For effective altruism like movement building and so on. How relevant do you think these kind of big corporate case studies are? Does it have that much in common?

Tanya Singh: Probably not. Probably not very relevant. I think there’s some generalist sort of insights that you can call out from failures where there it’s at a big organization or in a startup or in some public/private partnership sort of body, but beyond that, I think these organizations which are focused on doing the most good, effective altruist organizations, are dealing with different problems. It also goes so far as to say that these organizations are full of people who are very value aligned and mission aligned which is kind of very rare generally in the community. Generally in the corporate world, not everyone’s rallying behind the cause with the kind of forward enthusiasm that effective altruists are for the causes that they care about in the organizations they’re working for. In that sense, I think it’s better. It’s a better environment to be doing things because you’re not wasting a lot of energy trying to bring people who should be on board, bring them on board. You’re not wasting effort there.

Those case studies and so far as they explain how to anticipate growth challenges, so far is they talk about how to deal with things like improving the culture of your organization or improving communication channels in your organization. I think one particular area where the insights from the industry are particularly relevant is project management. It doesn’t matter the kind of project that you’re managing. There are some very good practices that you can adopt to efficiently manage projects, to make sure that you’re minimizing redundant work, you’re minimizing in efficiencies that are bound to creep in. Experience teaches you that. Some best practices teaches you that. You can try and learn a little bit from all of that, but operations in the EA community are slightly different ballgame as is true for any industry I would say.

Robert Wiblin: Okay. Yeah. Let’s talk about operations in effective altruism now. As I mentioned earlier, we recently published this article, why operations management is one of the biggest bottlenecks in effective altruism which was I guess trying to lay out the case for something that the people inside the community, people that work in these organizations, were aware of. But I think most people outside of them were not which is just that we’re struggling to grow and one of the key reasons is just that we like the operations capacity to make organizations function at a larger scale. Do you want to present a bit of a case on why you think operations can have a really large impact within organizations that are doing something very valuable?

Tanya Singh: Yeah. If I talk about my personal motivation for working in operations in this community is that the force multiplier argument that because economies of scale kick in, because if one person’s dealing with processes regularly and frequently, they’re likely to know more about them and they’re likely to be more efficient at it. You can free up a lot of Batman time, where Batman is a proxy for whoever you think is amazing and needs to be doing more of what they’re doing. I like to think of all the work that I put in as an executive assistant to Nick as freeing up some of his time. Now I’d refrain from making a qualitative assessment of quality of time that I free up for him. I think effective altruism is full of a lot of people who are very efficient. They drink their meals and listen to podcasts at 3X speed while walking. I’m not sure what’s the value, but I definitely think that I reduce some level of decision fatigue, some level of sort of having to deal with administrative things that possibly he doesn’t want to deal with and possibly won’t be as efficient in dealing with because he has not dealt with them.

Taking away some of those things is the kind of motivation for doing this from my perspective, so you can have a turbo charge kind of effect on the mission that you’re working towards. I think that’s what’s super motivating about working in operations. There is a dearth of talent of people. There’s a dearth of interested and talented people who want to work in operations and the community. I think that’s a temporary thing. When I say temporary, these are nascent organizations that are just growing. I don’t think the challenges that ops in these organizations face right now are such that an industry veteran with 25 years of experience is going to quit his job and come. He will see this as, “Oh, well, you don’t really need me.” We do need experienced people, but the industry veterans don’t think that they’d have much to gain from these sort of roles.

We have a bunch of people who are young, excited, unsure of what they want to do, possibly operations might be useful. I’ve heard it’s high impact, that kind of argument. Then they’d come and try their hands at ops. That’s the kind of talent that’s available right now. I think more people are likely to see that these roles can be super important, and then possibly we’ll have more people come in. I’d also like to say unless you want to become a AI safety researcher, I’m not sure how do you plan to contribute if you want to contribute towards making sure that these technologies come and they are used for the improvement of the world in general, like benefit of the world in general. You could be a policy person, or you could be a technical researcher, or you could be someone who’s making sure that communication happens smoothly and all these organizations work well together.

I think it’s a really good place to put yourself and absorb a lot of the information about the cause area by osmosis, by learning, by reading and making connections that are very valuable. You are connected. These are very small tightly knit communities so you get exposed. You get a lot of exposure talking to the people that you would prefer to talk to because you like working in these areas. Those are the things that should be the driving forces of people who want to work in operations in these fields. I think it’s important for people who want to do operations to want to continue to want to do operations were to find those rather than someone who’ll give two years of their life to ops, because I think that’s a slightly inefficient way of going about setting up systems that are scalable and are going to stay scalable and robust.

Robert Wiblin: Let’s see if we can break down the impact into various different categories. At first you were talking about the fact that you can save the time of other people. Potentially, if you put in eight hours a day, then you can save like eight hours of everyone else’s time by doing things that otherwise they would have to do. Potentially more than that, because you can be focused on these things extremely well. Whereas they would have to be get distracted and waste their time, then they got to do this one task that they don’t really know how to do, and then they could go back to their work. In as much as you’re doing this kind of trying to want to amplify someone else’s impact by saving all of their attention at times so they can do the thing that they’re really amazing at. You’re able to kind of shop around to find the highest impact person in the world basically if he’s willing to hire you for that role. You’re incredibly flexible in that way, that potentially you aren’t in some other roles. Do you think Nick Bostrom is extremely high impact, so you can go and work for him just directly and buy his time?

Tanya Singh: Yeah, I think that gives me so much satisfaction and joy to know that I’m freeing up some of Nick’s time, because I think he’s incredible at what he does. More Nick time will lead to more work that needs to happen happen and by possibly the best person who could be doing that work. That’s a very inspiring goal to run towards and motivate myself with.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. Suggesting people who are donating money often get a bit frustrated because they can’t find things to fund that they really like that aren’t already funded, so someone like Nick Bostrom usually isn’t limited by whether his salary can be paid because so many people are interested in funding him. But there’s other things that you can provide in your case. By providing skill, you can buy more Nick Bostrom in a sense just by filling in for these tasks that otherwise he’d have to waste his time doing.

Tanya Singh: Yeah, yeah. That’s such a fascinating way of looking at it. It’s a very intuitive argument once it’s made, but I had to sort of see it like this to buy in to the fact that, “Oh yes. This is what I could be doing. This is really exciting.”

Robert Wiblin: Okay, so there’s the saving time aspect. There’s also just the fact that from my experience, I was the executive director of CEA for a couple of years, you just find, like if operations can’t scale, then you just aren’t able to hire or you just find that you’re kind of stuck. You don’t have the capacity to put in place the processes to actually get the people who you need. Even if you got them, things would just become a mess very quickly. This thing of just like an organization can just get in a position where it can’t hire people doing frontline work without the necessary operations in the background. Do you want to talk about that?

Tanya Singh: Yeah. I think if you don’t have an ops team in place, there’s going to be inefficiencies that are … I think [Malo 00:52:20] or someone uses this analogy of death by a thousand cuts which I think is so accurate. Someone or the other will need to be doing these things. If someone wants a research assistant or an intern, they’re going to go out and find someone themselves and try and bring them in the system, make mistakes and learn, reinvent the whole wheel. If you don’t have ops people or ops systems, someone will be doing some of these things just that’s the nature of ops tasks that most of it needs to get done. If CFAR needs to organize workshops and don’t have the bandwidth of ops people to help organize them, then I don’t know. I know someone will be organizing workshops. That’s not an optimum use of her time, that’s not the most efficient way to go about these things.

Robert Wiblin: Also just to some extent if the other staff don’t know how to do it, then it just don’t happen. They just decide not to schedule them or [crosstalk 00:53:04].

Tanya Singh: Yeah, or they’ll just let go of that work stream altogether which is potentially worse. Even if you have ambition and if you have resources in terms of funding, etc., and you don’t have the team that can execute on all of that, can run the operations, you would A, not be able to scale to meet your ambition. Even if you do manage to sort of trudge along and scale somewhat because you absolutely need to, it’s going to be inefficient. You’re going to grow in ways that are probably going to be problematic later on because there’s no one who’s synthesizing everything and consolidating everything when it needs to happen, when you’re growing up, when an organization scales up. I think operations becomes really important from that perspective that there’s going to be a thousand holes that sink your ship very gradually. One day you’ll realize that, “Oh shit. Now I’m in trouble.”

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. It seems like as organizations move beyond the scale of just a couple of people who all know one another well, that operations becomes much more important, and like really, really essential if the organization to function. What are kind of the challenges that organizations face as they go from being two people to 20 people?

Tanya Singh: There’s something to be said about when organizations go beyond friends and family which is like 10, 15 people, very like-minded, everyone with the capability to communicate directly with each other, with very good communication channels. After you grow out of that and reach this, till the time you reach this 100, 150 people, 200 people scale, there’s a lot of changes that come about that you have to deal with in a very systematic and efficient way in order to not have staggering inefficiency settle in in your organization. I think that’s where the growing pains that all organizations have to deal with while they’re scaling up. They’re the ops challenges. Some of them have common underlying features, making sure that communication channels are smooth.

I think operations as a function, especially in the EA express community, that should take responsibility for making sure that people aren’t making decisions based on partial information, that relevant people who need to be consulted or informed about a project or a decision art. They’re in the know, they’re being consulted on time, all the relevant opinions that need to be factored in are factored in on time. Someone needs to be doing this task of being the central person who’s monitoring everything and informing the right people of the right things at the right time. That’s why I’m saying operations becomes really crucial. I think I imagine when you scale from, I don’t know, 250 to 500 plus or a thousand plus, there’s again like a certain hill that you have to climb which is of a similar nature that scale up beyond that point will lead to some other things that you have to factor in.

Some of your processes will break because they are not robust enough to support thousand plus people interacting with them or something like that. Or you’ll have to put fairly new different processes in place. You might have to cultivate in-house capability for things like recruitment and headhunting like you might need to have a recruitment specialist in-house. You might need to have a person who deals with a bunch of recruitment consulting firms. That’s their full time job and then they can figure out what are the good ones in the industry you can rely on, which other ones which give you leads that usually don’t pan out into anything meaningful, so someone who can sort of focus on these specialized tasks and meanwhile keeping the communication really strong and making sure that people aren’t talking past each other, they have common knowledge and awareness about what they should know about the organization.

Robert Wiblin: Okay. We talked about two ways that ops staff can have impact. One is save a group’s time. The other one is like allowing the organization to actually scale. I think maybe there’s a third one which is preventing catastrophes, because it is just the case that sometimes an organization can be significantly brought down by a failure within operations. I know of one case where our operations staff came in and basically saved the organization from failing very quickly because they noticed that someone was embezzling money and …

Tanya Singh: Oh wow.

Robert Wiblin: … put a stop to that right away, which otherwise basically would have meant that the organization was out of money and would have folded. Do you think that’s another large route to impact?

Tanya Singh: Yes, I think you’re absolutely right there. Because your job is to keep an eye on all the balls possible and make sure that you’re aware of everything that’s happening in all the directions in which your people in the organization are pulling the organization in, so to say. You are best placed to point out potential problems in the future, things that are not optimal to be doing given the objective of the goal of the organization. You’re in a very good spot to be able to point out any and all of that. From that perspective, that is something that you can have a huge impact on by being able to sort of clarify the mission, or define some useful systems and processes, or useful directions for the organization to be focusing on also, or just to be able to look at where you are and where you’re headed and say that these are the things that we should definitely avoid, these are the challenges that we should definitely avoid.

I think experience of having done ops preps you well for that because failures teach you a lot. It’s not to say that, “Oh well, then lets go out and fail 500 times because then we’ll end up learning a lot of things,” but that’s where seasons ops people I think help an organization, especially because they tackle this third aspect very head on, because they bring in experience that leads to them having sort of having better instincts about how to grow or what to watch out for or what to … be very mindful and cautious about while moving in a particular direction.

Robert Wiblin: You work for a week, I’d say, how many weeks of researcher time do you get out of a week of your time? Through this various different avenues, so one is saving people’s time by taking things off their plate, another is allowing the organization to have more people in it just by making the ops function so you can hire more. Do you have any sense of whether … Is there kind of a multiplier that you can give here?

Tanya Singh: I try and track all of this for my very unique situation at any given point in time, but I really don’t think that I have A, enough insight into effective altruism as a community and what all goes on in all the different roles that people are expected to play, B, enough insight into decision making. Because I think how an organization distributes its decision making par leads to a lot of what and which people in the organization impact. Like if you empower roles significantly, then they can make like a disproportionate impact on things. The second point that we talked about that if you’re able to make things run smoothly, you can hire quickly, you can scale up faster. That’s very tangible, direct number of research hours added or saved kind of calculation that you can do. But on the time you free up, I think in my EAG talk had talked about freeing up an hour of Nick Bostrom’s time every day, roughly saying that 30 minutes of it is something that would have required him to execute his decision capacity. Those are very wishy washy handwavy numbers. I’m not sure. He’s a fairly efficient guy who would have figured out a way to do all these things on the fly while drinking his liquid meals.

There are also people who are not very good at these things, and probably would not have … I’m not going to name names, but when I just joined FHI, I was setting up, installing a new printer for a bunch of the people. This researcher and I spent two hours trying to install the printer on his laptop, his Windows laptop. Two hours of his time solidly wasted because I was massively incompetent at trying to do this. I couldn’t figure out what’s the issue with this. Something like that can happen. It’s a very person dependent thing, but yes, I’d like to believe that because all the information rests with me and I am used to doing these things and they’re more in my skillset than in researcher skillsets or in the skillsets of academics, I can free up more than eight hours of FHI researcher level time per day. I think that’s fair to say, especially if you’re responsible for 10, 12 people. If the ops to researcher is one is to 10, one is to 11, or for a time one is to 20, that was in FHI while I was the only one around. Yeah, I was able to free up more than one researcher.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, that’s what I would imagine it is. Potentially you could get a several fold multiplier depending on what the ratio is or the …

Tanya Singh: Yeah. On the third aspect where if you can avoid massive inefficiencies, if you can avoid crash and burn or sinking of some part of the organization completely because there’s operations are not run well. It’s harder to figure out what the counterfactual is there like what could have, would have been done, what have you avoided is something you don’t know, possibly nothing. But yeah, all of that’s very hard to calculate. I think it’s easier to do it for your own role with the complete understanding that you have the ecosystem you function in. But across the community, as operations, as a function matures and as more people are focused on trying to do this more effectively, we’ll know more and discover more, I think.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. Some people think yes, operations roles are very valuable, but they also believe that it should just be easy to hire mercenaries basically to do this, that we should just outsource all these functions to kind of some external firm like APMG or just hire people who are not interested in effective altruism and don’t really care about the mission. You don’t believe that we can do that and neither do I, but why is that?

Tanya Singh: I want to be fairly epistemically modest here and say that I really don’t know what’s the best way, but I personally think that for someone to stick around for a long time with an organization, it’s important that they are happy with their job and they’re content with their job. I personally have struggled to find contentment even when I was working with a person I really respected. I liked most of my team. I think the work was challenging. There was a bunch of … I was paid really well. I was given all sorts of incentives to stick around, and autonomy. All those hygiene factors were sort of checked off for me, but I wasn’t happy. I think value alignment brings that contentment, that satisfaction.

When you’re working with an organization for a really long time, you’re going to hit low times as well. There will be times when you’re at odds with mostly everyone in the organization or you feel differently and other people feel differently or you feel that something should be done differently whereas it’s being done wrong. You’re going to have all sorts of moments, not having a crisis of faith then, it sort of boils down to how much do you believe in the overall mission that you are working towards. Is it all meaningful to you or is it just a job that you’re trying to earn and maybe earn to give or something, but basically, that’s what it essentially I think boils down to. That’s where I think value alignment becomes really important. You’re not going to feel isolated or alienated.

Effective altruists have like a very typical way of talking. We’re talking about the same things. We’re obsessing about the same problems. Someone who’s not a part of this community is going to find that very annoying all the time. “What are you guys on and on about?” If they’re not bought into that way of thinking, how urgent all of this is, they’re going to be fairly isolated in the whole setup is my sense. They’re also not going to work with the kind of urgency. They’re not going to be appreciative of the urgency of others. I think in operations roles, it’s important to have value aligned people who want to stick around so that you can grow these people as operations leaders. I think when an employee churns out, there’s a lot of institutional information, tacit knowledge, relationships that are lost that leave with that person. For the health of the organization, it’s important to grow people who have long term careers in operations. But obviously, there are also some roles where it’s all right if you don’t have someone who’s bleeding for the cause already, to bleed for the cause, or like a fanatic.

It’s all right to have some people who like working in a nice team, nice office environment, derive pleasure from the fact that they are checking off 15 things off their to-do list every day, keeping all these wonderful people happy, are doing something that they enjoy and are hanging around in an environment that they enjoy. I think it’s all right to have those roles be filled by people who are not necessarily that values align. There needs to be a certain level of appreciation for what effective altruists or whatever organization that they’re trying to do. They can be opposed to the idea of whatever you’re doing, but they don’t necessarily need to be absolutely bought into it. They can be exploring. They can be interested. Even if they churn, they don’t take away sort of important information that presents itself as sort of solid loss later, I feel. I do feel that senior roles in operations should be filled only by value aligned people because decision making and decision trade offs would be pretty impossible to understand or appreciated like the other people if you are on some other trajectory or tangent of what is important and what is not.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. I mean, that raises another issue that because it’s so important for more senior staff who have more strategic role to share the values, if you hire someone who doesn’t, then you basically can’t promote them. Also, you can move them, but you can’t move them horizontally either.

Tanya Singh: Yeah. It has a trickle down effect on the rest of the team as well. If they’re not aligned to the values of the organization, not bought into or to a very healthy, or sort of largely to the extent that’s needed, then the team that’s functioning under them and executing on the operations strategy under them is also going to be somewhat confused. Their incentives are going to vary a bit because their leader’s incentivizing something else and their organization largely is incentivizing something else.

Robert Wiblin: What’s the best argument for interest in the cause not being necessary for working in operations?

Tanya Singh: Since it’s easy to understand what are the kind of skills and mindsets that you’d need to be effective in your role in operations. A good project manager whose always worked in some different industry does not care about what’s happening here and also maybe things that okay, whatever, maybe not the most important thing or whatever, but fine. I’m in Oxford or I’m in the Bay, let me give these jobs a shot. If they’re really good at what they do, if they’ve been super successful in the past and past record, it has a bearing on your ability to be able to assess whether they’ll be good, specifically in the environment that you’re presenting them with. If you want someone to be able to accomplish things fast, move fast and break things kind of mentality, then you have to look at someone who’s on project management and tech startup kind of space.

If they’ve been successful, if they come with strong recommendations of being a reliable safe pair of hands who can execute things and has a good ability to pick things up quickly whenever needed, so if you can find someone like that, then maybe they can work well.

Robert Wiblin: How about outsourcing these operations tasks to kind of external professional services firms, just a bookkeeper who you find on the internet?

Tanya Singh: Yeah. There’s lessons to be learned about outsourcing from the industry in general, where I think there was a trend towards bringing all sorts of expertise in-house in the ’70s and the ’80s where you had these massive M&Cs come up on the scene who were trying to leverage economies of scale but had become like very clunky and non-flexible organizations that could not respond agilely to any situation. Then you also have these consulting firms that take away the cognitive aspect of ideating on a better solution or just the execution aspect of something like a payroll management or VISA processing for you and that’s what they specialize in. Economies of scale are on their side so you just engage with them on very specific narrow domains that they have expertise in. In the EA community as well, there’s a lot of similarity in the kind of things that come under operations for all different EA orgs, like a bunch of them are dealing with processing VISAS for people they’re hiring. That’s across the board a commonality that everyone’s having to face, or since there are so many not-for-profits then there’s some policy implications that you have to follow, there’s some organizations, companies, houses, etc., that you have to definitely deal with, so those are common things that everyone’s dealing with.

As the industry matures, it makes sense to centralize these things that can be handled well by one organization supporting many organizations rather than everyone reinventing the wheel and not being able to learn off of each others mistakes or experiences. I think something like BERI getting setup is an example of some semblance of centralization outside your organization for things like VISA processing or for things like dealing with a bunch of contractors, copy editors, on request that they can do which you as an organization, like every organization can’t have an army of people on standby only to be pulled in or activated when they’re needed. But an outsourced company that’s doing this for 15 organizations can.

I think we will see one, two, three, organizations emerging that will help all the EA orgs with some set of services which are very … like the 70% of the solution is already there, 30% needs to be customized. This will not happen for very specific to your organization problem, it’ll happen mostly for things that are outsourceable. But this has happened in the industry, likely to happen in the EA space as well, but I think it’s a bit early for that according to me. I think everyone’s just trying to figure out things. There are some things where this is already happening, but yeah, the scope of those things is fairly limited right now, likely to increase more in the future even, so taking away total HR management, financial management, all aspects of that, many aspects of that, like up to 80% can be outsourced away.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. I don’t know. My experience with outsourcing things is that it can create a lot of communication frictions, like that the external group doesn’t always understand exactly what you want. Have your experiences with outsourcing been positive or …

Tanya Singh: Yeah, my experiences with outsourcing or at least my observation, that has been positive in the sense that if it’s run well or if it’s run with the appropriate caveats in mind, then it’s useful. If you’re trying to outsource something that’s very core to what you’re trying to … like FHI can outsource research, that’s it. You can only outsource something that’s not really mission critical. It’s critical for that thing to happen for your mission to succeed, but that thing in of itself is not very mission critical. For those bits, you can have one person in the organization whose duty it is to interact well and communicate preferences and communicate back contingencies and issues that might come up with that organization to which you’re outsourcing things, but it’s important to have like a strong relationship that one person owns and holds and is responsible for with that organization or that outsourced entity within your organization and try and control that outsourced entity and what you want from it through that one person.

Now you’re right. Doing something in-house with people who are 100% on the same page as you is very different from people who somewhat understand what you’re doing. But again, if it’s like the administrator-y work, then you can do it with people who are not necessarily mission aligned, but they have service level agreements that they’re going to adhere to and give you finished product deliverable within the timeframe that you’re looking for. As long as they don’t need to be value aligned for that, it falls in somewhat the administrative bucket of things that we talked about, I think it should be fine.

Robert Wiblin: Presumably, you’ve had to hire other people working within operations before, do you find usually that the best applicant is significantly better than the second best applicant and the second better than the third? Is it like widely distributed capability?

Tanya Singh: Not in the experience that I’ve had. I hired my team in Snapdeal, so I hired basically project managers whose jobs would have been to communicate with the automobile organizations, do the marketing, handle the launches so to say of some new scheme that we would have launched. Yeah, some applicants stand out. You’re very tempted to hire them. I think interviewing someone, it becomes very clear how well you would be able to work with them. I think that two people who are working closely together or even … when I say closely together, some manager and manage kind of thing, spending, a bunch of time interacting on how to call out the best solution possible, so some brainstorming. Any working relationship of that sort, I think it’s important that they are able to work well together. It’s a very personality sort of thing. One can say that people are mature enough to appreciate different styles and still be able to work in lock step with each other without talking past each other, miscommunicating, and things like that.

But I find that you need a special level of maturity to hit that with two people, more often than not, you find a very inadequate situations, equilibriums, where people are not very happy, are sort of gritting their teeth and continuing on along, and don’t appreciate that they have very different working and managing styles. From that perspective, I feel it’s important to be able to figure out whether the person you’re interviewing or considering is going to work well with you. This is not to say that you don’t presuppose that you’re working style is awesome and everyone needs to align to that. If they bring a special skill on board, I think it’s important for managers to keep evolving to be quite flexible in their ability to work with different sorts of people. Some people need more direction, some people need more elbow rooms and more space to be able to do things. But yeah, amazing ops people do stand out a little.

If you’re very confused whether I should be hiring someone or not, it’s probably better to not hire them than take that bet. If you have the luxury to trial test, do sort of one or two month trials, that’s I think the best way to figure out how good/bad would they be, how they respond to feedback. I think those are the things that I personally look for. A person should be willing to take feedback on board. They should be excited about making things happen in the sense that they should be like doers. You can see this in the background story of a person. If they’ve been often the person who’s trying to make something happen, gone outside the remit of their role and responsibility, those are things that I appreciate. Then I think I appreciate drive a lot. Experience has its values, its merits, and I really value that. But if someone’s extremely driven, then I think yeah, I’d place my money on that candidate.

Robert Wiblin: How much people and operations get to set the strategy of an organization? I think this is one thing that people worry is that if they’re in an ops role, they’ll just have to hope that the organization as a whole is heading in the right direction because they want to be able to control it.

Tanya Singh: Again, I think that would depend on the organization, also the individual. I think my experience of working with FHI is that roles like executive assistant to a person who’s directing an effort or an institute, I think those roles while yes, your primary responsibility is to make sure that all of this administrative and operational work is off of that person’s plate, but you’re getting an insight into how they think and make decisions. You’re briefing them on whatever is relevant for them to know and seeing the decision making process real time. You’re also doing this with other key stakeholders in the organization. If you have important things to contribute, and if you have a good grasp of the subject matter which is not to say the research subject matter, like a lot of these decisions, a lot of the decisions that FHI has to take on a month to month basis does not have to do with our research direction. That’s largely clear to the researchers. They’re pursuing those trajectories. It’s more to do around what to promote, where to do outreach, how much to focus on marketing or outreach or website versus how much to focus something else, how to run HR processes more smoothly, how to hire faster, or how to move offices into a new … what are the things that we should be mindful of while we’re scaling up over the next three, four years.

These are organizational sort of day to day functioning level decisions, some of them are more in the future, some of them are more day to day. We can only hire for three roles over the next three months, so which three roles, while we want to choose from our pick of 10. These kind of decisions were I think being in operations, your job is to figure out what are the considerations that people keep in mind, what are the things that you need to make them aware of, basically making them aware of the things that they should know, and then modeling their preferences and stepping into those shoes. I like to believe that even if I’m not an instrumental part of making a decision, I’ll place my bet in my head and see where it’s going, so I think it’s a good way to keep holding that skill and also start contributing, give your two cents.

While you’re laying down, while you’re making sure that there’s efficient communication of all the important information, you can always add in a couple of lines of what you think is the right thing to be doing. I think therein part of the decision making process. If ops is not a part of the decision making process or the day to day decision making that an organization has to do, I would say that 60% of the decisions that are org level, that affect the whole organization, 60, 70% are in this category where there needs to be safe from someone who is handling the ops, handling the execution of things. If you’re not involved in that, then I think something’s going wrong. This is not to say the whole ops team should be involved in that, but there should be some representation from operations in those decisions. I do see that happening at FHI. I’m not sure about other organizations, but I’d be very surprised if that’s not the case.

Robert Wiblin: Do you have any good stories of things going wrong when operations is done poorly, or they haven’t been able to hire the necessary people?

Tanya Singh: Yeah, I think it’s less interesting but the biggest problem that ops not being done well or being under capacity, overburdened is that you’re not able to hire people quickly. There’s two elements to hiring, A, doing everything that’s required to sort of release a role, promoted, etc., etc., and get the person on board, so running those processes and the other element is making sure that you have an applicant pool that you’re excited about, because at FHI, oftentimes we run a recruitment process but ended up sort of not hiring anyone from it. That’s a situation where all the effort from an org perspective has gone into executing a process, but nothing has come out of it. Essentially, it’s a waste of everyone’s time. It’s equally important to be focused on making sure that if you are running the recruitment process for a role, you have some applicants that you’re really really excited about, like at least three, four, five applicants where you’d think that it would be surprising if none of them get the job. Not doing that leads to things that you’ve done and are sort of leading to nothing. I’m sure there are many examples of sort of legal troubles cropping up because you’re not careful or aware or you haven’t preempted all the things that you needed to possibly because you’re learning by doing kind of thing. In the industry, I’m sure there must be very many examples.

From my own personal failures I can talk about in Snapdeal where I was learning to set up a process, running sort of AB tests on the product, and the way I used to run the tests in the beginning and the way I used to run the test after two and a half months of running tests was really different. I could have gathered much better data that were trajectories of wrong development on the product that I made everyone follow because I wasn’t doing a good enough job of thinking through what the end product should have. I think I will couch all of them in a very handwavy way, operational and efficiencies are like failures of that, but it’s essentially an ops person not doing their job as well as they can potentially, which is not to say that they don’t want to. It’s just hard to figure out the perfect secret source for your organization especially when multiple stakeholders are involved. I think those situations become fairly tricky. I was working with seven or eight different teams and then coordinating and aligning all the dots. I know that I learned that by trial and error, by failing and improving. In the initial phase where I was learning, I personally let do a lot of inefficiencies because I was learning.

Robert Wiblin: Sometimes you hear people complain that there’s kind of too much operation in their organizations, that perhaps processes have been created where they don’t have to be created, and this is just excessive administrative overhead. What do you think of that? Is it possible to join an organization that had too much ops capacity?

Tanya Singh: Yeah. I think in the realm of possibilities that definitely seems possible. Just as you can have too few people looking at these things, you can also have too many people looking at these things, and too many cooks spoiling the broth kind of situation, that’s sort of most definitely possible. It’s also not clear to me which is worse. That might as well be worse because you’re adding far more overhead than there needs to be. There’s overanalysis, there’s analysis paralysis and things aren’t getting done because too many decision makers are trying to pull the organization in different directions, so there is a sweet spot or a sweet range of number of ops people that an organization of a certain size and scale should have. Again, it’s tricky to figure out. I don’t know what good should that be for EA orgs. It’s too early to say there’s a bunch to be discovered there, but being ineffective because of too many people trying to do operations and introducing systems and processes almost for the sake of it is definitely highly suboptimal.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. I guess my impression is that kind of none of the organizations that I’m familiar with are like this because they find it hard to hire ops staff rather than trivial to, I don’t know, to accumulate too many.

Tanya Singh: Yeah. I don’t think the EA organizations suffer from the too many problem right now, but they could in the future.

Robert Wiblin: It could happen, yeah.

Tanya Singh: They don’t right now.

Robert Wiblin: There seems to be this phenomenon that people who are good at ops don’t realize how much better they are than other people and they just assume that everyone else can do these things as well when they can’t. Do you have any explanation for this phenomenon?

Tanya Singh: I definitely think it’s true. I don’t have an explanation. A lot of ops tasks seem to be ones where you have to dive in, do the work, get your hands dirty kind of thing. If you aren’t comfortable with the lack of knowledge and awareness of what Pandora’s boxes might open, what might you have to deal with. Unless you have that risk taking appetite to some degree, you’re going to wait for some expert to come and do the job. I think bunch of ops people are very good genderless. It’s hard to appreciate genderless kind of skills. It’s easier to say that I’m really good at X, but I don’t know what am I good at. I find it hard. I think I can handle some sorts of things all right. I don’t think I’m particularly smashing at any one thing. Then if you say it like that, it’s a weird underconfident sort of statement to make. But I’ve seen ops people often be a bit confused about what is the magic there. Probably because is there is no magic to it.

It’s very systematically attacking problems, committing to doing things, experimenting a bit, like trying a few things, seeing what works. Oftentimes, it’s figuring out what’s the best thing to be done. You don’t know it, but some other person might hit upon that inside, so just making a few calls, knocking on a few doors, and assimilating information. None of it sounds like, I don’t know, expertise. I don’t think I’m great at gathering information, but that’s essentially what I’m doing most of the time. I don’t know what to credit myself for. I think that’s what a lot of ops people face and they’re like, “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m doing anything special. I’m just doing these things. I don’t know what is special about it.”

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. Yeah. I want to try to figure out what the explanation for this is. I mean, when you’re saying it’s about being generalist, it could be that if someone is very good at operations, they’re just good in everything, then kind of they never look outstanding. When you look at them doing one task, you don’t appreciate. In fact, they’re amazing because they’re good at such like tons of other stuff that they’re not doing in that precise moment.

Tanya Singh: Yeah, possibly. Or also in the same way in that a bunch of these tasks are not the kind of things that you applaud on the annual celebration day of your organization or the kind of things you talk about in media. They’re like minor incremental improvements that you’re bringing day to day, or some pivotal shifts where operations is definitely not the only sort of function responsible, so everyone comes together, there’s collective by interchanged directions and then you change that direction. None of the ops tasks are very … You can’t attribute to them a lot of credit for having shifted gears or change directions or uncovered some things that could have gone wrong. It’s a very organic, incremental, happens behind the scenes largely. It’s a complex three dimensional territory that needs to be chartered. It’s difficult to project like a very compelling two dimensional picture in an article or a blog post or an interview about what is so awesome about it. It behooves ops people to be a bit more humble and say that we don’t know what are we doing that’s magical, but the idea is to keep things running efficiently. That’s what we bring to the table.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. Another explanation might be that they’re doing something that other people could do in principle, but then just do it a fiftieth as fast or they do in their way, less systematic way. They wouldn’t automate it so they’d have to spend hours and hours doing something that they would automate and then manage to get done in minutes.

Tanya Singh: Yeah.

Robert Wiblin: Perhaps that differs from other people couldn’t have come up with the theory of relativity or something like that.

Tanya Singh: Yeah, exactly.

Robert Wiblin: It wasn’t just that Einstein was 50 times faster than me doing it. But you can’t just hire 50 ops staff to a job and need to be very slow, because then you’ve created this enormous communications overhead. It would be worse than having no one.

Tanya Singh: Yes.

Robert Wiblin: The only operations people who are worth having and people who are extremely fast in getting tons of tasks done very quickly and automate it all.

Tanya Singh: Yeah, I think that’s a very, very good way of putting it.

Robert Wiblin: All right. Let’s push on to talking about what you actually do. Operations kind of day to day in your job. Is it possible to break down what do you spend your time on in any given week?

Tanya Singh: Yeah, sure. A bunch of my time goes into delivering on the requirements from my role as executive assistant to Nick. There I’m churning through his email, I’m trying to figure out what his preferences are, whether it’s for things like travel or whether it’s for engagement with media or taking on some interviews and things like that. I’m communicating with those people and making sure that there’s no communication overhead for Nick for them, then trying to figure out what are some of the things that he needs to get done on a day to day basis. It’s about basically rising up to the challenge of whatever are his requirements and bringing in an element of proactivity to it if you can, giving him more time, more freedom from sort of these things that are bothersome about the fact that you work within systems and with other organizations. Part of my time is spent doing that.

Then I’m also handling some sort of projects for FHI where we have a scale of plans, so putting together our growth plan, making sure the stakeholders are aware of what plan we’ve put together, keeping everyone informed, feeding that information to Nick, so how we function is … Nick makes a smoothie or elixir, he likes to call it, every day in the morning where he’s sort of blending together vegetables to drink. I brief him on his email. I brief him on updates on other priority projects that are going in the organization where he either wants to know what’s happening or wants to give his two cents and pass one along something that he thinks that the team should think about or be aware of, so something like that. Then there’s a couple of other projects where we’re launching a training program, so I’m trying to help with the dealing with anything that needs to happen for that communicating with Oxford University for that. Hopefully, we should find like a keeper, like a full-time person to drive that.

We’re planning to shift offices later this year or early next year. We’re moving into a much larger office space, so going through the university, all the different committees that we have to present our case to, setting up the financial plan for that, so focusing on some projects, some discreet projects like this, also figuring out how or helping figure out along with other people what are the trade offs that FHI should be making in terms of its hiring. There’s a bottleneck in the number of people you can hire which is because of the bandwidth that the university people who we tag team for these processes can give to this and the internal bandwidth crunch that we have. What are the next roles that we should be hiring on? What are the things what we should be focused on? Because now we’re growing a new ops team in place where FHI has also undergone some restructuring recently, so how to make sure that all different parts of the organization are seamlessly speaking to each other, just focusing on some of these things.

Robert Wiblin: How much involvement do you have in, say, grant applications or dealing with donors? Does that come up somewhat?

Tanya Singh: Yeah, dealing with donors comes up every now and then, whether it’s about giving them an update about an existing grant and how we’re using that money. I think this year, all the annual updates, etc., for the donors that we give annual updates to was sort of handled by me. There’s also a university team who’s full-time role it is to be sort of dealing with donors and giving them the information they need, so communicating with that team, being the point of contact for them, making sure that our donors have everything that they need at the end of the year, the satisfaction of knowing what happened with their money, how was it spent, what impact came out of it, and getting in call with donors in case they want to ask something or even reaching out to them proactively in case we want something from them. All of those are elements, but infrequent elements. It’s not a part of my day to day job. Just because it’s not like a very regular ongoing activity, it happens once or twice with every donor annually kind of thing.

Robert Wiblin: It sounds like originally you were hired just to be Bostrom’s executive assistant, but then you’ve ended up doing many different things. It seems like a pretty typical story for operations staff.

Tanya Singh: Actually, originally, I was just brought in as a temporary administrator. Niel Bowerman then sort of handed off the reins of some of these things, some of these sort of projects to me. Then yeah, then there was this thing of how to keep me here, I’m on a … My partner is here and I’m able to work in the UK because of his visa, then we were able to open executive assistant to Nick’s position. Yeah, I think I have sort of delivered across multiple roles just because we did not have people filling those roles. Now that we have four people, possibly we’ll have, we should be opening three more ops roles this year if everything goes right. Yeah, we’ll have more hands on deck, and then I’ll probably have somewhat of a more defined role. But right now, yes. It’s hard to explain why am I doing all sorts of these, why am I wedged in so many different types of projects. But it was need based more than anything else.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. I guess my impression is that this isn’t that uncommon though, at least in the organizations that I’m familiar with. Perhaps it’s because they’re smaller, and so each person is less specialized. You only have so many staff. Kind of someone spends a third of their time on hiring and a third of their time on kind of … the office moving project and things like that, but there’s no one person who’s dedicated to each thing only.

Tanya Singh: Yeah, the organizations are smaller. I think this is also how much initiative you take is sort of directly proportional to how much work you end up doing and how many different things you end up handling. I call this scope creep of luck, you have a defined scope and then that creeps and creeps and creeps and becomes larger, except Mercer where I was learning how to do a job. It was my first job. I’d done this in every organization. I was hired to do something, I ended up doing a bunch of other things. I have a tendency to get wedged. I think people who are doing operations in this community are all doing operations because they think that these things should be done and are important. That’s why all of them have this trade of, “Oh well, that needs doing. Can I do it? Or can I help facilitate doing that?” Because that needs doing. I think that mindset makes you leverage your skills even where you don’t necessarily know what to do, but because you want to do it, and there’s not many other people and these are smaller organizations, you have the liberty to take that initiative and test waters, use that head and trial methodology of it.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. Do you find that fact that you’re working on a lot of different things appealing? Is the diversity enjoyable or what does it mean that you’re just like full split, too many different ways?

Tanya Singh: On any given day I’d tell you the diversity is like what makes I special, brings it flavor. I’m sort of learning new things constantly and that illusion of intellectual progression is very important for a person like me. But every now and then, I’d like to say maybe with the frequence like once a month, you’d find me in a place where I’ll be like, “I cannot do anything,” because my attention is split across 18 things. More than attention being split, I think there are some things where you need to take a strategic overview of all the little bits and pieces and try and do a very meta level, systems level thinking. There are some things where you need to be focusing on the most nuance thing and trying to do that or execute something on that.

I personally find this zoom in and zoom out across different tasks during a work day or a work week at times challenging. I’m not very efficiently able to zoom out or zoom in or sort of give anything the kind of mindspace it deserves. I step back and I thought about, “Is it useful if I do more things at 80% efficiency or less things at 100% efficiency?” I thought that the former was more useful, could be wrong. I’m not very confident about that, but I decided to do more with compromising on quality a little bit. Obviously, keeping most of my focus on the top five, six important things, and then tackling the tale and in a very quick and dirty way.

Robert Wiblin: What are some of the things that you’ve accomplished in your career either in FHI or before that that you found really satisfying?

Tanya Singh: In every job that I’ve held, I think till the time that I was doing that job, there were elements of satisfying things that were motivating to me and that kept me going. Watching your solution be put to good use or materialize in the form of a process that that organization commits to following in my consulting days or with Snapdeal. Those are extremely sort of satisfying things to witness that people are interacting with a process that you’ve helped create, go create, put in place, so that leads to a bit of a feeling of satisfaction of sorts. I found later in hindsight that it was temporary unless it’s sort of all adding towards something that you really, really care about. It fizzles out the satisfaction that you get by hitting your monthly BNL or making a crate higher. Those are all things that give you somewhat of a kick, somewhat of a yes, this is awesome kind of a feeling. It has differed.

I think big wins would be … I think I was very proud when I was running like a big BNL till the time I was not proud of it. It was very … There have been some transitions in that process, but having opened and run five recruitment processes with FHI, six recruitment processes with FHI, sort of tracking that, knowing that that needles moving, more people who want to be researching on these things, more awesome people who we can find and bring in our orbit, I’m facilitating that process. There’s a lot of satisfaction in that. I personally find it very satisfying to know that if on the rare occasion I can sort of premeditate Nick’s requirements and make sure that he’s equipped with what he needs to be equipped with while even making a certain decision and things like that. Being able to do that, there’s like a very day to day level of satisfaction in knowing that you’re improving there.

Robert Wiblin: Could you just give a kind of a quick summary of what are key characteristics that makes someone a good fit for the operations roles?

Tanya Singh: Sure. Bit hard to sort of boil it down to only very few. I also don’t want to launch into too many, so I’ll try and put out what I think are super important characteristics or traits that mostly all good ops people or most of the good ops people have. I think one would be a bias towards action and making sure that you’re tabling good solutions. Basically, tabling solutions and the second part that follows is tabling good solutions, being the person who feels very unsettled if things are broken. Rather than just complaining about them, you’d probably throw yourself at it and patchwork it somehow. I think that’s a very useful quality that’s very … also that’s very easy to see if someone has consistently displayed it because you’ll find it and the kind of things they’ve done in their school. You’ll see if they were instrumental in organizing any events in their college community building kind of stuff. You’ll also see it in their work. It sort of shines through this quality. I think it’s very important.

Then the second thing I would be sort of psyched about seeing in ops people is yeah, the excitement to learn different things and not be very settled in their jobs already. The drive to want to do different things, want to make things better, sort of put scalable systems and solutions in place even though it seems like a mammoth task, that who will change and people will probably adopt, not adopt. There’s a bunch of unknowns, but being comfortable in this ambiguity and knowing that we’re going to put something in place, that’s probably not going to work or is going to work poorly initially and then is going to improve drastically, because we’re going to make it improve. Just having that mindset of wanting to build scalable solutions, robust systems that make you redundant, that make your own job redundant. If someone’s excited by that, that’s a useful thing. That’s a useful indicator that they’ll be pretty good.

Being okay with presenting dissident arguments, like many times since I did my MBA in HR, I heard this quite often. HR people need to be people’s people. I’m a people’s person and I love people. I am not a people’s person. I’m like, “Oh my god. Am I doing the wrong thing?” I don’t think you need to be a yes sayer. In fact, I think that’s pretty damaging because you have a better intuition about operations because you’re working there. If you’re very agreeable, then you’re likely doing more harm than good. I don’t know whether I mentioned this somewhere, I do think that I’m better at solutions, especially pertaining to operations of an organization, are easy to defend. It’s easy to convince people and make them see the merit in it. You should be willing to step into that uncomfortable situation rather than going ‘let me avoid this confrontation, let me just do what you want me to do, and I’m going to fix it later’. That fix it later is problematic orientation to develop if your defaulting to it fairly frequently. That’d be one thing, yeah.

Excited about learning new things, also excited about working in a team. Operations can probably be never be a one-man show. You should be a bit of a team player and focus on reducing communication overhead, A, within the team and B, throughout the organization. Lastly, I would say the ability to wear sort of slightly different hats. Your role, if you’re a good operations person, is likely never going to be the same kind of stuff over and over again. You’ll get new challenges. You should be able to tailor your message to your audience, come down to or rise to the level of your audience, the kind of nuance they want and need, and be able to talk to them about that. Efficient stakeholder management form the perspective of being able to be high level or zoomed in or very detailed oriented, whatever you need to be, knowing what’s the kind of hat to wear while communicating with a particular person.

These are some of the sort of very broad generalist kind of things that are good. I have a strong bias for working with data, relying on data for your instincts rather than sort of these wig feelings that you can’t really explain properly. I also know great ops people who don’t work too much with data already have some very good instincts maybe because of a lot of experience under their belt kind of things, so yeah, that’s the sort of less important.

Robert Wiblin: Are there any skills that are important in other jobs that you think aren’t so important in this one?

Tanya Singh: Oh, that’s an interesting question.

Robert Wiblin: What are the weakness