Almost five years ago, I claimed that the Taliban would need to govern Afghanistan differently this time. I made three charts, and I felt pretty pleased with myself.

Things didn't exactly pan out the way I hoped.

• 2.4 million girls are now barred from secondary school, up from 1.4 million two years ago and on track for roughly four million by 2030.

• Women have been banned from universities since December 2022.

• Unexpectedly, boys are collapsing too: male university enrolment fell from 310,369 in 2019 to 188,957 in 2024, and 40% of the 2.13 million primary-age children out of school are boys.

• Female university faculty have fallen 70%, from 2,599 to 794, and UNESCO projects a shortfall of more than 11,000 qualified female teachers by 2030.

• Because the regime requires female-only instruction for girls, it has built a constraint that will outlast its own decision. Even if the ban were lifted tomorrow, there'd be nobody left to teach them.

I was wrong, and wrong very publicly. At the risk of being wrong-er and public-er, let's give it another whirl.

1. The internet arrived in Afghanistan, and then it stopped arriving

This is the chart I got least wrong, and there's one specific line in the original I'd like to smugly point at before I start revising everything else. I wrote that the Taliban could shut down the internet, but that "no matter how many times governments around the world shut down the internet, they always have to turn it back on."

In late September 2025, the Taliban cut the fibre-optic backbone and imposed a nationwide internet and mobile blackout, citing the prevention of "immoral activities." Banking stopped. Hospitals stopped. Airports stopped. Visa issuance stopped. They turned it back on after about 48 hours.

I'll take a small victory lap on this one: the regime swung big, paid a real and immediate cost, discovered it couldn't sustain the position, and walked it back within two days. The fundamentalist wing would love to seal the country off from the world. On the available evidence, it can't.

What I did get wrong is the shape of the line. I assumed connectivity would keep climbing, because that's what it had done every year for twenty years. Instead it froze. ITU figures put internet penetration at 17.6% of the population in 2019, and it hasn't recovered that level since. So while they can't disconnect Afghanistan, they have successfully stopped it connecting any further.

And one number is sobering. Of Afghanistan's five million social media users, 86.1% are men. Whatever information channel survived the takeover, women are mostly not on it.

2. The chart that remains misleading

In 2021, I wrote that over 85% of Afghan children completed primary school, against 28% under Taliban rule in the late 1990s, with 67% of girls completing.

Firstly, I really should have been looking at secondary school enrolment, and specifically at the gap between girls and boys, since the suppression of girls' education was the concern at the time and is exactly what the Taliban have gone on to do.

So here's the chart I should have made. In Afghanistan, lower secondary is grades 7 to 9. The Taliban's ban applies to everything above grade 6. These are, precisely and exactly, the years girls are forbidden to attend.

Enrolment of girls in them has gone up. From somewhere above 55% in 2021 to almost 65% today.

Under the Taliban.

In the period they banned girls from secondary school.

Which is, obviously, nonsense.

UNESCO's 2025 situation report explains that the de facto Ministry of Education lets students stay registered for three years without anyone verifying whether they turn up. The Ministry's information system records 1.08 million girls enrolled in secondary school in 2024. The field-verified number of girls above grade 6 since 2022 is zero.

So I can't update this chart. The only institution producing Afghan education statistics is the institution being assessed by them, and it has every reason to keep the line going up.

3. People experience healthier outcomes, for some reason

The third chart measured the burden of communicable, maternal, neonatal and nutritional disease, in disability-adjusted life years per 100,000 people. One DALY is one lost year of healthy life. In 2021 I said we'd halved it, from about 40,000 in 1994 to under 15,000. (The maths was also wrong, by the way. That's a 70% fall, not a halving. It's been a humbling experience.)

It was 12,465 DALYs in 2017, where my original chart ran out. It spiked to 21,446 in 2021. And in 2023, the most recent year available, it's 12,005.

The spike is probably some combination of COVID and the US withdrawal: Afghanistan's Delta wave peaked in mid-2021 with almost no vaccination coverage, and the withdrawal completed in August of the same year. Two enormous events, one annual datapoint, and no honest way to separate them.

The 2023 figure is what I can't explain. Twelve thousand is lower than 2017. Under the Taliban, with development aid collapsed, the banking system severed from the world, and a health system running on emergency humanitarian funding, this measure didn't just recover, it passed where it was before the republic fell. Maybe the aid-funded vertical programmes for vaccination, maternal care and nutrition are genuinely working, even as everything around them degrades. But I suspect the answer is duller than that: the data ends in 2023, the United States withdrew its assistance in 2025, and the frontline reporting on maternal, neonatal and child deaths since then is grim in a way no chart here reflects. None of that will show up in this series until 2027 or 2028. So I think this is mostly measurement lag, but I welcome alternative explanations from anyone better informed than me.

My larger error

What I got wrong was the rationale. My thesis was that material reality would constrain ideology: that a connected, educated, healthier Afghanistan would force the Taliban into compromise whether they liked it or not. And on things with immediate economic upside, like the internet, that's roughly what happened. On women and girls, it didn't, because I'd quietly assumed the regime would treat the costs of gender-based repression as prohibitive. It didn't. It looked at diplomatic isolation, frozen reserves, a collapsed economy and the loss of half its human capital, and paid the bill.

My error is more a failure of imagination, and of understanding the Taliban's incentives, than a forecasting error. I could build a reasonable mental model of the constraints. I couldn't imagine someone willing to simply swallow them.

A bald-faced, shameless attempt at doing it again

Having established that I'm bad at this, here are four falsifiable predictions for August 2031:

1. The ban on girls' secondary education is still in place, in substance if not in name. Partial re-openings, religious-school workarounds and province-level exceptions are likely; a genuine national restoration is not.

2. Enrolment doesn't recover, even if the ban is lifted. The female-teacher shortfall is the binding constraint, and it's now baked in for a decade regardless of policy.

3. Afghan health indicators visibly deteriorate in the data by 2029. Not because things get worse then, but because that's when 2025 shows up.

4. At least one Western government substantively normalises relations. The post-USAID pragmatism will endure, and migration management and counter-narcotics will drive national governments to re-engage.

The lesson I hope outlives the war

The Trojan War has been useful to humanity for three thousand years. It's a story compact enough to survive translation into every era that follows: a great power, a long war, a homecoming, trials and tribulations. Nolan's film means everyone has opinions about Ithaca this year, so with that in mind, I'd like Afghanistan to be added to the pantheon of timeless parables. That's in many ways why I've written this update.

The United States, the most powerful and influential hegemon in the history of humanity, could not remake Afghanistan. Trillions of dollars spent, countless lives lost.

And the Taliban cannot unmake Afghanistan by decree, and found that out in 48 hours when they switched off the internet and the banks stopped working.

Two ideologies, opposite directions, same wall. A country is not a project.

The people paying for the world absorbing these lessons are 2.4 million girls who did not go to school today and might never learn to read. That's the part I'd want a parable to carry, if we get one. Not what the superpower learned. Who was sacrificed on the altar of history.

I’ve semi recently had a realisation after a few people pointed it out to me: I’ve only ever worked with Founder CEOs. At first, I was incredulous, but looking back at my career I realised it’s true. I also realised that I’d been building a bit of a mental model for them and how they functioned.

Having now worked closely with at least five founders across the Effective Altruism/non-profit social impact space as their right-hand operations person, and with enough scar tissue to show for it, I lay out the framework I wish I'd had at the start: a way to categorise founder types and, more importantly, tips for working with each.

The two axes that matter ↕️↔️

Founders differ fundamentally along two dimensions:

X-axis: Source of Authority

• Domain Expertise. These founders derive credibility from deep technical knowledge or mastery of their field

• Strategic Vision. Founders who derive credibility from big-picture thinking and long-term organisational direction

Y-axis: Response to Uncertainty

• Trust-Building. Founders who, when uncertain, they delegate, seek input, and empower others

• Control-Seeking. Founder who, when uncertain, they centralise control, micromanage, and avoid delegation

These two dimensions create four distinct founder archetypes, each requiring different approaches.

The four founder types 4️⃣

⚠️

Disclaimer: I use made-up names to try keep each founder’s anonymity. If you know me personally, it’s probably still possible to figure out who’s who. Out of respect for each (and for me), please don’t try figure out who’s who.

The Hands-on Expert (High Expertise + Control-Seeking)

The archetype: This founder has deep domain expertise, often a PhD or years of specialised experience, but responds to uncertainty by tightening their grip on execution.

I worked with Taylor, who ran a consulting firm and held a doctorate in the exact services we sold. Clients literally came for Taylor's expertise, not anyone else's. Initially, Taylor gave me significant autonomy to handle operations and business development. But when we ventured into unfamiliar territory in which we were both figuring things out as we went along (e.g. marketing, sales processes, growth strategy), the micromanagement intensified dramatically.

Taylor would scrutinise my work in areas outside their expertise with the same rigour they applied to their own technical work. What they couldn't control through expertise, they tried to control through micromanagement. The irony was that their technical brilliance in one domain created blindness about their limitations in others.

💡

My advice: Build their confidence outside their zone of expertise and help translate their domain knowledge into organisational wins. They're micromanaging you because, at least in part, they don't trust themselves in unfamiliar territory. Your job is to help them fight their imposter syndrome while demonstrating that you can turn their expertise into something valuable and executable.

The Competent Delegator (High Expertise + Trust-Building)

The archetype: These founders combine domain mastery with the wisdom to know what they don't know. They handle uncertainty by building trust and empowering others.

I've worked with two separate founders who fit this mould: Jordan and Casey.

Jordan came from a science background but wasn't an expert in the non-profit's intervention. However, they recognised this gap immediately and worked relentlessly to close it. Within what I perceived to be only a few months, Jordan knew the intervention better than anyone in the organisation. They were highly analytical — spotting flaws in my work with surgical precision — but only became deeply involved in areas they deemed critical (legal risk, key hires). For everything else, Jordan trusted the team to execute.

Casey was perhaps the most paradoxical founder I've encountered. They'd started multiple projects independently and exhibited extensive experience in leading them. In areas core to their worldview and expertise, they exerted intense, almost obsessive scrutiny. But for execution details they deemed less critical? Complete autonomy, as long as you delivered results.

Casey taught me something crucial: founders can be both analytical and gut-driven, depending on what they perceive as high-stakes. They operate in a secret language of priorities, and your job is to learn that language.

💡

My advice: Prove competence early, then enjoy the autonomy they'll give you. These founders use task-based trust, so demonstrate you can deliver quality work, and they'll get out of your way. But mess up, and you'll find yourself back under scrutiny. The key is understanding which tasks they consider high-stakes versus low-stakes, because that determines their involvement level.

The Visionary Controller (High Vision + Control-Seeking)

The archetype: Clear strategic vision but poor tolerance for uncertainty or challenge. They respond to the unknown by doubling down on control.

In addition to founding a non-profit, Sam had studied grassroots development and social enterprise models extensively. They knew exactly what the organisation should become, and the vision was crystal clear in their mind. The problem? When that vision was questioned or when implementation hit messy reality, Sam became defensive.

Sam cared deeply about their "baby" and took challenges personally. Every strategic disagreement felt like an attack on their judgment. I learned quickly that political capital was finite and that I had to pick my battles carefully. Some hills weren't worth dying on.

💡

My advice: Learn their strategic language and frame everything through their vision. The key insight is that these founders need to feel their vision is being honoured, even when you're adapting it to reality. Don't challenge the destination; instead, propose alternative routes to get there. Master their vocabulary, understand their mental models, and translate your ideas into their framework. When you must spend political capital on reality-testing, do it sparingly and diplomatically.

The Empowering Visionary (High Vision + Trust-Building)

The archetype: Strong strategic vision combined with high trust in others. The most scalable founder type, but potentially vulnerable to blind spots.

What it looks like in practice: Michael is perhaps the most ambitious founder I've worked with. No challenge is too big; they're always thinking three moves ahead with grand aspirations for the future. Michael gave me more autonomy than any other founder.

Michael is highly analytical (even more so than Casey), but their pragmatism sometimes veers into tunnel vision. They're so focused on the long-term vision that short-term reality can become background noise. Ideas that align with the strategic vision get greenlit quickly — sometimes too quickly, without sufficient scrutiny of implementation challenges.

💡

My advice: Do the context absorption work to understand their long-term vision first, then reality-test with diplomatic care. These founders live in a future state that's hard to connect to present reality. Your job is to build the bridge between their tomorrow and our today, but spend your political capital on reality-testing very carefully, because challenging their optimism can land you in the doghouse fast.

What this framework teaches us

Beyond just categorisation, this framework reveals something important about the right-hand role: there is no universal playbook for working with founders. The strategies that work brilliantly with a Competent Delegator will backfire spectacularly with a Visionary Controller.

The control-seeking founders (Hands-on Expert and Visionary Controller) require careful political capital management and strategic communication. You need to pick your battles, speak their language, and recognise when to push back versus when to execute loyally.

The trust-building founders (Competent Delegator and Empowering Visionary) require early competence signals and then consistent delivery. They'll give you rope, just don't hang yourself with it.

The expertise-driven founders (Hands-on Expert and Competent Delegator) need you to demonstrate domain knowledge or at least deep curiosity. They respect technical chops.

The vision-driven founders (Visionary Controller and Empowering Visionary) need you to connect with their strategic thinking. They respect systems-level understanding.

A final thought on founder-operator dynamics

The most valuable lesson from mapping these five founders isn't the taxonomy itself, it's the recognition that founder behaviour follows some semi-predictable patterns.

When I started my second role, I was frustrated that my first-founder strategies weren't working. I thought I was the problem. Now I realise I was just using the wrong playbook for a different game.

If you're considering a right-hand role—Chief of Staff, Director of Operations, or any founder's-right-hand position—spend your first month mapping your founder onto these axes. It'll save you months of interpersonal friction and help you understand which battles to fight, which language to speak, and which strategies actually work. I can also highly recommend ‘The First 90 Days’ by Michael D. Watkins as a thought-provoking and useful read before starting in such an influential role.

The right-hand role is not about being universally competent. It's about being situationally adaptive. And adaptation requires pattern recognition.

I was ready to absolutely tear into Water2.

After reading Entrepreneur.com's profile of the UK water filter start-up co-owned by Bear Grylls, one detail had me properly fuming: their Fluoride Filter Add-On. According to founder Charles Robinson, this product was born from Facebook comment sections where customers were "crying out for the product, almost begging to give us their money for it."

My immediate reaction was visceral (and probably a bit sanctimonious, tbh). How could a company sell something that removes a proven beneficial substance from drinking water? Fluoride prevents tooth decay, particularly benefiting children and lower-income communities. In my mind, the anti-fluoride crowd are typically the same folks worried about chemtrails and 5G towers.

I was prepared to write about how Water2 had failed to maintain a basic "Do No Harm" principle: companies should at minimum ensure their products don't actively hurt customers. I had my narrative locked and loaded, then I made the rather inconvenient mistake of actually diving deeper into the evidence.

The assumption that wasn’t

Like most people with a passing interest in public health, my position on fluoridation was straightforward: it's safe, effective, and the science is settled. The opponents are conspiracy theorists; the supporters follow evidence-based medicine. So when I saw Water2 selling fluoride removal, my brain filed it under obviously-harmful-snake-oil-being-peddled-to-gullible-wellness-types.

Before putting pen to paper, I wanted robust sources to back me up. I turned to our own work at Ambitious Impact (previously known as Charity Entrepreneurship), where I knew my colleagues did some research into whether it’d be worth to recommend salt fluoridation for tooth decay prevention as a non-profit start-up idea. These are some of the most trustworthy, thorough and smart researchers I know, so I was taken aback by their conclusion: "Our view is that scaling up salt fluoridation in LMICs is not an idea worth recommending to charity founders at this moment."

I had to know more.

The science

Here's what completely upended my smug assumptions:

Fluoride might be harmful at any level. Unlike vitamins that are beneficial at low doses but harmful at high ones, fluoride may follow the "heavy metals model", where any exposure carries some risk. AIM notes that fluoride is "not an essential mineral" and "our body does not need it to perform any physiological functions." It might be more like lead than like vitamin D.

The risk-benefit calculation is murky. AIM’s cost-effectiveness modelling suggested fluoride's potential negative effects could be "greater than the positive intended effect" on dental health.

The neurotoxicity evidence is genuinely concerning. Multiple systematic reviews found associations between fluoride exposure and reduced IQ in children. Some evidence suggests effects beginning at levels close to those used in water fluoridation. From the AIM report:

In our view of the evidence, there is a non-negligible chance that exposure, to even small amounts of fluoride, during pregnancy and childhood may lead to neurological damage, with a potential population-wide reduction in IQ of one-two points. While the evidence in this space is largely of low quality, and may be highly biased, we find this risk of doing harm quite concerning.

So much for settled science.

Some lessons from getting the wrong end of the stick

All this genuinely gave me pause to think. Part of me enjoys the moments when my thinking is actively being changed (the feeling of becoming better informed is always nice), but it’s also internally embarrassing to some degree. My final thoughts:

1. I will still drink fluoridated water

This uncertainty genuinely shook my confidence, but it didn't flip my position entirely. The concerning evidence mostly involves higher exposure levels, and the dental health benefits remain well-documented. So while I now think the science on negative effects is in flux, that’s not to say that the science on positive effects is also unsettled. While AIM’s report above does make the comparison to heavy metals, we’re not actually talking about heavy metals, so we don’t need a lead-in-turmeric-level freak-out. My money is still on the “fluoridation is likely net beneficial” horse, until I see some concrete evidence to the contrary.

2. Someone really needs to sort this out

The fluoride question shouldn't be this ambiguous in 2025. If there's genuine scientific uncertainty about a substance millions consume daily, that seems worth resolving definitively rather than leaving it to Facebook comment sections. The documented delays in publishing government research and the harassment of scientists studying fluoride neurotoxicity are particularly concerning.

3. My “Do No Harm” critique still stands (somewhat)

Yes, I misjudged the science. But, I still doubt Water2 arrived at their decision through careful evaluation. Their explanation (Facebook comments and customer demand) suggests they saw market opportunity rather than conducted thoughtful analysis.

Responsible business practice in scientific uncertainty should include acknowledging complexity rather than oversimplifying for marketing, investing in research rather than exploiting uncertainty, and transparently communicating evidence to customers.

It's the difference between "customers want this, so we'll build it" and "customers want this, so let's understand whether it actually helps them."

4. Market solutions can be a good hedge against uncertainty

Instead of blanket approaches like Utah's complete fluoridation ban, having market solutions like Water2's filter might be a sensible hedge against scientific uncertainty.

Yes, it's unequal—only people with disposable income can afford to opt out. But when experts genuinely disagree, giving people choice seems more reasonable than imposing one-size-fits-all policies. At least people can make their own reasonable risk assessments (e.g. if you’re pregnant, it’d be very reasonable if you wanted to buy Water2’s filter for the duration of your pregnancy).

A different conclusion from the one I expected

Perhaps the most valuable lesson is about intellectual humility. I started this research absolutely convinced I was right, armed with what I thought was settled science.

The evidence forced me to conclude I didn't know what I thought I knew.

This happens more often than we'd like to admit. Since I began my career in global health and development I’ve encountered this repeatedly, changing my mind a number of times about different interventions that seem obviously beneficial until you dig deeper.

The solution isn't paralysing relativism where all positions are equally valid. It's developing better self-questioning habits, reading deeper and more widely, and maintaining enough humility to change our minds when evidence demands it. Often, the most responsible thing is admitting you're an idiot.

The other day I found myself at a convenience store in Marylebone station, searching for a protein bar to help get through the day without succumbing to unhealthier alternatives. I’m watching my calories to drop my body-fat percentage, so I wanted to be somewhat conscious of my intake that day.

I was faced with a wall of choices, and absolutely no way to know which one gave me the best bang for my buck — both in terms of the most protein for the least calories, but also the most protein for the least money.

A quick search online only returned uninformative taste tests and thinly disguised marketing listicles. So, I fired up a spreadsheet.

What’s the metric?

I focused on two key measurements:

1. Protein Density — protein per calorie (protein per 100g ÷ calories per 100g), revealing which bars provide maximum protein with minimum calories.

2. Protein Economy — protein per weight-adjusted British Pound (£). I use weight-adjusted prices because price and the bar’s size are probably linked, and many bars are pretty light (e.g. 45g at the lightest vs 64g at the heaviest).

I then pulled a bunch of nutritional data and price data from manufacturers’ websites for 42 protein bars, specifically the following brands:

• Barebells

• Eat Natural

• Grenade

• Huel

• KIND

• MyProtein

• Nākd

• Nutramino

• Warrior

Armed with the data and these metrics I thought I’d put together a Gartner Magic Quadrant-style graphic. After some sparring with Claude, I settled on the following:

1. Pound for Pound Champs — Excellent protein-to-calorie ratio at reasonable prices. The ideal combination.

2. Finance Bro Fundamentals — Overpriced protein-delivery devices, but still get the job done.

3. Swole Survivors — Modest nutrition at economy prices, suitable for occasional consumption.

4. Ego Lifters — Below-average nutrition at above-average prices, generally best avoided.

Check out my quad(rant) gains

Ok, so maybe I’ve had a little too much fun with the names.

I first came across Gartner’s Magic Quadrants back in my management consulting days. They were useful for my purposes back then and a quick and insightful way of comparing options. In future, I may adapt the below to add a function that lets you add your own data so you can compare whatever protein bar you find out there in the wild.

As an avid consumer of Huel, I was surprised and somewhat disappointed their bars didn’t perform better. However, I was glad that Barebells or Grenade take the trophy, as they by far have the best flavours.

If you want more protein bar content (which I guess now is an official category), check out Dr Mike wax brutal.

Elisa Allen, Vice President of Programmes for PETA UK, wrote to The Sly Old Fox Pub in Birmingham asking them to change their name to ‘The Clever Old Fox’. She claims that:

The words we use matter, and perpetuating negative stereotypes about foxes makes it easier to justify hunting or poisoning these unique and intelligent beings.

I don't think robust evidence exists to support Elisa’s claim. Specifically, I don’t think robust evidence exists linking a reduction in negative language to a reduction in animal mistreatment. I'm happy to be corrected.

I also don't think there's any theory for change behind this initiative, and if there is, I don't think the leap of faith between ‘pub changes name’ to ‘foxes saved’ will stand up to scrutiny. Again, happy for PETA to put me in my place.

The broader point here, however, has become painfully clear to me in the weeks following the US election: we, as progressives, are a laughing stock.

Trump didn’t win because his supporters flooded the streets or because Democrats stayed home. He flat out, fair and square, shifted swathes of people to vote for him. Name any demographic, he got it. Anyone on my side of politics who chooses to blame the uneducated rednecks or racism needs to wake 👏🏻 up 👏🏻

I accept that during the campaign Kamala Harris didn’t mention gender, or trans people, or pronouns, or any of the woke playthings that the Right likes to throw in our faces. However — and I really can’t put it any other way — do you think Kamala just fell out of a coconut tree? The reason she told Oprah she’d commit cold-blooded murder if anyone broke into her house and became BFFs with Liz Cheney was precisely out of a necessity to disassociate from the toxic, batshit, laughable brand that progressive politics has become.

We’re officially out of touch. We fell asleep at the wheel. Our views are no longer representative. We’re everything they said we were: a bunch of elitist, snobbish, holier-than-thou, feelings-over-facts, latte-sipping, petition-signing, avocado-toast-munching, virtue-signalling, addiction-normalising, victim-complex-ridden Chardonnay socialists. Chin-chin.

Last night, I put together some thoughts on signals I was on the lookout for this US election.

TL;DR – Everything looked bad for Harris. Trump has won.

1. AP called Virginia for Harris at 4:42 am GMT, almost five hours after polls closed. By contrast, AP called Ohio for Trump at 2:08 am GMT. Virginia should've been an easy pick-up for Harris, and they also count quickly, so the fact that it took over two additional hours for AP to called it wasn't a good sign for Harris.

2. Harris lost Florida by 13 points. I mentioned last night that if Harris lost by 11 points or more, that'd be bad news for her. Florida was always going to be Trump country, but such a huge margin suggests men got off the couch on Election Day and truned up for Trump.

3. Harris lost Northampton county in Pennsylvania by 2.23 points. Given the size of the population in Pennsylvania with Puerto Rican descent, I really thought the "island of garbage" stunt would mobilise them. However, Puerto Ricans either weren't bothered that much or still didn't feel incensed to vote for Harris.

4. Marginal Biden pick-ups in 2020 that Harris lost or is losing:

   1. Harris lost Baldwin, Georgia by 2.22 points.

   2. Harris lost Bucks, Pennsylvania by 1.66 points

   3. As of right now, Harris has a lead of only 1.60 points in Maricopa, Arizona. This is too thin, and even if she wins Maricopa it might not be enough to carry the state.

   4. As of right now, Harris is losing Washoe, Nevada by 2.26 points.

5. The Economist had an interesting tally going that showed the swing from 2020 for key demographics. Almost everyone swinged away from the Democrats.

Also, Maine voted to keep their existing flag. Bad news all round 😞

It is 9:30am GMT on Wed, 6 Nov. Trump's picked up 267 electoral votes already. Even if by some cosmic chance Harris picked up every other mainland state, Alaska has the three electoral votes Trump needs. Alaska has only voted for a Democrat once in its entire history.

Trump will be president. Here we go again.

Below I list a few of the signals I'm watching for tonight as the US goes to the polls in what I think is the most consequential election in recent history with perhaps the largest tail risk in certainly my lifetime.

I wrote this quickly and mostly to get my thoughts in order. A lot of the below is a mix of things from here and here, and also brain farts of my own.

Virginia and Ohio

If Virginia isn't called for Harris soon after the polls close (midnight GMT) → good for Trump

If Ohio isn't called for Trump soon after the polls close (12:30 am GMT) → good for Harris

How badly does Harris lose Florida?

Harris is unlikely to pick up Florida, so it's more about how hard her landing will be. Florida might get called soon after polls close at 1 am GMT.

If Harris loses by seven points or less → good news

If Harris loses by 11 points or more → less good

Speedy Michigan

If Trump picks up Michigan, it'll be very hard for Harris to come out on top. Michigan may be one of the fastest states to complete the count (they started before election day with early votes), so we might get a result soon after polls close at 1 am GMT.

Curious counties

At the last election, some counties were won comfortably by the candidate that also carried that county's state, despite the margin by which they won the state being much smaller.

For example, Trump won Cabarrus in North Carolina by 9.45 points over Biden. Not too shabby. However, Trump only won the state by 1.35 points over Biden. This means that if he performs particularly badly in Cabarrus this election, that might spell out bad news for the statewide result. In fact, winning Cabarrus by anything less than 8.10 points over Harris would be bad news for Trump.

Below I tabulate some key counties and the minimum either Harris or Trump needs.

County & State 2020 County & State winner Min county margin that would suggest same winner in 2024 Baldwin, Georgia Democrat 1.06 Cabarrus, North Carolina Republican 8.10 Bucks, Pennsylvania Democrat 3.22 Maricopa, Arizona Democrat 1.87 Washoe, Nevada Democrat 2.13

I'm also keeping a big eye on Northampton County, Pennsylvania. The county is 16% Hispanic, and most voters are Puerto Rican. Biden won here in 2020 by 0.72 points, so if Harris is pulling bigger numbers then we know the "island of garbage" stuff did some damage.

Do the "prediction" markets freak out?

I think the fact that Polymarket has Trump's odds at above 60% is laughable. The smart people with money in these markets will wait to sell until the last possible moment. If it's looking good for Harris, we'll see a fire sale Trump's odds on those markets will plummet.

Will Maine get a new flag?

One of Maine's five ballot initiatives is to decide whether to replace its existing flag with a slightly stylised version of its original flag.

An Act to Restore the Former State of Maine Flag, Do you favor making the former state flag, replaced as the official flag of the State in 1909 and commonly known as the Pine Tree Flag, the official flag of the State?

It's nice to see Mainers keeping themselves grounded with a good ol' vexillological debate.

Human Resource Management is deeply misunderstood. You could say HR suffers from bad PR. Robin Kramar and Jawad Syed’s explanation is that:

1. HR deals with human behaviour, an inherently complex and unpredictable beast at the best of times.

2. There is a wide variety of HR policy instruments and practices, making it difficult to navigate and implement consistently.

3. Even when implemented, the success of HR initiatives is often challenging to evaluate accurately.

4. Unlike other business areas like accounting, HR lacks globally accepted professional standards, leading many managers to mistakenly believe that HR is simply common sense.

Another way to think about why HR is so misunderstood is that HR is “everything people,” and people are complicated. Stefanie Greve put it in such terms along with the graphic below which will live rent-free in my brain forever.

Because the inevitable automation and artificial intelligence acceleration cannot, almost definitionally, replace jobs that require high EQ and a nuanced understanding of human relationships, HR is too important for it to succumb to confusion.

Before I jump to my own view of what HR is, let’s address what HR is not. I’ve noticed that people pigeonhole HR into one of three boxes:

1. “HR exists to advocate for staff” — I mean, yes, but mostly in situations where managers have overstepped their bounds or some harm has been inflicted on an employee. But to confuse HR with your union rep is a mistake. It’s best to think of HR as the “referee” or the system that allows issues to progress towards resolution.

2. “HR exists to create more unnecessary red tape” — Modernity invented HR, and a layer of procedure inevitably came with it. Yes, it's added bureaucracy (it'd be disingenuous to claim otherwise). Still, when done well, these systems bring order and clarity to otherwise messy human relations. It's a bit like traffic lights—annoying, yes, but imagine the chaos without them.

3. “HR exists as a two-faced puppet for profit-maximising executives” — HR is an organisational arm controlled by leadership. Still, it is too cynical a view to say that HR is simply a capitalist bulldozer with a friendly face. Often, employees' interests are aligned with those of their employer. When there is gross misconduct at the workplace, it's in everyone's interest to contain the situation and not exacerbate the harm caused.

With that out of the way, let's turn to my view of HR.

HR’s long game: Productivity

Let’s dehumanise human resources for the sake of an explanation. Let’s think of an organisation’s people as a jukebox: you feed it some inputs, and it spits out some outputs. The obvious input is money, in the form of people’s salaries, which leads to those people building widgets or providing services.

Simply put, HR's role is to increase the jukebox's productivity. There are only two ways to do this: decrease inputs or increase outputs. I know how this sounds, so bear with me a little longer.

How can we measure the jukebox's productivity? Let's put some numbers on it. Say a factory produces 10,000 widgets (O) and has 100 workers (L) who are each paid $1,600 a month (W). So, the total labour cost is $160,000 a month (T). From this example, we can derive the unit labour cost (i.e. the cost incurred to produce one widget), which is $16 a month (P).

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Output (O) = 10,000 widgets
Labour (L) = 100 workers
Wages (W) = $1,600

Total Labour Cost (T) = L * W = 100 * 1,600 = $160,000

Unit Cost of Labour (P) = T / O = 160,000 / 10,000 = $16

HR’s task is to reduce $16 a month to a smaller number.

HR’s role is to reduce unit labour costs.

HR’s role is to improve productivity.

The many levers behind productivity

At this point, you probably think I’m some sort of Thatcherite anarcho-capitalist and are readying your pitchfork. I don’t blame you. In my defence, the ways in which HR achieves lower unit labour costs are varied and state-of-the-art HR teams implement creative and innovative solutions that go beyond pay cuts, redundancies and hiring freezes.

For example, great HR teams can implement salary sacrifice schemes that allow staff to make pre-tax deductions. This effectively lowers their gross salaries, reducing their income tax and, importantly, lowering their employer’s tax bill. This means that the total amount spent on employing staff decreases, thus lowering the unit cost of labour without asking people to do overtime or cutting their pay.

Another example involves sick leave. While there is undoubtedly a baseline level of sick leave that is inevitable for all employers to experience, it can reach excessive levels. Outstanding HR teams can monitor sick leave data and identify individuals or times of the year causing spikes in total sick leave. It could be as simple as tracking people's accrued paid annual leave and encouraging them to take it when too much has been accumulated. More frequent rest breaks are an evidence-based way to avoid burnout (and the associated sick leave that comes with it) which effectively increases the jukebox’s output (as people on sick leave don’t produce anything).

A final example involves staff growth and professional development. The simplest version of this is technology, which consistently proves an existential threat to workers. Top HR teams would’ve seen the arrival of ChatGPT and immediately started thinking about upskilling or embedding the tool within other teams that could most benefit from it. Similarly, people’s performance evaluations should yield a set of improvement areas which can be shared among several people. HR should be actively monitoring this and spearheading professional development to ensure these gaps are plugged in and people can rise to their full potential.

HR can be transformational

There is a certain power in the fact that HR teams can rally around one overarching goal. Divided attention and trying to optimise for too many things often lead to optimising for nothing at all. So, when done well, HR can be a transformational force within an organisation and serve as a key source of comparative advantage. But we can’t achieve that unless HR teams, organizational leadership, and, most importantly, staff are all on the same page about the purpose of HR.

I moved to London in early April 2020. Just before that, the UK government announced the first COVID lockdown, and in fact, the same day I arrived, Airbnb restricted UK bookings to key workers and essential stays because of COVID, which meant off the bat we had no accommodation. Maybe this initial chaos and the permacrisis that ensued anchored my impression of Britain in a way I can’t unsee, but I also think Britain has a natural state that makes it feel like a soap opera on fast-forward. From least to most off-the-rails, I collate below my humble anthropological observations.

Larry the Cat 😼

Let’s start easy: in 2011, Downing Street adopted a cat, appointing him to the adorable but no less insane position of Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office. I’m a patriot, so I love cats as much as the next guy, but I know that not only would this idea not have occurred to me had I been working in Downing Street, but if it had, I would’ve overthought the shit out of it and it never would’ve happened (”What would the public say?” “Will they think we’ve finally lost the plot?”). In classic British style, everybody thought this was a perfectly reasonable thing to do, including the fact that police officers now knock on the famous No 10 front door so that an employed human adult opens the door to let Larry in the house.

The Bale of Straw 🌉

When London’s Millennium Bridge opened, it wobbled. That’s weird, but nowhere near as weird as the fact that the 900-year-old charity that is responsible for the bridge had to, by law, hang a bale of straw off the bridge due to repair works in October 2023 because that’s the way to alert river traffic of the reduced headroom. It’s right there in clause 36.2 of the Port of London Thames Byelaws. This isn’t exactly what I picture when I think of British pomp and circumstance, but it also has an air of quintessential Britishness that I can almost hear Gary Oldman in his Winston Churchill voice say “get on with it man! Just hang a bale of straw off it!”.

The Goat Major 🐐

Because of the UK military’s unpreparedness for conflict of any scale, naturally in December 2023 Grant Shapps, the then defence secretary, steadfastly led us to accept a modern reality: it’s time for army soldiers to have beards. Nested in that story, however, was the even more deranged fact that up until that moment of Shappsian political courage there was only one member of the British army exempt from the no-beards edict:

The Goat Major—actually a corporal—who tends the Royal Welsh regiment’s goat is allowed to have facial hair. So is the goat, which is technically a lance-corporal. (Britain is like this.) Everyone else is expected to be clean-shaven.

I’m sorry, I’m going to need more than a parenthetical Britain-is-so-random aside to process the fact that we’ve institutionalised a goat with a rank and a handler with special beard privileges. Don’t get me wrong, the goat is grand, but together with Larry the Cat we’re only one anthropomorphised pig away from Britain becoming a real-life re-enactment of Animal Farm.

The Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Chiltern Hundreds and of the Manor of Northstead

Members of the UK House of Commons can’t resign.

Alex c’mon, what do you mean they can’t resign? Don’t they just get up and say “Not for me” and that’s it?

Nope. Since the House resolution of 2 March 1624, MPs are prohibited from resigning their seat. The reasoning is rooted in the belief that an MP, once elected, holds their seat as a matter of public trust. The idea is that the seat belongs to the electorate, not to the MP personally, and therefore an MP cannot simply give it up. It’s one of those quirky old-timey things that made sense at the time, like “Wouldn’t it be a wild ride if we had a well-regulated militia?”

So how did BJ skedaddle back in Jun 2023? Well, MPs can ask to be appointed to one of two unpaid offices of the Crown retained from antiquity for this purpose only – Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Chiltern Hundreds or Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Manor of Northstead.

Yup, Britain is indeed like this.

Submarine Deathwish Letters 💌

Vigil was all the rage in 2021, but I personally didn’t think it lived up to the hype. Despite that, I’m forever grateful to it for introducing me to what I call the UK’s submarine deathwish letters. On their first day in office, the Prime Minister pens (by hand!) a letter of resort for each of the UK’s four Trident missile-armed Vanguard-class submarines secretly roaming the depths of the world’s oceans. In the letters are the Prime Minister’s orders to the submarine commanders in the event of total nuclear annihilation, chosen from a set of four options:

1. Retaliate with nuclear weapons

2. Do not retaliate

3. Use your own judgment

4. Place the submarine under an allied country's command, if possible (such as the US or Australia).

The above has become a hilarious albeit morbid conversation starter in my arsenal, and I can imagine it would perform swimmingly (or horrendously, dunno) as a dating app opening line.

Maybe it’s because I’m the guy who thinks that wills are stupid and that dead people surrendered their rights when they, you know, died, such that they should not be able to affect any outcomes for the rest of us. But I find it jarring that any hope remaining after a devastating nuclear attack could be extinguished by the wishes of a dead PM who most of his population probably didn’t vote for.

Wack.

The half-hour when no-one knows who the PM is 🤔

For thirty to forty minutes every time the government changes, British intelligence sweats bullets. After the newly elected PM and the monarch are done snogging, there is a short period during which the question “who is the Prime Minister right now?” doesn’t have an obvious answer.

Although the time between quitting and kissing is brief—almost always under an hour—that is still too long for intelligence services who, as one insider puts it, really like to know “who’s actually running the country at a particular minute of the day”. That is just in case, says Gus O’Donnell, a former cabinet secretary, there is a plane “heading towards Canary Wharf… and we wanted to shoot it down”. So fudges are made: the outgoing PM retains some powers until the new PM has kissed the kingly hand; in extremis a new PM can be anointed over the phone.

The things we do to satisfy the labial demands of our God-anointed regents.

Is the mayor of High Wycombe fatter? ⚖️

Accountability is public shaming in a business suit. Nowhere is this better embodied than in High Wycombe, a 75,000-strong English town northwest of London. The people of this town take public service and corruption seriously. Do you think the town’s mayor may be wining and dining on the taxpayer’s purse? Well, the people of High Wycombe (Wycombrians? Wycombeites? Wycomptonites?) have it all figured out: weigh the mayor at the beginning of each year. Mayor fatter? Mayor badder. The scales of justice have never felt so real.

Swan Upping 🦢

No list of the unhinged is complete without some mention of ornithological micromanagement. Charles III — or as he’s more colloquially referred to among us residents of this great kingdom, the Seigneur of the Swans — must, among other heavenly duties, ensure that every swan, right down to its downy offspring, remains unblemished and accounted for. So, His Majesty enlists a flotilla of ornately clad swanherds who embark on a cygnine census of each feathery denizen of the realm’s rivers: they count the swans. They boat around the Thames, pull swans out of the water (or “up” them out, I guess), make health assessments, and tally them. This, of course, because of the Crown’s hereditary right to claim ownership of all mute swans. Rule, Britannia!

While mindlessly scrolling through job descriptions to see if any sparked my curiosity (I’m not actively looking, but it’s interesting to see what’s out there), I came across something I hadn’t seen before — a reasonably well-known animal welfare organisation asking in their application form whether candidates were vegan.

It struck me as odd. The recruiter in me thought they were using this question as an easy way to screen people out (link to this). I also thought they might lose too many candidates by making this a simplistic yes/no question. After all, some great candidates might want to be vegan but can’t for whatever reasons, and other people (like me) are too weak-willed to take the next step from vegetarianism, but that doesn’t mean I’m worse at my job than a vegan version of me would be.

Then, the lawyer in me reared his head in—can they even ask this? Short answer: yes! If that surprises you, read on.

Veganism is a Protected Characteristic

The UK’s Equality Act 2010 protects characteristics such as religion or belief from discrimination. Notably, in 2020, the employment tribunal concluded that ethical veganism qualifies as a philosophical belief and thus is protected under the Equality Act. This means ethical vegans are protected from discrimination based on their veganism in employment, education, and providing goods and services (yay!).

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Ethical veganism?
Ethical veganism is motivated by concerns about animal rights and welfare, extending beyond diet to avoid all forms of animal exploitation (e.g. horse riding). This goes beyond the more commonly known dietary veganism, which focuses on the health benefits, or environmental veganism, which aims to reduce the environmental impact of animal agriculture by avoiding animal products. Of course, these things aren’t mutually exclusive, but it is essential to distinguish them for the sake of this post.

Given ethical veganism is a protected characteristic, can employers use it when recruiting for roles? At the end of the day, all recruitment is discrimination in the purest sense of the word. You're trying to sort the goats from the sheep. Can we discriminate based on whether some goats have a particular ethical stance? 🐐

Genuine Occupational Requirement

Let's take two roles: Campaigns & Engagement Manager and Bookkeeper. The former leads the organisation’s corporate and campaign efforts to secure cage-free policies from food companies, and the latter manages and records the organisation’s financial transactions.

Do the requirements to perform well in one of these jobs require that the candidate be a vegan? I'd argue that for the Bookkeeper role, the answer is unequivocally ‘no’, with a caveat that maybe a non-vegan in that role won't succeed because they won't fit with the broader organisational culture (although another way of putting that is that colleagues will be intolerant towards the person, which brings a different host of issues).

Because the Campaigns & Engagement Manager is a public-facing role where persuasion plays a key part, there's a robust argument that being vegan is necessary. A non-vegan in the role might lack the moral authority to advocate for cage-free policies, being on the back foot at every turn, which would take a toll on their performance.

So ask yourself: can I make a defensible argument that not being vegan would hinder the candidate’s performance, such that being vegan is a genuine occupational requirement of the role? This is why women's shelters can select female support workers and discriminate against male candidates. It's reasonable that certain niche jobs require a specific profile. For another explanation about this, check out Acas.

Let them eat (gay) cake

What if you were gung-ho and didn't care about staying within the genuine occupational requirement framework I outlined above? What if you wanted your Bookkeeper to be vegan as well because you crave those cult-y vibes? If you're in the UK, you might be in luck.

We had our own gay cake case in 2018—Lee v Ashers Baking Company Limited. The Supreme Court decided that a bakery did not discriminate against a customer by refusing to make a cake with a message supporting gay marriage because the bakery's refusal was based on the message itself, not on the customer's sexual orientation. The court emphasised that the law protects individuals from being treated unfairly due to their own characteristics, not the beliefs of the business owners.

The Employment Tribunal, in the 2020 case I linked above, applied this principle to conclude that discrimination claims should focus on the protected characteristics of the person alleging discrimination, not those of the discriminator.

In our case, candidates are not being discriminated against because of something they have but because of something the potential employer has. Candidates might be able to claim discrimination if they also had a protected characteristic, but following a meat-eating or vegetarian diet hasn't and likely won't be upheld as a protected characteristic. One important exception that I won't go into is if someone can't be a vegan because of a disability.

Bring on the vegans

So all in all, while it might seem a bit on the nose to actively screen out job applicants based on whether they’re vegan, and while that might land you in some hot water in the court of public opinion, it seems that (at least in the UK) it’s a reasonably safe stance to take. Personally, I would still only do so for roles where there’s a defensible genuine occupational requirement that passes a common sense test, not only because it’s a legally well-grounded path but also because having a work culture where only a specific type of person is accepted sounds a bit on the toxic side to me.

There are two ideas here, both with which I agree, but they are connected in a way I hadn’t realised until recently.

On one side is the mantra that organisations should aspire to be teams, not families. The former focuses on performance and achieving collective goals, while the latter implies inseverable ties and focuses on maximising the wrong thing. Families try to ensure everyone gets a fair go and optimise for stability (e.g. chores are divided evenly, toys are shared, and if there’s only enough money for one ice cream then no-one gets any ice cream). Conversely, teams roll out of bed because of a sense of shared responsibility in striving towards objectives everyone on the team agrees are important. Decisions that set the team back in this quest aren’t and shouldn’t be well received, such as keeping someone on despite demonstrated poor performance.

All this is an easy sell for those who run organisations. But if you’re not in that position and are still sceptical, consider the view that organisations that self-describe as “close-knit” or ”like a big family” may be trying to manipulate you.

Some leaders try to sell the workplace as a foster “family” to create loyalty and belonging. They like to think of their workplaces as families and sell it as such. They use this metaphor to foster a sense of loyalty and belonging among their employees.

But this can have serious drawbacks for their happiness, productivity, and even their morality. When work becomes family, the lines between personal and professional, work and life, blur. Employees may feel pressured to conform, sacrifice, or compromise for the sake of the “family”. They may also lose sight of their own goals, values, and boundaries.

The second idea is more novel: a repudiation of the “bring your whole self to work” trope. Similarly to the “our team is like a family” platitude, this starts innocently enough — colleagues shouldn’t feel pressured to oppress their identity, and teams work better when they’re transparently diverse. It's an admirable goal, but as Bartleby points out, “any idea that covers so much ground is bound to have holes in it, and this one would make a colander blush.”

The qualm here is similar to the team = family issue. There are characteristics about all of us that we purposely dial down at work because our better senses prevail in the pursuit of the team’s collective objectives. I may get the urge to fire up Steam in the middle of the day and dominate some noobs in Age of Empires VI (jk, I’m barely Silver III), but I shoo away this urge as I still have more clicking to do in Asana for the next 3 hours. Further, I’d argue it’s disingenuous for organisations to ask their staff to bring their whole selves to work. Bartleby puts it better than I can:

Any job that involves a uniform is by definition asking employees to subsume their personalities, not express them. When times are tough or performance is shoddy, an employee is an individual second and a line item in the budget first. If the circumstances require it, he will be asked to leave and take his whole self with him.

The link between these two ideas should be clear now. Asking team members to bring their whole selves to work is akin to asking them to treat each other as family. It’s a harmful distraction from what people are there to achieve, hopelessly trying to merge the Venn diagram of work and life which has worked pretty well for us so far. I suspect that the non-profit sector, where I currently work, is at most risk of falling into these traps due to its propensity to market itself as a warm and fuzzy antidote to the private sector’s hostile and fiercely competitive forces. Non-profits are trying to solve problems all too important to allow themselves to succumb to these fallacies.

I work in Operations Management, and over the years I’ve encountered many tea leaf readings of what this means. It’s always been uncertain where Ops Management ends, and while we can probably all agree that buying groceries and cooking for people is a step too far, the grey area before that is still quite wide. For example, is calendar management included in Ops Management?

In this post, I collate some of the definitions of Ops Management that have helped me crystallise the concept in my head, and I give my view on the important distinction between an Ops Manager and a Personal Assistant, which in itself helps clarify what Ops Management is.

Firstly, this year I came across the best visual description of what we do:

Though it took Sadie years to admit this to Sam, Marx did prove incredibly useful that summer. No, Marx wasn’t a game designer. He wasn’t an ace programmer, like Sadie, and he couldn’t draw, like Sam. But he did almost everything else for them, and his contributions ranged from the pedestrian, but necessary, to the creatively essential. Marx organized workflow, so Sadie and Sam were more aware of what the other was doing and what they needed to be doing. He made long lists of supplies they would need. He was more than liberal with his credit card—they always needed more memory and storage, and they were regularly burning out graphics cards—and he must have made fifty trips to the large computer store in Central Square that summer. He opened a bank account, and an LLC, Go, Ichigo, Go. He arranged for them to pay taxes (which saved them money in the short term by making their business purchases tax-free), and if, at some point, they needed to hire people, which he knew they would, he set them up for that, too. He made sure everyone ate, hydrated, and slept (at least a little), and he kept their workspaces clean and free of chaos.

I was taken aback when I first read this passage from Gabrielle Zevin’s ‘Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow’. It was almost like someone was holding up a mirror to me.

Marx’s role in the book is that of a ‘producer’, which when you google it, isn’t all that dissimilar from the role of an ‘operations manager’. There’s a lot of vision-execution and behind-the-scenes work that falls to the producer, all in an effort to give the “creative” space to do what he or she does best. There’s an emphasis on logistics, support and turning inputs into outputs.

I believe you needn’t read anything else to understand Ops Management and its importance within organisations, especially early-stage ones. But let’s dig a little deeper.

Some quick back and forth with Gemini suggests the original idea of ‘manufacturing management’ comes from Adam Smith in reference to the ‘things’ that make manufacturing more efficient (e.g. labour specialisation). This became ‘operations management’ in the 20th century to encompass service industries, and a century later the Effective Altruism movement started using it almost ad nauseum (which is how I came across the term for the first time).

You’ll notice EA’s expansive definition of the term:

People in operations roles act as multipliers, maximising the productivity of others in the organisation via building systems that keep the organisation functioning effectively at a high level.

The breadth is well-meaning, intending to capture a whole swath of functions that otherwise need to be individually categorised (e.g. not much else ties HR and event logistics together). However, I tend to agree with Joseph Lamien in that the breadth of the term risks dilution and that there’s unexplored value in zooming in on the trees in the forest. His point about operations managers vs personal assistants is a great one:

I have seen a few pieces of writing within EA that conflate operations work and personal assistant work, and I want to prevent that from happening. I’ve also seen multiple job postings titled as operations managers that list personal assistant-type tasks. My stance is this: in certain scenarios you could make a reasonable argument that a personal assistant falls within the operations team/department, but in general we should not be conflating PA work with operations work. An operations manager should be creating/designing systems and processes, optimizing existing processes, establishing new processes, and generally helping business flow smoothly. An operations manager job generally shouldn’t include updating social media pages or handling someone else's emails/calendar/travel schedule.

I’ve also seen this conflation in posts within EA, but most notably, I’ve seen it in job ads. Recently, someone sent me an open Chief of Staff role at a high-growth start-up in case I was interested in applying (won’t name and shame, but I’ve archived the webpage in case you don’t believe me). Very high salary and interesting enough mission, so I thought that at worst I’d be able to simply donate a high portion of the salary I’d receive.

The description of the role put me off, however. The ad explains that the Chief of Staff would manage the CEO’s focus to ensure he was doing the right thing with his time, including calendar audits and daily stand-ups with him to sync on priorities and call prep and summarisation. This was the first thing listed, and I’ve written enough job ads to know that this is likely a massive priority for the role. In fairness, the job ad does go on to list more in-line ops functions, such as people, finance and security.

Managing the CEO’s calendar and handling a startup’s finances and HR are both ‘enabling’ functions, but the same roles shouldn’t do them. We’ve fallen into the trap of lumping these things together because labelling Ops Management as the neck that moves the head is only part of the story. I’d argue Ops Managers are a somewhat specialised function under that umbrella. A good Ops Manager will enable you to do more with less, finding efficiencies on both sides of the equation to set up the organisation for short- and long-term success. A good Ops Manager is a systems thinker with a bird’s eye view of how each gear in the machine works with each other and how changing one thing might have unintended knock-on effects elsewhere. Often there is a tension between the quick and scrappy solution today vs the robust and scalable solution tomorrow, and a good Ops Manager will be able to identify which situations call for each one.

If these functions are sacrificed because the CEO needs someone to gate-keep their calendar or handle RSVPs for an important event, then it’s time to get a Personal Assistant. In this sense, PAs are the enablers’ enabler, in that they allow Ops Managers to focus on oiling the machine’s gears and keeping a watchful eye over critical metrics. PAs also bring different skills, making them particularly well-suited for this work (more on that in a future post).

I hope my thoughts above clarify how I think about Ops Management, but I also hope they give my fellow colleagues in the space the licence to say ‘no’ to certain pieces of work and advocate for a different role to perform those tasks.

Here are two surprising statistics:

1. According to a global software developer survey in 2021 (n = 82,286), most developers are male, accounting for 91.7% of all respondents.

2. In India, only about 19% of women participate in the labour force. This is significantly lower than the world average of 46%.

Now imagine that you’re trying to recruit a software developer for an Indian non-profit, and you receive over a hundred applications. Most are from men, but a significant number are from women.

You’ll need to answer one key question because you know that your executive director will ask: Did enough women apply for the position? Or put another way, is the pool of candidates who applied for the position representative of the labour force in this particular market?

Given you’re aware of the two stats above, you know that this will be a tricky question to answer. So, you get googling: what is the gender split within software development in India? You find this source from HackerRank, which tells you that, because of India’s more equitable education and tech industry culture, about 23% of Indian software developers are female (as opposed to 14.8% in the US and 10.3% in the UK, for example).

Ok, case closed then, right? All you need to do is ensure that at least 23% of applications are from female candidates. Just do an advertising blitz in female software development online communities, push the job ad to some of your female friends who are in software development, and Bob’s your uncle.

So, the day comes. Applications have now closed.

You log in to check how many you received.

106 applications. Not bad.

Quick counting reveals that 15 applications are from female applicants.

which is approximately…

14% of all applications.

You calculate it again because maybe you made a mistake.

14.15%.

Hmmmmm, that’s less than the 23% you were aiming for. But isn’t it possible that 14% of applications are from women purely by random chance? Like, if you have a jar with 80 red marbles and 20 blue marbles, and you grab a random bunch of marbles, the ratio of marbles you grab isn’t always going to be split exactly 80:20 red to blue. Sometimes it’ll be 85:15, or 75:25. You could even grab all 20 blue marbles by pure chance. It’s unlikely, but it’s possible.

Can we apply the same logic to the gender split in your pool of applications? If exactly 23% of applications were from female candidates, that would’ve been 24 applications. But surely there’s an acceptable range? Surely, it’s possible that your process and advertising blitz were sound, but you got less than 24 applications by pure random chance, right?

Binomial testing

Fortunately, there is a statistically rigorous way to check this. It’s called a two-tailed binomial hypothesis test, which you can easily plug into ChatGPT or Gemini to learn more about. For this task, we will skip all the technical details.

You will need to know:

• The total number of applicants (n)

• The number of applicants who belong to the category you’re interested in — in this case, female applicants (k)

• The expected proportion of candidates from the category of interest (r)

You can find out the first two parameters (n and k) from your pool of applications; you’ll need to look up r (in our example, it’s 23%, according to the HackerRank source above).

Now, you can use a Google Sheets formula to handle the calculation. What we’re basically doing is calculating the probability that, by random chance, we get k candidates given the expected proportion r. This probability is known as the p-value.

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Quick sidenote to explain what p-values are. Imagine you're flipping a coin. Normally, you expect heads and tails to come up about equally often. In other words, your starting assumption is that neither result is more favoured. Now, you flip the coin 10 times and get all heads. That's surprising, right? How likely is it that this random chance event (all heads) happened if your starting assumption (heads and tails are equally likely) is true? A p-value is precisely that: the chance of getting a result as extreme as yours, or even more extreme, if the starting assumption is actually true. In this case, the p-value would be very small (almost impossible) because getting all heads with a fair coin is unlikely.

The p-value tells us how likely it is that, if we picked 106 Indian software developers at random, 15 of them (i.e. 14%) would be female. As a rule of thumb, a p-value less than 5% is considered low. If the p-value is less than 5%, it’s unlikely that this scenario happened by random chance. In other words, it’s much more likely that something was awry, so we should re-advertise the position.

So, let’s crunch the numbers. How unlikely are we to receive 15 female applicants out of a total of 106, if 23% of potential applicants out there in the world are female and assuming our application process is unbiased?

To answer this, you can plug the parameters above into the following Google Sheets formula:

=MIN(BINOM.DIST(k, n, r, TRUE), 1 - BINOM.DIST(k, n, r, TRUE)) * 2

If we use this formula to work through our example, we get:

=MIN(BINOM.DIST(15, 106, 0.23, TRUE), 1 - BINOM.DIST(15, 106, 0.23, TRUE)) * 2
=0.03292571445 ≈ 3.29%

Here, the p-value is 3.29%, meaning there’s only a 3.29% chance that 15 out of 106 applicants would be women purely as a result of random chance. This is low. We should conclude that our application process was biased against women in some way.

Continuing with the same example: how many female candidates would’ve been enough for us to reach the opposite conclusion, i.e. that the gender proportions in the pool of applicants were not out of the ordinary? You can plug different values of k into the formula above to generate the necessary p-value that is greater than 5%. In this case, the p-value is greater than 5% if k is greater than 16.

=BINOM.DIST(16, 106, 0.23, TRUE) * 2

=0.06044113672 ≈ 6.04%

So, if 16 out of 106 applications had been from female applicants, that would’ve been fine.

When you re-advertise the position to get more female applicants, you should re-do the analysis using the new parameters. Say you readvertised and received 10 more applications, of which 5 are from female applicants. Given this, your parameters become:

n = 116
k = 20
r = 0.23

Given these parameters, you’re now fine and can safely assume that enough female applicants applied to the position. You should try to run the analysis using these new parameters and try to explain this new conclusion by referring to the new p-value. Imagine your Executive Director is asking you.

The final thing I’ll say is that it's also crucial to remember that statistics are only one piece of the puzzle. You should always consider other aspects, such as the content of job advertisements and the inclusiveness of your workplace culture and policies (e.g. parental leave), to attract and retain a diverse workforce.

On Tuesday, 7 Sept, the Taliban announced the first members of a caretaker Afghan government to lead the country into an undoubtedly tumultuous future.

For all their nice polished press conferences and pledges to form an “inclusive” government, there’s absolutely no reason the Taliban will be different unless they need to be different. Analysts say this will partly depend on external forces and macro-level issues, such as trade with Russia and China and the Taliban’s ability to do the big stuff of sophisticated governments (e.g. tackling droughts).

What about simpler factors? What if we look inside the country? Afghanistan's realpolitik is very different from what it was two decades ago. To assume that the return of the Taliban means a return to late 90s Afghanistan is a mistake that fails to consider three crucial realities alive in the Afghanistan of 2021.

1. The internet arrived in Afghanistan

It’s easy to forget the sheer state of underdevelopment in which Afghanistan found itself back in the 1990s. Admittedly, the advent of the internet took everyone by storm back then, but its proliferation in Afghanistan is a direct consequence of the US reconstruction efforts.

Afghanistan went from nearly universal internet disconnection to over 4 million consistent internet users. Mobile phone usage saw a similar increase — going from near zero to over half the country now having a mobile phone subscription.

The Taliban cannot put this genie back in the bottle. This is a reality with which it will have to live and to which it will have to adapt. Much like the printing press supercharged the Protestant Reformation, the internet creates a serious risk of popular dissent for the Taliban. Millions of people with internet access will mean millions of people who will question your rule.

Sure, the Taliban could simply shut down or filter the internet when things get too hairy. This happens all the time in the region. But the fact remains that, no matter how many times governments around the world shut down the internet, they always have to turn it back on. This will be a concession with which the Taliban will need to come to terms.

2. Generations of children grew up in an inclusive society

From the very beginning, the Taliban pledged to respect women and the rights they gained over the past 20 years. Pretty much no-one believes them. To a certain extent, however, the Taliban might not have much of a choice on the matter.

One of the biggest successes in Afghanistan over the past 20 years has been the increase in primary school enrolments and completion rates for both girls and boys. Today, over 85% of children complete primary school, in comparison to 28% under Taliban rule in the late 90s. 67% of girls are completing primary school, which admittedly is less than the percentage of boys but it’s more than 0% under Taliban rule.

There are obvious benefits from this, like increased levels of literacy and the opportunities presented from increasing women and girls’ education and participation in the economy. At the end of the day, societies that treat women badly are poorer and less stable.

Importantly — generations of children spent their most formative years under a co-ed system, especially in key urban areas like Kabul. The Taliban missed their opportunity to feed them fundamentalist dogma and indoctrinate them. These children are tomorrow’s elders and middle class, and they won’t identify with Taliban hardliners. The Taliban will need to adapt.

3. People live better lives today than they did under Taliban rule

The undeniable fact about Afghanistan is that despite its rampant corruption and worrying development indicators — the country is a better place than it was 20 years ago.

Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) is a metric that combines years of life lost due to premature death and years of life lost due to time lived in less than full health. It measure’s a population's overall burden of disease, where 1 DALY = 1 lost year of healthy life.

Due to a variety of factors, including better food security and access to drinkable water, people in Afghanistan today die less needlessly than they did in the 1990s. Specifically, we’ve slashed by half the number of DALYs lost in Afghanistan: from almost 40,000 in 1994 to approximately under 15,000 today.

Achieving this wasn’t easy, and maintaining it will be the Taliban’s biggest challenge. Not only does the Taliban lack the technocrats necessary to govern complex economies, but it will also face a hyper-cautious international aid and financial system in the immediate term and an Iran-like, stymied future in the medium term.

All in all, Afghanistan under Taliban rule will not be a kitten- and fudge-based democracy. It will also not be a return to the 1990s injustices and backwardness that are still seared into the world’s collective memory. It will be something in between — a compromise between values and on-the-ground realities which the Taliban will be forced to make.

Originally published on my Medium page, which I no longer use.

We’ve been warned that the United Nations is facing its biggest cash crisis in nearly a decade, with USD 1.3 billion owed by 62 Member States including the US, Brazil, South Korea, Mexico and Saudi Arabia. Secretary-General António Guterres is warning about the possibility of global disruptions to regular operations and defaulting on staff salaries and vendor payments.

Such news is music the ears of people like former US National Security Advisor John Bolton, Executive Director of UN Watch Hillel Neuer and Queensland Senator Malcolm Roberts — the latter of whom repeatedly calls for Australia to “exit the UN” despite that not being possible.

Pundits wax indignant about the UN being an unelected bureaucratic monolith with no mandate and diminishing relevance in the modern world order. Bolton himself once advanced that if the UN HQ building in New York City “lost 10 stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.”

Just how big a difference would be made if the UN did, so to speak, lose 10 stories? If world leaders were overpowered by nationalist sentiments, ushering an era of realpolitik and isolationism in matters of foreign policy and national security that meant the end of international organisations — what then?

In the spirit of Bolton’s hyperbolic rhetoric, let’s explore the following: if the UN and its various agencies were to disappear overnight, what are some of the immediate consequences?

(1) Millions would starve within weeks

The World Food Programme (WFP) is the arm of the United Nations responsible for delivering emergency food assistance. Every time a parent berates their child for not finishing their dinner, citing the starving children in Africa as justification, someone at the WFP gets a little tingling sensation.

The WFP is an emergency responder, every year distributing more than 15 million food rations to victims of war, civil conflict, drought, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes and crop failures. There are currently six emergencies to which the WFP is responding, including in North-Eastern Nigeria, the Sahel and Yemen. In Yemen alone there are 12 million people who receive WFP support every single month.

There is strong evidence in favour of the effectiveness of the WFP’s role as an emergency food provider. A 2012 study by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development reviewed 52 different evaluations of WFP operations, finding robust positive results on whether the WFP achieves its humanitarian objectives and whether the WFP efforts create positive change. In other words, most studies find the WFP to be an effective organisation at combating hunger and saving lives and livelihoods in emergencies.

Now, let’s assume the WFP ceases to operate. Without their steady flow of food assistance, over 20 million people in Yemen would wake up hungry every day. Add to that the 3 million people in North-Eastern Nigeria who are entirely dependent on food assistance programs, and over 5 million Congolese receiving life-saving food assistance in 2019. These are people whose governments do not have the means to provide assistance and who’d be entirely left to their own devices. This is the immediate short-term impact arising from a complete halt of WFP activities, to say nothing of the WFP’s work with governments to strengthen their capacity and enhance their emergency preparedness.

(2) Civilians would die as civil conflicts intensify

UN Peacekeeping operations (PKOs) are designed to support countries transition from violent conflict to peace. Peacekeepers (aka. the Blue Berets or the Blue Helmets) are deployed to monitor and facilitate the transition processes, protect civilians, restore the rule of law, promote human rights and assist in the disarmament and reintegration of former combatants. There are currently 14 active PKOs, with the two largest ones being in South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Internal civil conflicts can last between 5 to 10 years, and the risk of conflict flaring up again is highest for at least a decade after the conflict ends. Depending on the context, studies show that PKOs can be effective through four different channels:

1. PKOs reduce the lethality of ongoing conflicts.

2. PKOs increase the chances of hostilities ending.

3. PKOs prevent conflict from breaking out or recurring.

4. PKOs prevent contagion to neighbouring countries.

By analysing the combined impact of these four channels, a January 2019 study evaluated the effectiveness of PKOs and simulated their potential benefits. PKOs with strong mandates and robust budgets can reduce the risk of major conflicts by about two-thirds. A global two-thirds reduction translates to:

• 150,000 fewer dead people.

• 57,000 fewer dead children.

• 900,000 fewer people without drinking water.

• 1,300,000 fewer undernourished people.

Maybe you don’t trust these numbers. Maybe you don’t trust the motivations of the study’s authors. Maybe you want to point out the time UN peacekeepers stood by and watched the Rwandan genocide, or the multiple instances of sexual abuse at the hands of UN peacekeepers, or the argument that peacekeepers don’t tackle the root causes that brought them there in the first place. Fair enough — Peacekeeping is one of the most controversial subjects about the UN, and peacekeeping efforts are by no means perfect. But no-one can deny that, on the whole, peacekeeping operations save lives. They save lives because they introduce a truly neutral middleman between cocked and loaded weapons. They save lives because some unnoticed conflict in some forgotten part of the globe all of a sudden becomes a matter of international concern with the whole world watching. They save lives because they literally stop guns from firing. These are indisputable facts.

(3) Child vaccination levels would plummet

UNICEF operates globally to safeguard children’s lives and their rights, working with governments to promote child protection, inclusion and survival. UNICEF also provides emergency assistance to ensure child nutrition, shelter and safety.

Most notably, UNICEF is primarily responsible for immunising children in the developing world. UNICEF is the world’s biggest purchaser and distributor of vaccines for developing countries, having purchased nearly 1 billion vaccine doses in 2017. UNICEF alone purchases and distributes over 85% of vaccines for all of Africa, and is responsible for one-third of global vaccine purchases. That’s right, one-third of the world’s vaccines are purchased by a single organisation. And that’s not all — UNICEF vaccinates 45% of the world’s children under 5 years old.

As a central procurement organisation for developing countries, UNICEF is able to act as a collective bargainer and negotiate with vaccine manufacturers on a level playing field. Moreover, by representing a significant portion of the market for vaccines, UNICEF is able to flex its price-setting muscle. Since 2013, the prices for tuberculosis vaccine and polio vaccine purchased by UNICEF have decreased by 11% and 54% respectively. Across 11 different vaccines, UNICEF pays a median price of USD $0.25 per dose while self-procuring countries pay a median price of USD $4.79 per dose — almost 20x more expensive.

Remove UNICEF from the equation and not only does the burden of immunising half the world’s children fall back on the developing world, but it suddenly becomes an unwinnable battle as price-setting power reverts back to vaccine manufacturers.

I’ll never deny that there is significant room for improvement at the United Nations. As ultimately a taxpayer-funded organisation, I have high expectations of the UN and I’m unsettled when those expectations are not met.

In saying that, my expectations are also realistic — I don’t expect the UN to be the world’s Superman and fix all our problems. Anybody that sees the UN as the be-all and end-all of humanity’s challenges is naïve and should be reminded of UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld’s famous remark:

“The United Nations was not created to take mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell.”

Equally as naïve, however, are those that believe the UN to serve no purpose other than providing cushy and overpaid jobs for tree-hugging, globalist, farmer-hating, open-border-loving, private-property-stealing, holier-than-thou, virtue-signalling Chardonnay socialists.

The United Nations is critical to the survival of millions of people around the world. If it didn’t exist, we would have to create it.

Originally published on my Medium page, which I no longer use.

There have been two narrowly split decisions these past few days — the Muslim ban decision, and Janus vs. AFSCME. The latter relates to whether the First Amendment bars public sector unions from charging fees to non-members who benefit from collective bargaining contracts.

What is interesting about these two decisions is not the content of the majority opinions, but rather the tone of the minority. Whatever scrap of collegiality the US Supreme Court had left has now mostly been consumed in a maelstrom of scalding opprobrium.

26th June: Sotomayor and the Muslim Ban

There is little value in adding to the debate on the merits of the Muslim ban decision or the legal reasoning, and there’s sufficient commentary already available from both sides of politics.

It was a 5–4 decision that passed no comment on the propriety of the policy itself, closely sticking to the eternal ‘get out of jail free’ card that is national security. The 5–4 split is enough to tell us that the Court took no joy in deciding the matter, with possibly heated debate behind the scenes amongst the justices. Associate Justices Breyer, Kagan, Ginsburg and Sotomayor constituted the minority,

Justice Sotomayor wrote her own dissenting opinion, to which Justice Ginsburg joined. In almost 10 years of reading judgments by superior courts, I had never seen anything like it.

Based on the evidence in the record, a reasonable observer would conclude that the [President’s] Proclamation was motivated by anti-Muslim animus. … The majority holds otherwise by ignoring the facts, misconstruing our legal precedent, and turning a blind eye to the pain and suffering the Proclamation inflicts upon countless families and individuals, many of whom are United States citizens. Because that troubling result runs contrary to the Constitution and our precedent, I dissent.

There’s an entire ward in the hospital dedicated to that BURN.

Being a judge on a national court of last resort is a unique job in numerous ways, one of which is the fact that you get to publically spout criticism about your fellow colleagues without any fear of repercussions. Normally, however, judges self-impose certain limits on that unfettered freedom to criticise. After all, they still have to turn up to work the next day and somehow carry on business as usual.

It would seem that Justice Sotomayor has thrown all that out the window, and she’s not alone.

27th June: Kagan and the Unions

This was another 5–4 decision of the Court, which held that compelling non-members to pay fees to public sector unions violated their First Amendment rights. Again, there’s plenty of commentary out there already.

Associate Justice Kagan wrote the dissenting judgment, to which Justices Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Breyer joined. I gotta say, it gives Justice Sotomayor’s fiery opinion from the previous day a run for its money.

Kagan accuses the majority of subverting “all known principles of stare decisis”, the millennia-old common law norm that today’s court ought to adhere to yesterday’s decisions. In direct reference to passing related comments made by the majority judges in two previous cases, Kagan said:

… Relying on them is bootstrapping — and mocking stare decisis. Don’t like a decision? Just throw some gratuitous criticisms into a couple of opinions and a few years later point to them as “special justifications”.

Gloves are off now, boys and girls.

Kagan continues by expressing deep concern that “[t]he Court today wreaks havoc on entrenched legislative and contractual arrangements”. She states that “thousands of current contracts covering millions of workers” are now at risk of unravelling completely, and that the majority reached its decision “knowing that many of the parties will have to revise (or redo) multiple contracts simultaneously”. Kagan continues that, in reaching it decision:

[The majority] does so knowing that those renegotiations will occur in an environment of legal uncertainty, as state governments scramble to enact new labor legislation. … It does so with no real clue of what will happen next — of how its action will alter public-sector relations.

Clueless. She just called them clueless.

Justice Kagan wraps up her dissent, unforgivingly:

So the majority’s road runs long. And at every stop are black-robed rulers overriding citizens’ choices. The First Amendment was meant for better things. It was meant not to undermine but to protect democratic governance — including over the role of public-sector unions.

What I’d give to be a fly on the wall of the US Supreme Court Christmas party.

The acerbic invective seen these past few days from the US Supreme Court, while entertaining, leaves behind a concerning cloud of uncertainty. These judgments provide yet another perspective on the deep divisions that plague the American political discourse, as well as the extent to which these divisions run. It is entirely possible — if not beyond question — that the legislative, executive and judicial branches of the US government are undergoing periods of increasingly polarising ultra-partisanship.

The question becomes: is there still something — anything — that unites Americans?

Originally published on my Medium page, which I no longer use.