How do we inspire others non-coercively?

Get people to set up teams to accomplish things they already want

Summary

My friend and I ran the healthiest Effective Altruism retreat I’ve ever run or attended. It went well because we tried to encourage participants to do what THEY want to do, rather than trying to get them to do more of what we want and what we think is important. Here I go into one example of this which was our closing session, a crew formation workshop.

Scroll to “Crew formation workshop” if you want to see the format without the backstory. 

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It’s hard to do things alone. As a recovering self-help addict, I like to think that I can control everything and that everything can be achieved through willpower alone. This doesn’t work. I will still get deeply excited about a project for two weeks, lose momentum, and then wonder where the magic went. 

But sometimes this doesn’t happen. I can sustain progress when I’m working with a team of people that I truly enjoy being and working with. That seems to be the only thing that can keep up my motivation on hard problems and disciplined work over the long term. That team can also be in the form of a dyad: just me and a coach or mentor. 

I’ve run 5-10 Effective Altruism (EA) retreats. When I first ran them, I was still in my honeymoon phase with EA. That meant I could keep up my intrinsic motivation, and make big behavioral changes through willpower and discipline alone. Effective altruism has some powerful ideas, so I think I had some of the most powerful forms of these motivations. I literally thought that the work I was trying to do was the most important thing I could possibly be doing. But still, it wasn’t enough, and I’d lose momentum. The processes that used to feel alive got stale. Excitement turned into dread. Running a retreat felt like a chore instead of Christmas morning. 

My past retreats largely took advantage of people’s anxious motivation. That’s the best way to give someone a retreat that feels and appears life-changing. You’ll get more people on your feedback form saying they’re going to radically change their future plans, and fewer people telling you the truth about how they felt uncomfortable.

My past retreats turned the question of “oh god what do I do with my career and my life???” into a determined but ultimately anxious single-pointed focus on the goal in front of you. That meant running activities like “turning beliefs into action”, in which I would have people imagine a change they would want to make, or a project they would want to start, then ask “What’s the literal worst that could happen?” Then people see that the worst-case scenario is not so bad, and I encourage people to set up coercive accountability (like bets or positive social pressure) to do the thing they want to do. I think this is a reasonable activity, except that in the context of my retreats, people felt pressure to have “what they want” be the same as “be more involved in EA”.

Also this activity, instead of engaging with the hesitant parts of participants, tried to bypass them altogether, in the same way that I was trying to myself. But those hesitant parts grind you down. They keep shouting and making you feel that something isn’t right — because something isn’t right. 

My relationship with myself has changed quite dramatically over the past 6 months. The quickest way to express it is that I went from almost entirely on the top in the “Coercive Circle” to about 50/50 flipping between these two modes of thinking.

The EA retreat that I ran this weekend felt quite different from any that I’ve ever run, and any that I’ve ever attended. One way to say it is that it was almost entirely “collaborative circle thinking”, or that I integrated the components of Microsolidarity that I thought were most important to the workshop. But I think it might be more clear if I just explain our closing session.

Our closing session, instead of “turning beliefs into action” was “crew formation”. 

Here’s the structure:

Crew formation workshop

Setting the context: Why we think this is important

The group is the fundamental unit of change

You can’t do it alone, and you don’t need to. Thinking and learning is a social process, and social structures can deeply support your motivation and learning. There’s no need to rely on willpower and discipline when you can set up a meeting with friends that you just will show up to. Want to read a book? Start it alone and it you’ll get through the first half quickly and then get bored. Start a reading group and you’ll stay on track, realize points that would have flown over your head otherwise, more deeply understand the book, have more fun reading it, and strengthen your friendships. This does have a decent cost of organizing people, the possibility of failure and rejection, and the logistics of organizing people, but when these groups really take off it’s worth it. 

Especially in the area of Effective Altruism, if we want to deeply understand a problem, learn to think for ourselves, and be skeptical and critical, we can’t just read the state of the art, we have to actively engage with it. Try to bend it and break it. Teach it, raise your confusions, make fun of it, and play with it. You might theoretically be able to do this alone, but almost no one does.

Examples of what we’ve done

(we refers to me and my friend/co-facilitator)

We’ve started reading groups, peer support groups, research groups, meditation groups, a working group to create a new third space, and more. If you’re specifically interested in peer support groups then I recommend looking into Microsolidarity crews and Case Clinics.

What do you want to do? -> brainstorm for 5 minutes

Is there a book you want to read? A textbook you want to study? Do you want to work on your life’s biggest problems with your friends once a week? Is there a research field you want to explore? 

Write down 10 things you might want to do. Some of these ideas should be bad — don’t judge the ideas yet, we’re in brainstorming mode

You can just do all of these things, but they can be hard, intimidating, and hard to sustain motivation for without a team. 

But you can also just create a team, and practice the art of cultivating great teams out of thin air. You can post an ad for your reading group at your college, or tweet about the book you want to read. 

Caveat: Maybe you’re busy

We will be planning this all out as if we’re going to do it, but maybe you’re thinking, “no matter what I plan, I won’t have time to do it”. That’s okay! We will consider whether this is genuinely worth your time at the end, and you will have the option to delay this or never do it. 

Choose the idea that you think you are most likely to make happen

The most important thing is that we play, experiment with, and practice the skill of forming these groups. We want you to be able to fluidly and easily create the structures to support yourself in 5 years. It doesn’t matter how well this one goes nearly as much as how much you learn from running it. So it’s okay if you’re being less ambitious here so that you actually get something off the ground. 

Pair up with someone and share your ideas

This helps make this new group feel like a real possibility. Someone might also give their partner good feedback or encouragement. 

Write out a list of 10 people you might do this thing with

Who might want to join your group? Again, let’s go into brainstorming mode here. You don’t have to invite anyone on this list, so just write down whoever comes to mind. There should be some people on this list who you probably won’t invite. We want to find options that you may not have considered before. 

Select the people you want to reach out to

Tip: Find a co-facilitator

Sometimes this can feel like a lot to take responsibility for, but it can feel a lot easier and more exciting if you find someone who is willing to organize with you, or just someone who commits to showing up each week. That way you know you won’t be alone, and will at least have one other person to work with, which might be all you need. 

Write a message/invitation to these people

Write a message to these people (or make a plan to talk to them about it). What do you want to do? Why do you want them to join you? How long is it for and when does it start? What do you think you all might get out of this? 

Again you don’t have to send this.

Important note: Communicate a check-in point at the start

There’s a reason that people don’t often set these things up for themselves. They can get awkward, fade out, feel stale, or just be boring. If this is your first time running something like this, I’d say it’s about 50/50 whether it will feel alive or a bit boring. That means you want to give yourself and others an option to stop this without making anyone feel unnecessarily uncomfortable or rude. 

So don’t ask people to join your reading group, ask people to join your reading group for the next three weeks. After that you can reflect (alone or ideally with the rest of the group) about how things are going and whether you’d like to continue. This gives you and others an easy out so that they can save face if they’d like to leave the group. You probably don’t want to be running a group where you or others aren’t genuinely excited to be there anyway. 

If you want to, send it!

Consider whether you have time for this and whether this is worth setting up right now. Maybe you’re at the end of a busy semester and you want to wait until the summer. How will you remember then? You could schedule-send this message to those people, or set up an accountability partner here to remind you that you want to do this. 

If you do want to send it, go for it! Remember, we want to build the skill of creating social groups, structures, and teams that support you and others in your work. This is truly a learning experiment, and so it’s alright if this fails, as long as you learned something new and valuable.