Do gooders anonymous: when you realise your theory of change is a furphy

In my last post I listed some deeply held, unquestioned beliefs that got inverted for me and in me, and wondered out loud what would be next. I kind of already knew, but it’s fresh so didn’t want to include it in the retrospection of the last set of notes.

Most of the previously listed inversions were cultivated by multiple inputs and their traction took some time. Not so this one, the inversion was dramatic and sudden. Margaret Wheatley spoke heretical words that I knew instantly were true.

The ground had been cultivated for this inversion by sophisticated skeptics that have challenged my comfortable view of the world from inside social change and consulting paradigms. Nassim Taleb (Skin in the Game and other writing) and Anand Giridharadas (Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World) are the most notable for me. And then, in an unassuming little book called So Far From Home: lost and found in our brave new world, Margaret Wheatley said it straight up, “I no longer believe that we can change the world.” (page 5) Kaboom!

"This world did not materialise from plans, conspiracies, or randomness: it came from life’s process of creating new and more complex systems. Emergence is how change happens on this planet, but it is one of the most difficult things to comprehend for those of us trained to think of change as incremental.” (page 27)

We have become so sophisticated at talking about, modelling, monitoring, measuring and communicating our efforts to change the world. ‘Impact’ we call it, or positive social outcomes. Among the most commonly used tools in this sector is a framework called a Theory of Change, which seeks to map a logical path from action to impact. But Wheatley drives a truck through it. Not directly, she’s much more gracious than that unlike Taleb or Giridharadas who both take no prisoners. She simply offers an alternative worldview, that our individual and collective attempts at cause and effect action are completely powerless in holding back the political and social systems fuelled by greed and power.

But here’s the rub.

Instead of giving up and retiring into my sorry urban recluse, she invites me to warrior-up, to fight even more strongly for the human spirit. For good. Not motivated by a naive hope that my efforts will change the world, but because it is the right thing to do. Radically liberating.

Giridharadas is brutal. The subtitle of his book is The elite charade of changing the world. His basic thesis is that the educated left elite have created a comfortable industry of do-gooding … as long as our power and status is maintained. Close to the bone for me, he takes aim at philanthropy for failing to speak the truth to power and more precisely, money. He also criticises our tribal gatherings as blind to the extent to which we are an echo chamber of our own biases. I could never use the term ‘thought leader’ after reading his book and don’t think I have listened to a single TED talk since either. (He is scathing of how ‘peer review’ is pretty much totally absent from the phenomena of Thought Leadership.)

Taleb’s contribution to my inversion is more subtle. In essence he argues that without skin in the game, in other words, that unless there are personal consequences to our decisions, we inevitably make bad ones. Essentially he says that there should be mechanisms that ensure those in power feel the impact of their policy choices and decisions. In the 1990s, those working for disability rights starting using the phrase ‘nothing about us without us’, which later became mirrored in a slogan used across the social change sector, ‘nothing about them without them’.

But these inputs into my consciousness were niggling rather than transformational, not withstanding the insights from Giridharadas that gave me a new lens on my world. Neither Giridharadas or Taleb suggested people shouldn’t set out to change the world. Enter Margaret Wheatley.

Wheatley’s thesis is pretty simple really. The world is fucked. There is no grand conspiracy to keep it so, it’s just that the systems that define our contemporary existence, in so many cases incentivise greed and power and result in fundamentally bad outcomes; essentially poor relationship with self, with others and the environment. To some extent this has always been so, but technology and speed of change means that there is simply no holding back the tsunami of bad.

Her argument is not that people of good will and good action don’t make local changes for good. Just that the aspiration of population level change is naive. We did not get here because of simple cause and effect actions by people with intentionality. No one wanted this world. But our systems have rewarded greed and power and we have such complex pathologies that the things good people are working for; justice, fairness, love … are no match for the social, economic and political systems that shape our world.

So what am I to do?

1. I give up believing I am important enough, powerful enough, competent enough to change the world.

2. I recommit to good. I must find the things that are fundamentally good and figure out how to warrior-up; not in the adversary way of combat, but in the monastic or perhaps martial artisan way of discipline and commitment to mastery. Not in the hope that it will change the world, but because it is the right thing to do, because it might make a difference in my own experience of living and those who I connect with.

3. In my professional life, I am committed to supporting so-called change makers. I am thinking differently about that work. I am thinking that our primary responsibility is to the inner development work of change makers. ‘Yes’ to continuing to support the success of their initiatives and projects, but there is an increasing awareness for me that warriors for the human spirit are fundamentally what our world needs. Social change projects without them are destined to mirror the values of the systems they are supposedly designed to respond to.

There will be more to come on this …