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Surrender to discomfort

  • Writer: Neil Townsend
    Neil Townsend
  • Jan 5, 2024
  • 4 min read

Updated: Jan 9, 2024

Today, more people worldwide are working on the planet's greatest social challenges and more money is being spent on them than at any other time in human history. Social enterprises, development organisations, research organisations, government departments, private sector organisations, charities, foundations, religious organisations and many others all work on a multitude of increasingly interlinked, complex social challenges.  


What occupies my mind is whether these endeavours can be more effective - radically more effective even - and whether we can speed up the process of change to make greater progress.


To achieve the changes we seek requires the relentless pursuit of critical insights - a deeper unerstanding of the people we work alongside, the challenges, the context, the opportunities and our potential to foster change. These insights are hard won, requiring time and investment. These insights are not static ‘silver bullets’ but require constant attention and learning. Unfortunately, though, we are subject to multiple pressures that can make the process of unlocking them even harder than it needs to be.


It is a challenge that the funding model used by much of the modern social sector means that the people who really need to be kept happy are those who supply the money. Funders though have their own set of pressures, from audiences sometimes distant from those who own or experience the challenges on which we work. This can incentivise actions that keep others happy but don’t take us down the pathway needed for change. 


We also work in a context where expertise is highly valued, in which it is often very uncomfortable to admit when we don’t know. Partly, this is because we feel the need to project our competence to our donors, supporters and critics. But it is also complicated on a personal level as we often feel our individual worth lies in our knowledge and in our ability to state with certainty the way forward. So, often, we focus on doing things we know we can control and do well, rather than take actions over which we have less certainty.  


Collectively these, and other pressures, can lead us to adopt practices that are based on expediency or on other people’s expectations.


A ‘new orthodoxy’ emerges around many of these practices that lead them to become accepted and ultimately, expected. We hope, if diligently applied, they will add up to change, even without having too much evidence that they work. And so, we apply risk matrices and do ‘due diligence’ on each other. We fill in the latest tools and templates, spreadsheets and forms. We flood in our thousands to the next conference, go to workshops, have more meetings, and rack up air miles. Individually, sometimes necessary, but collectively they lead us to drift from our needed course, overwhelming and displacing other critical action that would help us develop and apply the insight we need to succeed.


So, can we unlock more of the needed paradigm changes in a world where our challenges have moved from being largely separate and stand-alone issues to ones that are far more interlinked and increasingly complex to address? 


The answer is yes, but it will require many of us to change our approach in a few important ways.


We urgently need to reconfigure the relationships between funders, practitioners and those who experience the challenges on which we work, such that progress on the actual challenge is incentivised rather than the results prioritised by an external audiance. Creating a more healthy balance within this triangle would mean less separation between practitioners and problem holders and a greater degree of separation between funders and practitioners. Funders could focus on being good funders and practitioners could focus on pursuing their critical path with a recognition that these are separate skill sets. 


We also need to name, with greater clarity and simplicity, what it would look like if we were successful. The scale and complexity of the problems we work on are such that we sometimes don’t dare to have the audacity to name success directly for fear of being called unrealistic or naive.  And, if we are really clear on what success looks like, it also becomes uncomfortably obvious when we fail. We are tempted to have many complex measures of success so that we can demonstrate some success even when the core challenge we are working on has been obstinate and not actually shifted (despite all the great conferences we attended). We make our goals sound more reasonable, but radical success requires audacious goals so that we can fully commit to our success.


Then, we need to surrender to the discomfort of not knowing so that we can invest more time exploring the hard issues, investigating them in depth, testing different approaches, and, most critically, working with the people who know them best. Adapting frequently, sometimes significantly, to our failures, successes and to changes in our context or understanding is critical if we are to become radically effective.


Many of the issues we work on can feel intractable and unsolvable. That is, until they are solved or until great progress is made, and then with the benefit of hindsight, we understand them and see them differently. Looking back in history, we can point to huge paradigm shifts on issues such as health and health care - the eradication of major diseases and the development of effective treatments for others or in regard to the progression of human rights, on slavery, access to education and technology, reductions in poverty. These success stories remain far from equitable, and much remains to be achieved, but it also shows that significant progress is possible and frequently happens even where it might have once felt impossible when we dare to take it on.  


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