2d • General discussion
From Dialogue to Action
Three weeks ago I wrote about data and statistics; the cold architecture of global inequality. Two weeks ago I wrote about imagination, whether we can understand a person we’ve never met, and what kind of imagination actually gets us closer to someone else’s reality. Last weekend the course “The World as a Village of 100 People” moved into its third chapter: Transformation.
**Now that we understand and now that we’ve imagined, how do we act without reproducing the very dynamics we’re trying to dismantle?**
It is, I’ve come to believe, the hardest question of the three.
In our village of 100 people, one of the villagers stopped me in my tracks this past weekend. She is a young woman, aged between 20 and 24. She lives in the deepest poverty: one of 68 people who together control just 3% of the village’s wealth. She has no housing, no education, no water, no sanitation, no internet. She has electricity. That is all.
When asked what she most wanted, she didn’t ask for a donation. She didn’t ask for a handout. She said: "Don’t just help me. Make sure no other person can ever land in my position".
She was asking for systemic change. She was asking us to go to the root cause. Not treat the symptom, not make ourselves feel better with a gesture, but fix the conditions that made her situation possible in the first place.
It is a completely different ask. And most of our systems (aid, development, philanthropy) are not designed to deliver it.
This is not a new problem. It is an old one, repeating itself with remarkable consistency across generations of well-meaning effort. A striking example is PlayPumps International, a project that installed merry-go-round water pumps in rural African communities, designed so that children playing would simultaneously pump clean water. It was ingenious, it was photogenic, and it attracted significant funding. And it failed because nobody adequately consulted the communities who would use them. The pumps were harder to operate than hand pumps, broke down without accessible spare parts, and placed an unexpected burden on women and children to keep them running. A solution designed without asking the people it was designed for.
I know this story well. PlayPumps was the example that convinced me to join Giving What We Can, an organisation that advocates for effective altruism: rigorous, evidence-based giving rather than giving to whatever sounds touching or looks good. Good intentions, without rigour and without genuinely asking the people you’re trying to help, can actively cause harm.
But here is what I’ve been sitting with since last weekend: even effective altruism, for all its rigour, largely operates within existing systems. The young woman in our village wasn’t asking for better-designed aid. She was asking for the system itself to change.
Last weekend I wrote about imagination, about the discipline of reaching toward someone else’s reality rather than projecting our own experience onto it. I wrote about Hassan, a boy I built from a statistical profile, whose life I tried to honour by asking questions about what I didn’t know. And yet. This weekend I caught myself in a different story entirely; a story I went through last year.
My mom is 82 years old. She lives alone, 600 metres up a mountain in Reunion Island. My two sisters and I live in different countries. As it has become increasingly difficult for her to manage — the drive down for groceries, the isolation — my sisters and I began discussing what should be done.
Maybe she should sell her house and buy a small apartment lower down, somewhere she could walk to a bakery, a pharmacy, a doctor. Or maybe she should move closer to my sisters. We were plotting away, the three of us, with the best of intentions and genuine love.
We had not asked her. When we finally did, it turned out she loves her house. She loves her garden. She cannot imagine living in an apartment without one. As for moving to my sisters — yes, perhaps, but also no. Not now. She has a boyfriend. She doesn’t want to leave him.
One word. Boyfriend. And the entire architecture of our well-intentioned solution collapsed. We were solving a logistics problem. She was living a life.
This is the pattern that runs through all of it, from the young woman in our village to my mom on her mountain. We design solutions before we ask the questions. We fill in needs before we hear them expressed. We optimise for what looks good, what feels meaningful, what fits neatly into our existing frameworks and we forget that the person at the centre of the problem is also the person who best understands it.
Understanding this is necessary. Imagining our way into someone else’s reality, with humility and curiosity, is necessary. But neither understanding nor imagination is transformation. And here is where I want to push back, gently but firmly, on something.
The inner development guide, which I deeply respect, are right that inner capacities matter. Empathy, curiosity, perspective-taking, humility: these are not soft extras. They are prerequisites. You cannot build something that genuinely serves people you’ve never tried to understand.
But the IDG guide, and the broader inner development movement, can sometimes underweight what transformation in the real world actually demands once those capacities are in place. There is a certain comfort in being at the table, in the visioning sessions, the roadmap creation, the carefully facilitated dialogue. The table is safe. The field is not. At some point you have to leave the table.
The young woman in our village didn’t ask for more empathy directed at her situation. She asked for someone to go all the way to the root cause and stay there, through all the complexity and resistance and inevitable failure that root cause work involves, until something finally sticks.
That requires two capacities that I believe deserve far more attention than they currently receive, including within the IDG guide: courage and perseverance.
Courage to leave the talking table and enter the field. Courage to go to the root cause when the symptoms are so much easier and more visible to treat. Courage to accept that the answer to "what do you need?" might be "I don’t know", and to stay in the conversation anyway.
And perseverance. The willingness to act, fail, learn and act again. To treat every stumble in the field not as evidence that the problem is too complex but as data; the kind of data that no roadmap, however beautifully designed, could have given you in advance.
Hassan’s sister Aisha is still not in school. The poorest villager is still without housing. I understand more about why than I did three weeks ago. I can imagine their lives with more humility than I could before. But understanding and imagination only become transformation when someone , when enough someones, summon the courage to act on what they now know, and the perseverance to keep going when the first attempt, and the second, and the third, don’t stick.
That is what the young woman on the margins of our village was asking for. Not a gesture. Not a pump that looks good in a photograph. A commitment to stay in the field until the system that put her there no longer can.
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From Dialogue to Action
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