Size Matters, Less Does More

This post is part of a series in which Influencers describe the books that changed them. Follow the channel to see the full list.

I love books. And in spite of enjoying a good story, I'm more so a fan of nonfiction for some reason.

As a 10-year-old boy growing up in Dallas, I stumbled upon R. Buckminster Fuller’s Nine Chains to the Moon one day at the Green-Stamp store with my grandmother. This 1938 book was Bucky’s perspective on technological history. He proposed his vision of future prosperity driven by what he called “ephemeralization,” or the process of doing more with less. Although I only comprehended about 1/1000th of it then (and maybe 1/100th of it now) I went on to read almost everything written by or about Bucky Fuller, his work and his ideas. I had the na?ve gumption to write him about an idea I had and he had the kindness to write me back—and recommend I read Critical Path—which, of course, I did. Many years later, I was honored to be invited to write his encyclopedic biographical entry. But Fuller’s books did not change my life.

Also around that same time, I found and fell in love with Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog. I think I found it in a head-shop as I’d moved on from Green-Stamp stores for my literary needs. As a tween I’d leaf through the gigantic newspaper pages and imagine equipping my future via this groovy access to tools as it were. It was THE one-stop source for DIY anything with a whiff of counterculture to make it fun. And in spite of owning almost every subsequent iteration of the Catalog, it was not that book that did it for me either.

The role Bucky’s and Brand’s works served was perhaps as a kindling or priming for what really brought things together for me. As an adult embarking on developing my then nascent non-profit center I came upon economist William Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden, and then everything. Came. Together.

The book's title refers to the famous Rudyard Kipling poem, but it takes a far more nuanced view of the work of aid organizations than its name suggests.

Easterly’s thesis is pretty simple: Big organizations create big plans that draw big donors or big attention to do big things. The problem is they tend to be equally big flops and big fizzles. Additionally, such large organizations have their concomitantly large internal operational costs, and as a result fewer dollars or Euros make it to the end-recipient. There seems to be a general absence of meaningful results in spite of the billions spent by these large nonprofit organizations. But, big projects are sexy projects, outcomes be damned.

Easterly’s book had kept presenting itself to me—just like Bucky Fuller’s did in the Green-Stamp shop or Brand’s in the head-shop years prior. I stumbled upon reviews of it by people I knew and who’s opinion I respected, like Virginia Postrel who noted Easterly’s view of the traditional "Planner" method versus the "Searcher" approach to humanitarian aid. Postrel explained, “Searchers treat problem-solving as an incremental discovery process, relying on competition and feedback to figure out what works.”

Quoting from the book:

A Planner thinks he already knows the answer (whereas) a Searcher admits he doesn't know the answers in advance; he believes that poverty is a complicated tangle of political, social, historical, institutional and technological factors.

She opines, “Planners trust outside experts. Searchers emphasize homegrown solutions.”

To me, Easterly was channeling a synthetic integration of seemingly disparate factors that actually are connected (a la Bucky Fuller), with the DIY, smaller scale solutions that smacked of Mr. Brand. It was similar to reading William A. Schambra’s review of Steven H. Goldberg’s Billions of Drops in Millions of Buckets, as he notes -that impactful change is the result of small organizations’ “intimate understanding of local conditions and needs—that may, in aggregate, do the most good.” But Easterly’s book really inspired me as being a much better fit in my role as a proud new director of an über-small non-profit, and previously feeling envious of the Big-Boys and their budgets. I felt I could act like some guerrilla humanitarian—working collaboratively with those in need.

It would seem many bureaucrats have pitifully short term memories when it comes to assessing outcomes at all, or less-than-expected results are often explained away by so-called intervening and uncontrolled contaminating variables (such as conflict and warring situations or catastrophic climatic events) that mitigated the hoped-for effect. Such events unfortunately do not likewise mitigate monies spent.

Hey, don’t get me wrong, I am all for more funding, but as Easterly points out, there is not always a direct or positive correlation between bang-and-buck. His calculus pegs Western foreign aid thus far to be around $2.3 trillion with pitifully little to show for it. The emperor has no clothes.

Prior to reading The White Man’s Burden, I was struggling with what felt like theoretical and fanciful concepts I held for our newly forming organization. This book changed all that as it offered not just the economist’s observations as to what didn’t really work (large-scale) but concrete examples of what was working (small-scale). And that seemed like something we could do, and subsequently we have done.

Easterly’s book served as the necessary catalytic inspiration we needed, and I think it does likewise for other’s working in the nonprofit, NGO, humanitarian space. On our website’s splash page we write about our philosophy of the power of the small project based on Easterly’s thesis. Indeed, Mother Theresa once said if you cannot feed one-hundred, then feed one. While the problems many of us work with seem large, having a big impact on even a few is critical, and it has become our organization’s reason for being.

There is indeed great power in the small project. Just ask anyone it has helped.

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If you’d like to learn more or connect, please take a look-see at https://about.me/DrChrisStout If you’d like to more about my Curated Library, shoot me an email. You can follow me on LinkedIn, or find my Tweets.

If you liked this article, you may also like:

• DIY Humanitarianism
• 52 Ways to Change the World
• The New Humanitarians
• Philanthropy for the Rest of Us

Photo: Author's own