How often have we heard the pithy phrase: “Social change is a marathon, not a sprint”? It is easy to think about this in terms of time because the work takes years. There is the older saying: “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together,” and we have somehow mixed these up. The work that needs to be done together is being done alone, calibrated to individual metrics, optimised inside individual organisations, with each unit pursuing its own indicators in something close to isolation.

So what could social change learn from marathoners? This piece contrasts two approaches to elite distance running. The Norwegian method is a precise individual calibration. The Ethiopian method is something different in that energy is treated as transbodily, a substance that flows between athletes rather than being contained inside any one of them. Leading the run is a duty shared, and the athlete who leads pays a cost the followers do not, and the next day, someone else takes the front. Running alone is treated as antisocial, like eating alone. The capability is held in the group, not in the individual.

Yes, yes — both approaches produce world-class results, and it isn’t that one is right. The point is that they answer different questions about where expertise lives. Our sector has (unknowingly? unwittingly?) imported the Norwegian method with our logframes, theories of change, impact metrics, and individual organisation dashboards. The leaders I know who have thrived in this work are usually doing the Ethiopian thing inside the Norwegian structure. They are taking turns at the front, sharing energy with their teams, paying costs the metrics do not see, on behalf of work the funder cannot quite read.

Worth thinking about which method we are training in, which method we have been pretending to train in and what our problems require.

---

Originally written for LinkedIn on 7 May 2026. View original →