Category: LinkedIn

I’ve been thinking about the question the (amazing!) team started with at Manotsava – National Mental Health Festival: not what can we build here, but what wants to emerge here?

Over two days, we watched more than 6,000 people—families, students, practitioners, and friends—show up for a mental health festival. Not a conference, not a campaign. A festival.

Thirteen thousand had registered, seven hundred ideas were submitted, and it all found its own rhythm. People filled walls with dots and post-its, strung threads across ideas, and wrote down small joys that made them smile. It all felt coherent, as if the festival itself knew what it wanted to become.

The numbers, encouraging as they are, weren’t what stood out. It was the way people arrived, curious, and left connected. Strangers stood in front of a board about grief or loneliness and realised they weren’t the only ones marking the same line. This quiet recognition is hard to design for, but you know it when you see it, more so when it is felt.

Maybe that’s what this moment asks of us in the mental-health field. To build less from blueprints and more from attention. To notice what’s trying to surface when people are given space, time, and safety.

Manotsava – National Mental Health Festival grew because people made it their own, and it reminds us that emergence isn’t something we manage but something we make room for.

Originally written for LinkedIn on 10 November 2025. View original →

Intelligence and wisdom are not the same thing, and our sector keeps confusing them.

Adam Mastroianni: Intelligence tests measure well-defined problem-solving. But life’s important questions (how to live well, build relationships, find meaning, etc) are poorly defined. They resist optimisation and demand wisdom more than cleverness.

Jason Lewis on what philanthropy forgot: “The gift creates a relationship. That’s its purpose. It’s not a financial exchange; it’s a relational act. A gift binds people together. It carries memory, meaning, and trust.”

The work we do in social systems exists entirely in poorly defined territory. Yet we keep trying to solve connection problems with tools of abstraction. We can’t metric our way to relationship any more than we can optimise our way to wisdom or abstract our way to systems change.

As Mastroianni writes: “You’ll spend your whole life trying to solve problems with cleverness when what you really need is wisdom. All of your optimising, your straining to achieve and advance—it doesn’t actually seem to make your life any better.”

Poorly defined problems require connection. The gift knows this. We’ve forgotten.

And yes – there’s a bonus zinger on AI in ancient Greece…

Originally written for LinkedIn on 27 October 2025. View original →

Context is the real protagonist in any room — but we keep designing for the individual as if they exist apart from it.

I absolutely love his craft of reading people, but am amazed (in a good way!) how he keeps treating context as the real protagonist. In his world, talent, leadership, and even luck become relational, not individual. And the care he takes to build containers where people can thrive feels like a practice of stewardship more than management. It really does speak to how we hold people, possibilities, and timing.

Maybe that’s why his work feels so familiar. The deeper I go, the more I see the same pattern: attention as strategy, relationship as infrastructure, and containers as interventions.

He’s spent a lifetime refining the same lesson many of us learn the hard way. That change, whether in people, teams, or systems, can’t be forced.

What I love most is how his world (and it feels adjacent to ours) is moving from design and control toward discernment and trust. From building programs to cultivating conditions. From trying to change people to seeing what wants to happen through them.

Seeing people clearly, believing in them deeply, and designing the right water for them to swim in might be the purest form of systems change there is.

Originally written for LinkedIn on 16 October 2025. View original →

Friction is not failure. In human systems, it may be the mechanism through which meaning gets made.

Two pieces I read today that have been in conversation with each other.

Sean Voisen’s Design for Lingering argues that abstraction violates the principle of lingering. Lingering, much like slowly burning incense, creates the time and texture where meaning can take shape. Speed erases it.

Then I read Vaughn Tan’s essay(s) on re-designing AI tools to increase friction and bring back meaning making. His “Confidence Interval” system uses LLMs not to make things easier, but to slow us down, deepen our reasoning, and teach discomfort as a form of thought.

Only at the end did I realise he’s also the creator of the IDK cards, which I actually have. Felt like a serendipitous reminder that maybe friction really is where meaning lives, and lingering is the necessary condition for it.

That thread runs through all my recent work on connection vs. abstraction, especially in The Limits of AI in Social Change.

Originally written for LinkedIn on 15 October 2025. View original →

Richard Sutton, the father of reinforcement learning, called LLMs a dead end. His critique is that they don’t learn from experience, predict tokens not outcomes, mimic but can’t act and have no goals.

It’s a technical debate that lands squarely in the social sector because social change requires us to learn in real time by trying, failing, repairing, adapting and persisting. Exactly what Sutton calls the “era of experience.”

Interview: [link]

This is why I’ve argued that wide abstraction is so dangerous in social change. Pattern-matching machines can’t sit in the mess, repair relationships, or build trust and don’t “learn” the way people and communities do.

My recent essay in India Development Review (IDR) Review unpacks this risk, and asks how we keep tools in service to connection.

Originally written for LinkedIn on 29 September 2025. View original →

Over time, my writing has been an attempt to follow one thread: how do we keep social change human?

In 2023, I asked how nonprofits could scale without becoming brittle (The power of building a community) and argued that scale happens at the speed of trust. Later that year, I turned to leadership (What new possibilities could your leadership unlock?), framing it less as directing and more as gardening. By 2025, the question of connection versus control had come into sharper focus. Connection, not abstraction argued that philanthropy’s role is to nurture the scaffolding of relationships, not just replicate frameworks. And in A question for all of us who care about change, I asked how we might resist the pull of control and stay with the messiness of connection.

My new piece for India Development Review (IDR) picks up that thread in the age of AI and argues for a vigilant embrace. Large language models can amplify relationships, illuminate ecosystems, and automate routine tasks. But when they slide into wide abstraction, flattening context and corroding trust, they risk creating systems that look efficient but feel hollow.

The principle remains the same across all my writing: abstraction must serve connection.

Social change scales like a forest: root by root, mycelium by mycelium, canopy by canopy.

Originally written for LinkedIn on 25 September 2025. View original →

While reading The Lost Art of Thinking Historically, I was struck by the fact that if you replace the word ‘history’ with ‘philanthropy,’ the essay still holds true.

In particular, these lines:

“Making consequential choices about an unknowable future is a profoundly challenging task. The world is not a laboratory. It is a vortex of ambiguity, contingency and competing perspectives, where motives are unclear, evidence is contradictory and the significance of events changes with the passage of time.”

That feels like the daily work of philanthropy, too. We often yearn for certainty, with clear models, predictable outcomes, and tidy causal stories. Yet the practice is more about holding ambiguity, sitting with contradictions, and choosing anyway, knowing how provisional our judgments will look in hindsight.

Philanthropy, like history, may not offer prediction. But it can hold a different sensibility: modesty, curiosity, empathy and a constant reminder that our ignorance is very deep.

Originally written for LinkedIn on 24 September 2025. View original →

I read “Magical Systems Thinking” by Ed Bradon this week. It is sharp, readable, and I agree with a lot of the caution. Complex systems tend to kick back, and it is wiser to grow from small working nuclei than to design grand contraptions on paper.

I still felt uneasy because the essay knocks down a version of “systems thinking” that many of us do not recognise. It treats the field as if it promises prediction and mastery. That strawman is easy to defeat.

The tradition some of us learned from sounds different. Donella Meadows ends her classic “Leverage Points” not with mastery, but with humility. She argues that the deepest leverage sits in mindsets and paradigms, and then goes one step further: real power looks like “strategically, profoundly, madly letting go.” That is epistemic humility in plain sight, not magical thinking.

A few other places where the piece felt selective to me:
> Treats Forrester’s World Dynamics like a failed forecast, not a scenario tool. That misses the point and the enduring insights about growth and feedbacks.
> Cherry-picks “failures” that are long-horizon and political, then contrasts them with “successes” that were crisis programs with narrow scope, top cover, and blank-cheque resources. Not quite apples to apples.
> Frames the alternative as “start simple” and “bypass bureaucracy,” but skips the relational work that actually makes simple systems take root: trust, shared expectations, and learning in practice.

So my takeaway is both/and. Yes, beware magical plans. Start from simple, working slices and evolve. And also remember what Meadows already taught: systems are counterintuitive, information is partial, people are not components, and humility is a method. The work is to stay in relationship with the system, learn fast, surface goals and rules, and only then abstract into structures that can hold.

Do you have other pieces that hold both the critique and the humility? I’d love to read them.

Originally written for LinkedIn on 16 September 2025. View original →

I was reminded recently of a conversation I had many years ago with Supriya from Agami. We were talking about seeing and mapping systems. I was very much in my frameworks-and-causal-loops phase back then. She said something that I didn’t quite understand: that she didn’t really see systems in that way and what she did was sense them.

Over the years, and through a fair amount of friction, I’ve come to realise the quiet wisdom in that. Because if you haven’t experienced the tension and mess of fragmentation, if you haven’t had to hold it in your team, feel it in your body, and try to reconcile it in your budget, you probably don’t really know the system.

Not in a way that’s lived. And even seeing it clearly isn’t the same as recognising that you’re part of it. Being part of it means staying in relationship with it, through all of the attendant tension, ambiguity, and discomfort. It requires humility and curiosity to stay inside it, to keep showing up and to resist the urge to define and control.

People like Supriya seem to do that naturally. And what I am learning from them, slowly, is that that’s often the only way through.

Originally written for LinkedIn on 2 September 2025. View original →

From “Who deserves our care?” to “What kind of world are we trying to build, and who can help us get there?”

That’s the shift I’ve been sitting with after reading a provocation on inclusion that cuts across the gender debates dominating my feed.

On the same day, NPR reported new Harvard research showing women who have experienced stalking face a 41% higher risk of heart disease (and rising to 70% for those who’ve sought restraining orders). A dark reminder of the long-term costs survivors carry.

That’s the paradox many movements face. Engagement can be the more strategic path to transformation, but too often it falls on those already carrying the greatest burden. I’ve seen leaders like Rohini Nilekani, who saw this pattern a decade ago, and Natasha Joshi, who has patiently connected the dots and brought the Layaak portfolio at Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies to life, work from that place of empathy despite the imbalance.

The discomfort it is real: when is opposition alone insufficient, and when, even in the face of unfairness & injustice, does engagement offer the greater possibility for change?

Originally written for LinkedIn on 14 August 2025. View original →