Category: LinkedIn

“What’s going on here, with this human?” It is the best framing I have encountered for the act of seeing another person clearly — which is what good hiring, good leading, and good relating all require.

But while the post is framed around hiring practices, it’s really about something deeper: how we see, how we relate, and how we hold responsibility when we’re in positions to make decisions about people.

The piece brings a rare blend of practical insight and developmental thinking to the process. He frames hiring not as a filter for excellence, but as an act of discernment. Not “is this person good enough?” but rather “in what context could this person thrive?” His view is that every person can be an A player in the right environment. That insight alone shifts the role of the hiring manager from gatekeeper to steward.

What I appreciated most was the way he threads self-awareness into the process. Drawing on Bob Kegan’s adult development framework, Duncan argues that seeing others clearly requires first seeing ourselves: our habits, biases, projections, and ways of being in the room. The hiring process, in his framing, is relational and not just evaluative.

This resonates with a broader pattern I’ve been exploring: the movement from I (self-awareness), to We (relational practice), to It (structures, systems, roles). Duncan holds that arc with clarity. While his focus is on hiring, the approach can be applied far more widely. Be it team design, performance conversations, leadership development, coaching, or even strategy.

It’s also why his post connects with the idea I keep returning to: connection, not abstraction. Especially in systems work, in ecosystem leadership, or when operating beyond clear organisational boundaries, the ability to hold multiple perspectives, stay grounded in context, and engage with epistemic humility becomes essential.

Duncan’s piece offers a clear, layered, and unusually honest take on one process that also models a way of thinking that can serve across many.

Highly recommend reading it.

Sue Adams

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Originally written for LinkedIn on 7 August 2025. View original →

Two pieces I came across this week, exploring “the decline or end of the NGO era”.

But what if what’s ending isn’t civil society as much as it’s a particular structure and model of NGOs and CSOs that grew after the Cold War? Professionalised, donor-driven, and closely tied to state and multilateral agendas?

That architecture is now being challenged by shrinking funding, political backlash, and a growing legitimacy crisis.

I don’t think what’s emerging is a vacuum. We’re seeing the early signs of something different: locally grounded, trust-based, relational forms of civic action. These aren’t always visible or institutional, but they are very much alive.

Some of the echoes we have been hearing: From platforms to places. From frameworks to fields. From intervention to infrastructure

What if we stopped evaluating civil society through the lens of scale, visibility, or donor alignment? Because legitimacy doesn’t come from financial audits or global partnerships alone and can also be anchored in public trust, embeddedness, and relevance to context.

Philanthropy has a role here, too. Instead of replicating institutional control, can it learn to support civic imagination, field-building, and shared infrastructure (especially in the global South)?

Not NGO 2.0 (or 3.0 or 4.0) but recognising and strengthening the next civic architecture as one that isn’t defined by organisational dominance, but by connection, coherence, and care.

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Originally written for LinkedIn on 5 August 2025. View original →

The radical individualism that insists our fates and suffering are defined by our personal choices fuels an illusion that we are powerful and can take control of our lives.

This blinds us to the hyperobjects that are shaping the trajectory of our futures: climate emergencies, pandemics, oligopolistic economies, disruption from technology and fragmentation of real community and society. But though we can’t necessarily see them, we can feel their effects.

Hustle culture pushes our youth to ‘optimise’ themselves with productivity protocols. New age-y spiritual influencers encourage them to leave their woes for the universe to handle. But we’re neither machines to be ‘hacked’, nor magical pixies able to float above the realities we are served.

As social beings with hopes and dreams for ourselves, our loved ones and the world we live in, narratives that insist our fates are in ‘our hands alone’ alienate us from each other at a time when joining hands gives us the best chance of the support and power we need to alleviate our collective pressures.

In other words, how do we tell our youth: it’s not just a ‘you’ thing?

Thank you, Sue Adams, for putting this into words! Bamboo Being

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Originally written for LinkedIn on 31 July 2025. View original →

Over the past decade, I’ve heard an ever-expanding glossary of how money meets the impact/development world. Strategic. Trust-based. Systems change. Participatory. Field-building. Community-led. Log-frame loyalists. I’ve likely used all of them at some point, maybe even in the same sentence, and likely nodding earnestly.

Each of these models has its logic that reflects a range of instincts. Leverage to letting go. Build infrastructure to fund organisers. Cheques with conditions, others with disclaimers.

Since it is Monday, I want to offer my own term to the canon.

What would a kind of philanthropy that didn’t begin with a plan, a grant cycle, or even a theory of change look like? What if it started with the radical premise that “we don’t understand enough”? And showed up with attention, not answers?

That didn’t act quickly, but stays long enough to notice what’s actually going on. Not in the abstract, but in the way people negotiate power, systems, belonging, and daily survival? That instead of measuring, scaling, or replicating, it observed, reflected, and, when invited, accompanied?

What would philanthropy look like if it borrowed less from management consulting and more from anthropology?

Not the colonial or extractive kind. The kind that does fieldwork. That sits at the back, takes notes, stirs the rice, asks too many questions, and updates its priors based on what it hears.

Would we call it philanthropology?

Where culture, not capital, is the deeper operating system?

It wouldn’t move fast. It wouldn’t promise scale. It is unlikely to survive a review meeting.

It would also make us … philanthropologists.

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Originally written for LinkedIn on 30 June 2025. View original →

Raise one hand if you’ve ever heard the role of philanthropy and civil society described as working on the failures of the market and the failures of the state.

Raise your other hand if you’ve heard that civil society needs to be more “corporate” and use the tools/logic/frameworks the market uses. (Occasionally, we are asked to borrow from the state, too, but thankfully, less often!)

If those tools/logic/frameworks contributed to the problem, are they the ones that will help us out of it?

Audre Lorde said it plainly: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

And if that doesn’t land, Buckminster Fuller offered a different entry point: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

Does transformation come from perfecting what is? Or does it emerge when we dare to step outside the frame altogether?

Ask not what makes civil society more efficient, strategic, or measurable in market terms, but how can it be made more like society? Messy. Relational. Rooted. Capable of holding contradiction. Designed not to dominate or extract, but to accompany and connect.

To work on society is one thing.
To work like society is another.

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Originally written for LinkedIn on 23 June 2025. View original →

Two newsletters in my inbox this morning. Both wrote of overload, distraction, and the constant churn of modern work.

Azeem Azhar asked whether AI could filter the noise, manage our inboxes, and protect space for meaningful work. Better tools, he muses, might just give us back control.

Oliver Burkeman took a different route and asked why we’re trying to control everything in the first place. Maybe the real problem, he muses, isn’t the flood of tasks but our refusal to accept that we’ll never get it all done. Better boundaries, fewer illusions, and learning to live with what we can’t complete, rather than better systems, are his takeaways.

Smarter augmentation vs Honest limitations

Didn’t Marshall McLuhan once say of technology that every extension is also an amputation?

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Originally written for LinkedIn on 21 June 2025. View original →

Random musing from a call today:

• Platforms treat friction as failure. But in human systems, friction is often how trust and meaning take shape; friction is structure.
• Dialogue is a structure to hold complexity without reducing it.
• Legitimacy isn’t static (doesn’t live in credentials/bylaws alone) but emerges/moves with context because it also shows up in how people feel held. Is it the thing that lets two people with different languages see the same shape?
• The weight of being a self-sufficient node in a hyperconnected system is unbearable because connection was designed for transmission.
• Most of what’s real doesn’t want to be seen because making something visible too early can make it vulnerable. Is the work is in helping the underground system get dense and relational enough to survive when it does surface?
• If the trauma sits under the structure is not met, no amount of redesign will hold.
• The future is too large and too layered to be a puzzle to solve so we must consider shifting from what we control, to who we stay in relationship with while everything moves.

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Originally written for LinkedIn on 18 June 2025. View original →

Friction hasn’t disappeared from the economy. It has been redistributed — from the digital to the physical, from the individual to the collective, from the visible to the felt.

The loneliness we call personal is often structural. The smoothness we celebrate in tech is subsidised by someone else’s exhaustion. And the curated worlds we retreat to are buffers, not solutions.

There’s a sentence in here I keep returning to: “Friction is also where new systems can emerge.” Yes. That’s the hope! Bit only if we’re willing to feel it, not just route around it.

Highly recommend reading the whole thing!

Updated to add this brilliant piece by Indy Johar. [link]

“I will not build my safety on someone else’s precarity.”

Thx Rakesh!

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Originally written for LinkedIn on 9 June 2025. View original →

I totally get this frustration but am wondering if we approach commons challenges with the wrong geometric assumptions.

Could an underlying driver be that we’re trying to create commons using one cultural logic (linear: design-implement-maintain-measure) in contexts where multiple geometries are colliding?

The Miyawaki forests represent ‘modern’ ecological commons thinking – scientific design, government implementation, citizen maintenance. But the communities around them might operate from different spatial logics about shared spaces. Some might see them as circular – spaces that should evolve and be used organically by the community. Others might view them through network logic – as nodes in broader urban systems that serve multiple functions beyond their ‘intended’ purpose.

What if the tragedy isn’t that people don’t value green spaces but that we’re imposing one geometric approach to commons stewardship and then wondering why it doesn’t work?

What if instead of asking ‘How do we make people maintain these forests properly?’ we asked ‘How do we create forest commons that can thrive across different cultural approaches to shared urban space?’

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

For someone who has had the good fortune of working alongside India’s samaaj, it feels like the imagination has been drained out of the room. If all we’re doing now is designing for what governments can pay for then we are consulting firms with better branding.

For someone who has had the good fortune of working alongside India’s samaaj, it feels like the imagination has been drained out of the room. If all we’re doing now is designing for what governments can pay for then we are…. consulting firms with better branding?

Agree with Rakesh here, the shift from “transition to government” to “they should own it from the outset” feels oddly binary with no space for co-creation or for imagining and building together.

Where are the people in all this? The communities, the movements, the folks inside government who aren’t just implementers but thinkers and dreamers too? It’s one thing to ask what’s affordable but who is going to ask what’s dignifying? What builds belonging? What opens up new possibilities?

Tired of new solutions. We need new questions. And, most importantly, new ways of listening.

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Originally written for LinkedIn on 23 May 2025. View original →