Category: Substack

What I learned watching swimmers who tried to skip the boring parts

 

The air is sharp with chlorine. The tiled deck sweats under bare feet. It’s 5:30 in the morning, the pool lights throwing pale gold onto the water. Swimmers slip in, shoulders rolling, arms slicing the surface. Lap after lap after lap. The sound is rhythmic, almost metronomic — breath, splash, turn, push. It’s tedious if you watch it wrong. But if you watch it right, you see a thousand micro-corrections, the slow burn of lungs learning to hold more, the stubborn patience of a body teaching itself to move with less waste and more grace.

This is where I sit most mornings now, watching Anoushka train. Cup of coffee cooling in my hands, watching the same strokes repeated hundreds of times. At first, I thought I was just being a supportive parent. Now I realise the pool has been teaching me things I couldn’t learn anywhere else.

There’s a girl in lane three who joined the squad a few months ago. Strong, athletic, clearly talented. She asked the coach about technique videos, wanted to know if there were apps that could analyse her stroke. Could she skip ahead to the advanced sets? The coach just smiled and pointed to the kickboard. “Start there,” she said.

I watched her face. The disappointment was subtle but unmistakable. Kicking looked so basic, so beneath someone of her obvious ability. She wanted the elegant parts – the butterfly sets, the race pace intervals, the stuff that looked like real swimming. Instead, she got 400 meters of kick with a board, focusing on keeping her knees underwater, feeling the water catch her feet.

For weeks, she approached every drill like it was something to get through. Her kick sets were perfunctory. Her catch-up stroke was rushed. She kept glancing at the faster lanes, clearly wondering when she’d graduate to the “real” training.

Then something shifted. Maybe it was fatigue, maybe boredom, but she started actually paying attention to what her body was doing. I watched her hold a streamline off the wall for an extra beat, not because the coach demanded it, but because she seemed curious about how it felt. She began experimenting with her hand entry, making tiny adjustments set by set.

The change wasn’t dramatic. Her times didn’t suddenly drop. But something in her stroke started to look different. More connected. Like the parts were talking to each other instead of working separately.

Last week, she swam next to one of the senior swimmers in a distance set. Same pace, same interval. But watching them side by side, you could see the difference. The senior swimmer looked like she was having a conversation with the water. Every stroke seemed to build on the one before it. Her breathing was so integrated into her stroke that it looked effortless, even as the pace climbed.

The newer girl was working just as hard, maybe harder. But there were tiny gaps in her stroke, moments where the rhythm stuttered, places where effort wasn’t translating into speed. Not wrong, exactly. Just not yet fluent.

It reminded me of watching someone speak a language they’ve studied versus someone who grew up speaking it. Both can communicate. But one has patterns written into their body in a way that the other is still learning.

That’s what the pool keeps showing me. Excellence isn’t a destination you arrive at by skipping steps. It’s built stroke by stroke, breath by breath, in the repetition that most people think is boring. Daniel Chambliss wrote about this – how the best swimmers he studied weren’t just more talented, they were more willing to pay attention to mundane details that others glossed over.

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And what the bar knows about becoming

 

I have been here long enough to learn the tides of a room. Morning light that climbs the far wall, the humid breath of the monsoon before it settles, the faint sweet-sharp of disinfectant under the heavier smell of rubber mats. I know the way chalk floats when the bucket is handled too hard, the way metal answers metal in small talk. I remember the first time you reached for me.

Your hands landed wide and uncertain, fingers cold then suddenly hot as the blood rushed in. You wrapped your thumbs late, tried to crush me as if force could quiet the doubt. The knurling found soft skin and held on. Your shoulders jumped to your ears before your feet left the floor. When you pulled, everything pulled at once and nothing pulled in the right order. Your neck tugged forward, eyes straining, the sinews in your jaw standing out like rope. Elbows flared, wrists bent to angles they were not built to hold, forearms blazing as the lactic fire climbed. Your ribs stayed caged. Breath was a thief that took what it needed and left too soon. For a half second the weight lifted, then your legs flailed for a foothold that was not there, heels scuffing the mat with a squeak you pretended not to hear. The skin under your left palm shifted and pinched. When you slid back to the ground, I felt the heat you left behind.

You did not return right away. People often do not. I watched you from a distance instead. You took to the corners where the room is quieter. On a reformer, springs sighed as you pressed and drew, pressed and drew again, someone’s voice guiding your ribs to widen sideways, then backward where air is shy. The cue was simple but not easy. “Fill the back of your shirt.” I saw your chest stop trying to do the breath’s whole job. Your belly stopped bracing against the world. You learned to make a small hammock with your pelvis so your spine could rest in it. None of this looked like it had anything to do with me, which is why it mattered.

You stood on one foot and the music changed from bravado to listening. At first your toes clawed the floor, white-knuckled against the mat. Weeks later they learned to spread. I watched the tripod of your foot find the ground: big toe, little toe, heel. The ankle stopped locking. The knee stopped running away. Hips began to stack. Somewhere else, on a different day, you lay on the floor with a band around your wrists, pushing out just enough to wake the small muscles that pull your shoulder blades flat and low. Your hands shook in the way that means the quiet parts are finally being asked to help.

You still visited me. You came with chalk on your fingers that smelled like dry rain. Sometimes you only hung and counted slow seconds out loud. Sometimes you tried to climb and could not. But by then the approach had changed. You stood beneath me and let your breath arrive before your grip. You placed your hands with a small ritual: fingers first, then thumbs, then a brief twist of the arms so the elbows knew where to point. Shoulders set down toward back pockets instead of up toward ears. I felt the bones of your shoulder blades glide instead of jam. You were learning to let the movement begin below the neck.

There were days of friction. You pulled and stalled at the same place for a month, a plateau so flat you could have camped on it. I have learned that the room is most honest in those weeks. Your palms hardened, callus forming ridges my knurling read like Braille. You sanded them down with a pumice stone and came back the next day. You changed the way you held me. Not a death grip, but a set that turned the bar into a hook, pressure resting against the pad under the pinky and ring finger so the wrist could stay straight. You practiced leaving the floor with quiet feet. You practiced arriving into the hang with your ribs still soft.

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When speed is a gift and when a theft

 

My weekend mornings start at the pool now. My weekdays’ evenings end there, too.

Anoushka’s training has stepped up. There are early starts, longer sets and competitions that creep into every weekend. Sitting on the steps, I’ve picked up the language swimmers use with each other. Splits. Negative splits. Underwater to the 15. Descend by 50. It’s a vocabulary of precision, repetition and the slow process of teaching a body to move well.

One topic that comes up a lot between her, her coaches and other parents is yardage. How many metres a swimmer covers in a day or a week. It’s seductively tempting to believe that more distance automatically means more fitness and faster times. But it isn’t that simple. A swimmer can churn out endless laps and still plateau if their stroke wastes energy, if their turns leak time or their breathing throws off their rhythm.

The best swimmers focus on quality. They work on the exact pitch of the hand entering the water, the tightness of a streamline, the way the head stays steady as the body rolls. They repeat these things over and over until the movement belongs to them. Daniel Chambliss, in his study of Olympic swimmers, called this the mundanity of excellence. It’s the idea that greatness is built through small, consistent details, repeated with care until they live in the body.

Watching Anoushka has made me think a lot about how I learn, not just in sport but in my own body, in my inner life and in the “bodies” of the organisations I work with. Over time, I’ve noticed four different ways of trying to improve: hacking, rewiring, repatterning and, eventually, a kind of devotional practice I think of as sadhana.

Hacking

In 2017 I treated my body like an engineering problem.

I tracked macros, measured ketones and blood glucose, and logged every workout. My muscles were outputs, my food was input, my training was a process. The goal was to get from zero to three as quickly as possible, the way a swimmer might try to shave time by adding more and more yardage.

It worked for a while. But like a swimmer chasing distance without fixing their stroke, my improvements were fragile. The moment life added stress, travel or illness, the whole thing wobbled. I had skipped the slow, repetitive drills that let you feel the water and adapt when conditions change.

Hacking produces quick, visible results. But it bypasses the long, sometimes tedious refinement that makes those results last.

Rewiring

Later, I shifted to something closer to rewiring.

In the pool, rewiring is when a swimmer changes the structure of their training, adds resistance work or shifts breathing patterns to match race strategy. For me it meant changing nutrition, reorganising training cycles, making recovery and rest part of the plan.

In organisations, I see rewiring when leaders rebuild infrastructure, adopt new tools or change workflows. It is decisive and often necessary, especially when the environment shifts like it has with AI. But like a new training programme, rewiring still needs time in the water. Skip the adaptation, and you get a body or a team that looks ready but struggles when the pace changes.

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Is the point of hiring to judge or to serve?

 

That’s the question Graham Duncan begins with in a remarkable essay on hiring. I return to it often, not just because it’s well written (it is), but because it opens up a much deeper conversation.

On the surface, it’s a post about assessing candidates. But it reads more like a meditation on how we come to know people and how much of that depends on whether we’ve come to know ourselves.

Duncan approaches hiring not as a performance review in disguise, but as a relational process. He doesn’t pretend that it’s easy or neat and starts from a different place: that everyone is capable of excellence in the right context, and that our work, as managers, leaders, or peers, is to help them find that context. That might be in our team. It might be somewhere else entirely. But it’s an act of care either way.

That framing resonated deeply with me. Especially his use of Robert Kegan’s adult development theory because it is something that shaped my own coaching training and continues to influence how I see leadership and systems change. Duncan draws attention to the “self-transforming mind,” that stage where one begins to question not just the conclusions we reach, but the frameworks we use to get there. It’s a stance that’s curious, reflexive, and aware of its own limits.

It’s also a reminder that clarity doesn’t come from standing above complexity, but from moving within it: with care, humility, and attention.

And while Duncan is writing about hiring, I found myself reading it as a much broader pattern that applies just as much to how we build teams, hold performance conversations, structure collaborations, or try to work across systems.

It’s the same thread that runs through my own work and writing:

That connection, not abstraction, is what creates the conditions for insight and movement.

That we are always in relationship: with people, with context, with our own assumptions.

That leadership, especially in complex systems, is less about certainty and more about discernment. And that discernment starts by noticing what water we’re swimming in—our own and each other’s.

Duncan’s post doesn’t offer a method so much as a stance. And for me, that’s the most useful kind of guidance.

If you’re someone thinking about hiring, or building teams, or simply trying to navigate complexity in more human ways, I think you’ll find this piece meaningful. Possibly even centering.

You can read it: https://grahamduncan.blog/whats-going-on-here/

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Originally published on Substack on 7 August 2025. Read on Substack →

… by holding differently

 

Badri watched me squat.

“Again,” he said.

I went through the motion, focusing on form.

He nodded slowly. “Still too much quad. Your glutes and hamstrings haven’t woken up.”

I was lighter than I’d been in a decade. Stronger, fitter, more focused. But underneath it all, I was still compensating by asking the wrong parts of my body to carry what they weren’t built to hold.

“Strong doesn’t mean functional,” he said.

And didn’t I know it. I could feel it landing in places far from the gym.

Repatterning hasn’t been a single moment but more a languid undoing. Over the past few years, I’ve been retraining my body to move differently, engage differently, and stop pushing from all the wrong places.

My Pilates practice has been central to this in how it taught me to stop muscling through and start paying attention and to stop chasing intensity and start trusting structure. It’s humbling. Sometimes humiliating. Always illuminating.

Bit by bit, I’ve had to retrain old habits. I learned to stop overusing the front of my neck and access the deep flexors instead. I shifted from shoulder bracing to engaging my shoulder blades. I reawakened dormant muscles and re-sequenced my core so that tension doesn’t stand in for actual stability. I worked to quiet overactive hip flexors and fire glutes and hamstrings that had gone offline. I stopped asking my adductors to do more than they’re meant to. Even my feet had to learn new patterns to learn to grip and ground better.

Each adjustment took time, precision, and trust. And a slower understanding that change doesn’t have to be dramatic to be real because slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.

Then the physical re-patterning brought up emotional patterns I hadn’t quite named.

I’ve always been good at resilience. Capable under pressure, quick with clarity, reliable in a storm. What I hadn’t seen was how much of that capability was built on a bypass of solving as a way of not feeling and pushing through as a way of staying safe.

Through therapy and coaching, I began to see how much I relied on doing instead of being, especially when things felt emotionally charged. I used to assume that if a sensation felt intense, it meant something specific to that moment, that person, that context.

It took me a while to realize that what I was feeling was often real, but not always specific. A sensation is human. It doesn’t have to mean what I first attach to it. The heat of desire, the ache of recognition, the feeling of awe aren’t always about someone or something in particular. They’re just part of being alive and I don’t have to act on them, but sometimes I can stay a while and notice.

This shift from reflex to reflection was its own kind of re-patterning.

I began to see how often I reached for control in the name of clarity. How frequently I tried to resolve what was meant to be lived with. How predictably I rushed to name what was still unfurling.

What I thought was strength was often just overuse. Not unlike the quads.

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Every system protects itself

 

Every system protects itself. That’s how it survives, not just through rules or incentives, but by rewarding those who play along and punishing those who don’t. Belonging becomes the currency. You learn the signals. You speak the language. And somewhere along the way, you stop noticing the cost of fitting in.

When someone steps out of that current, even slightly, it creates friction. Sometimes it’s visible. Often it isn’t. It might look like a question that lingers too long, a hesitation in a room that prefers certainty, or a refusal to let something slide just because it always has.

A friend once called this kind being a “class traitor.” Isn’t there something in the discomfort that feels … useful? Not disloyalty for its own sake but in choosing to be accountable to something deeper than the incentives around you. Choosing conscience over coherence.

It doesn’t have to be dramatic. Often it’s not. It shows up in small moments: refusing to rubber-stamp a lazy decision, questioning a cherished norm, standing alongside someone your peers find inconvenient. You don’t change sides. You stay where you are, but you stop pretending.

Gramsci might have called these people organic intellectuals. Those who emerge from within a group and start challenging its defaults. But it’s not only thinkers who do this. It’s founders who pull capital out of extraction, civil servants who risk being sidelined, community leaders who push against the grain of their own movements. What they have in common isn’t ideology. It’s friction with the roles they were expected to inhabit.

The trouble is, these people are usually alone. They aren’t part of a cohort. They’re not coordinated. They’re just trying to hold their line without losing their footing. Sometimes they stay quiet, other times they speak out. Either way, they begin to notice what it costs to keep integrity intact inside a system built for accommodation.

The costs show up quickly. Social distance. Professional coldness. A polite exclusion from decisions you were once part of. You’re still in the room, but something shifts. You’re now the one who slows things down. The one who overthinks. The one who makes others uncomfortable because you’ve stopped playing along.

Most institutions don’t know what to do with that. They are designed to contain critique, not respond to it. They prefer feedback that comes through the proper channels, raised at the right time, in the right tone. When people begin asking harder questions outside those boundaries, they get framed as disloyal or unproductive, even when what they’re offering is clarity.

Over time, that kind of resistance gets worn down more through fatigue than confrontation. The cumulative weight of having to explain, defend, justify. The sense that your insight is now read as threat, that your care is mistaken for disruption. Many walk away, not angry, but tired of being the only one in the room who remembers what the work was meant to be.

What makes a difference is connection. Just finding others who’ve stepped into the same ambiguity. People who carry similar doubts, who’ve stopped pretending, who understand the weight of staying in a system without capitulating to it.

These connections usually don’t happen in formal spaces. They grow in the margins, in private conversations, shared silences, the unguarded parts of a walk or a meal. They’re held together not by outcomes, but by recognition. You know it when you feel it: I’m not the only one asking these questions.

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This was the third funeral like this in the past few months. Same rituals. Same electric crematorium.

Perhaps it was the recency. Perhaps the repetition.

But this time, something lodged in my mind and stayed there.

He would have turned ninety next week.

His father had been fading for a while. Not dramatically, just that quiet softening age brings. The kind where memory loosens and time begins to blur. A bout of pneumonia a few months ago had rattled everyone, but he had pulled through. So when he got the call last evening saying his father looked like he was struggling, no one expected that it would end here.

But it did. Quietly. At home.

I went to see them that morning. The apartment was one of those from the late 1970s, possibly early 1980s, with a name ending in “- Kiran”. The layout was familiar — odd corners, low ceilings, octagonal rooms, tiny grilled balconies that looked out onto nothing in particular. The whole place had that smell old apartments carry, a mix of varnish and dust, with the lingering trace of turmeric in the walls.

Upstairs, the furniture had been cleared to the shared landing. Where the sofas once sat, a body now lay. His father was wrapped in white, his skin rubbed down with sandalwood paste, turmeric, neem oil, and ghee. Grains were scattered across his chest and shoulders. A little ragi, some wheat, a few rice kernels like some forgotten harvest ritual. He looked small. Still. Tended to with care, but not with ceremony. Just the quiet hum of presence. Family, a few neighbours, some cousins, a priest. No urgency. No performance. Just the slow, steady movements of people who have done this many times before.

He had led a good life. People said it gently, as if reminding themselves it was true.

Then came the crematorium.

The pattern repeated. Rosewater, tulsi, camphor, and banana leaves. His body was lifted onto a metal tray placed over a thin wooden briar. It felt symbolic, not practical. More water was splashed. The leaves wrapped again. A final arrangement before the slide inward.

And it was in that moment, watching him disappear into the chamber, that something turned.

This was cooking.

The oils. The herbs. The wrapping. The heat. It didn’t feel like a farewell. It felt like preparation.

Papillote-style, like the French do with fish. Wrapped in parchment, lightly seasoned, and steamed in their own aroma. As the banana leaves touched the hot metal, they hissed. And that was it — I couldn’t unthink it.

We call it an offering. But to whom? For what?

Across cultures, we dress the dead, perfume them, anoint them with oils, wrap them in leaves, surround them with spices, salt, coins, grain. We call it respect. A final kindness.

But maybe that’s not the only reason.

Maybe it’s fear.

Maybe our gods are not what we imagine them to be. Not merciful or watchful. Maybe they are something older, something hungrier. And what we call ritual is just a recipe passed down across generations, designed to keep them sated. What if sandalwood is a marinade? What if turmeric is not just antiseptic, but flavour?

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Leadership through the lens of relationship

 

I had a slightly sideways thought this week. We often imagine divinity as a source of power. That it is something we beseech when we’re in need, hoping it’ll act on our behalf. But what if it’s the other way around? What if the gods gain their power from us? What if it’s the act of asking, remembering, tending, that gives gods their strength and not the other way around?

This line of thought won’t leave me alone. What if attention isn’t neutral? What if it’s generative? What if what we relate to is what becomes real?

pointed me to the Circumpolar Inuit Protocols for Equitable and Ethical Engagement which holds a quiet but consistent thread: relationship isn’t a step in the process. It is the process. Knowledge, identity, land, language, decision-making don’t exist in isolation. They exist through connection.

A hunter’s first seal isn’t just food. It’s a communal moment of reciprocity. The seal gives itself. The hunter shares it with elders and those in need. That act of sharing doesn’t just reflect community values; it constitutes the community. Without it, the relationship frays. And when the relationship frays, the meaning thins out. Things become less real.

So how does this land in our work? In the messy realities of philanthropy, leadership, and institutional life?

Let’s start with philanthropy. So much of the field still sees itself as a source of capital. We fund. We support. We enable. But if you shift the lens. If you accept that attention and relation create power. Then philanthropy more than resourcing. It’s about consecrating. What we fund is what we acknowledge as worthy of belonging. What we name, show up for, listen to, and keep returning to are the things we breathe life into.

Not to everything into a spiritual exercise. But to be honest that money follows meaning. And we shape meaning through where we place our gaze. When we treat certain knowledge systems as “input,” certain leaders as “investable,” or certain stories as “impactful,” we’re deciding what gets to be real in the system.

“We share our knowledge in the same way that we share our food.”

Doesn’t this line just hold everything? Knowledge isn’t abstract but is a living thing that’s kept alive through use, through ritual, through recognition. Like food, it’s meant to be shared with care, with context, with memory. If we forget to do that, if we extract, tokenise, summarise, the knowledge dies. And so does the relationship.

This applies just as much to leadership. If relation creates reality, then leadership isn’t about vision or control but stewardship of attention. What we notice. What we name. What we dignify with our time and trust. Leadership, in this frame, becomes a practice of presence. Less commanding, more convening. Less solutioning, more sensing.

It also demands a kind of humility that philanthropy and leadership often resist. Because if the system isn’t waiting to be fixed, but waiting to be related to, then we can’t start with answers. We have to start by becoming trustworthy partners in a relationship that might ask more from us than we’re used to giving including discomfort, slowness, and the willingness to let go of control.

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Commons as Laboratory for New Leadership

 

Note: I had been sitting with this post for a while now and chanced upon this article posted on Linkedin. It was the provocation I needed to hit the publish button.

The river has no patience for frameworks.

Picture a community meeting about water sharing along the Kaveri. We have farmers, companies, and government officials gathered by its banks. The water flows past their deliberations, circular in its seasonal rhythms, linear in its downstream journey, networked through tributaries, spiraling through landscapes and generations.

Each group speaks a different spatial language.

The farmers speak in cycles – of monsoons, crops, and ancestral water practices. The company representatives speak in lines – of quarterly targets, infrastructure, scalable interventions. The officials speak in hierarchies – of permits, policies, jurisdiction. And the tribal elders speak in spirals, of how water holds the memory of ancestors and the needs of children yet unborn.

These scenes reveal how commons work surfaces geometry. Not the mathematical kind, but the cultural logic of how people relate to time, space, and relationship. And leading across these geometries, without flattening difference, is a distinct, multi-lingual form of leadership.

In my earlier writing about connection and abstraction, I suggested that change work takes different shapes. But nowhere is this more visible than in commons governance.

• Circular thinking is relational and seasonal. It is built on reciprocity. Taking water requires giving back, and leadership is collective, rotational, and rhythmic.
• Linear thinking defines property rights, tracks progress, and seeks efficiency. Leadership here is about direction, control, and outcomes.
• Networked thinking spreads power laterally. Think open-source protocols or digital commons. Leadership is facilitative; trust flows across nodes.
• Spiral thinking integrates personal, communal, and spiritual dimensions. It holds memory and aspiration in the same breath. Leadership is ancestral and moral.

Perhaps the real challenge is that most governance systems are designed for just one geometry and in expecting the others to conform, results in misalignment, mistrust, and missed opportunity.

This is why commons work can be a powerful laboratory for new kinds of leadership.

Where leaders learn to read the room, not just what people said, but the geometry behind it. When farmers were speaking in cycles about crop rotations and when bureaucrats were speaking in lines about budget deadlines. And to creatd spaces where the geometries could meet, like overlapping circles creating new forms at their intersections.

This is “through me” leadership. Not imposing, not brokering, but enabling emergence. It’s less about reconciling differences and more about weaving across them.

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Dismantling the myth

 

I came across this post on Linkedin reviewing the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa that promised to double yields and incomes for 30 million smallholder farmers while cutting food insecurity in half.

It does appear that AGRA fell short in precisely the way many development efforts fail when they borrow too much from the corporate playbook. Agriculture, like education or justice or health, isn’t just a system to optimise. It’s a relationship to be tended. And this is where so much of the venture-philanthropy, impact-investing, startup-accelerator logic falls apart. It’s trying to steer a sailboat by owning a larger share of it, rather than understanding the wind.

This essay is a reflection on why the development sector doesn’t need corporate salvation. In fact, it may be time we asked why corporate sectors keep failing at social change, despite the capital, tools, and confidence they bring. I’ve sat in too many conversations where venture capitalists earnestly suggest that NGOs just need better dashboards or tighter management systems. And while some of that is true, the deeper question is: what worldview are we importing when we adopt those tools? And what are we unconsciously pushing aside?

The Myth of Corporate Superiority

The idea that non-profits should be more like businesses has become oddly persistent. It usually starts with a conversation about efficiency and ends with someone quoting Drucker. But this mindset mistakes the logic of return for the logic of repair.

Corporate success is structured around extraction and acceleration. Development work is structured around complexity, consent, and collective well-being. These are not just different strategies. They’re different worlds.

I’ve even heard this logic up close. On a flight, I found myself seated next to a group of venture capitalists who were excitedly discussing their forays into philanthropy. Their conversation was peppered with terms like “metrics,” “scalability,” and “return on investment.” When they learned I worked in the development sector, one of them leaned in and said, “Have you considered running your organisation more like a business?”

It was well-meaning. But also wildly misplaced.

VC vs Philanthropy: A Window Into the Divide

Venture capital is about placing high-risk bets in search of exponential financial return. That means time horizons are short, ownership is central, and control is non-negotiable. Founders often have to trade autonomy for capital, and investors focus on pattern recognition, growth curves, and exits.

Philanthropy, when it’s at its best, operates differently. It works on timescales that make 10-year funds look rushed. It deals with interdependent systems, not isolated products. It listens more than it directs. It works in relationship, not just in return.

And yet, over the past two decades, we’ve seen a growing push to make philanthropy act more like VC. Outcome-based funding. Accelerators for NGOs. ROI-style language about “impact per dollar.” The result is that we’re now rewarding interventions that scale neatly, measure cleanly, and photograph well, while deprioritising the slow, deep, often invisible work of shifting systems.

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