by Bill Shore
It’s not that Brother Thomas was aiming for perfection—he was wise enough to know that is unattainable. But he was aiming for the best possible. What distinguished him from his peers, and what accounted for his success, was a more expansive vision of what could be accomplished. Impractical was not a disqualifier. Nor was inconvenient, expensive, or extremely labor-intensive. These were merely obstacles to be worked around or run over. They rendered his quest more difficult, but in no way altered the reality of what he knew to be within reach.
Most important of all, he was not just aiming for the best possible but was holding himself accountable to the highest of standards. In an essay in Creation Out of Clay, a collection of his art and writings, Brother Thomas wrote: “If I were a pottery manufacturer, then losing half of my work would be madness. . . . To be unfaithful to my own inner vision of what is beautiful-to-me would be the beginning of an inner lie . . . that would soon render my work inauthentic.”3
Extensive photos documenting Brother Thomas at work show a man, not surprisingly, as physically strong as he was mentally tough and determined. Large, round, black-rimmed glasses are all that soften the Zeus-like look bestowed by a large and long head, thick tight curls of grey hair, and a speckled full beard. His powerful hands shape the clay into the most delicate-looking vessels, at times so lathered in wet clay, and so sturdy in appearance, that it is hard to tell where his flesh ends and the pot begins.
Working with little else but those hands, and occasionally a stick or knife, Brother Thomas produced a stunning range of art. A fire burned within that was every bit as intense as the fire in his workshop’s kiln. And he put it to the same use: hardening his determination to work according to his own vision, no matter what others might have thought.
For Brother Thomas, good was not and never would be good enough. It’s an admirable, even inspirational, philosophy. But it might be better suited to the monastery than the marketplace. Breaking 1,100 of every 1,200 pots could also be interpreted as stubborn, eccentric, unrealistic, or unreasonable.
“Good but not good enough” implies a restless and relentless push for more, a refusal to accept what others accept. It borders on hubris that nearly disparages the ease and comfort most of us are content to seek and embrace. But aren’t these qualities often embedded somewhere in the foundations of great achievement? Aren’t they always?
In the DNA of every great and worthy breakthrough is a gene encoded with the instruction that good is not good enough. It is not only in Brother Thomas’s pottery: It was also in Joe DiMaggio’s swing of a bat. It is visible in the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and audible in the strains proceeding from Yo Yo Ma’s cello. It was evident in Rosa Parks’s belief that a seat in the back of the bus was not good enough, and her refusal to accept one. It prevailed in NASA’s determination to reach the moon and Gandhi’s determination that India reach independence.
It would be easy to confuse this quality with a classic work ethic, the kind that leads a Boy Scout to an Eagle badge. However, good but not good enough is not just about practicing longer, working harder, or being more competitive. Instead it is a deeply intrinsic drive to achieve what others have dismissed as unachievable, or have simply not been able to even imagine. It’s a drive powered by internal vision and compass and indifferent to external expectations, conventional wisdom, skepticism, or even ridicule. It demands a willingness to take risks that often seem unreasonable right up until the moment they succeed.
Eradication of the threat of malaria throughout the world is the kind of challenge that demands unreasonable imagination, a willingness to break a lot of pots before expecting a solution.
The audacious goal of saving the lives of nearly 1 million children a year—the number currently dying from malaria—will require new breakthrough thinking, considering the half century of high but continually shattered hopes in the history of malaria eradication efforts. Brilliant research by dedicated scientists across the globe has taken place over the past fifty years, most of it against the backdrop of the incremental progress that was believed to be all that was possible at the time. And yet the problem persisted, with the number of malaria cases actually rising instead of falling around the world.
What was needed in the seemingly quixotic quest to create and manufacture an effective vaccine for malaria was the stubborn conviction that what could be accomplished was greater than what anyone else in the field had thought possible. Good was not good enough.
Many of those pursuing social change have reached a similar place—a place where incremental progress has led to a frustrating plateau. And then along comes someone who decides to turn the old methods upside-down and do something different. Whether with hunger, health care, housing, schools, or any of dozens of other issues, a dividing line has grown ever brighter: On one side are the many efforts to ameliorate the symptoms of a problem; on the other are extraordinary efforts to attack the root causes and eradicate it altogether. That line marks the difference between those content to stand on good intentions and those willing to risk a public commitment to a specific, often ambitious outcome.
Wealthy donors, foundations, and others are increasingly gathering on one side of that line. It is creating a sea change in the conduct of philanthropy and explains why there is so much emphasis today on more focused investing for impact, strategic management, and technical assistance; measurable outcomes and greater transparency; and the scaling of evidence-based programs. From small family and community foundations to massive institutions like the Kellogg and Ford foundations, there is long overdue reorientation and refocusing underway founded on the impatience that accompanies the idea that good is not good enough.
Share Our Strength went through just such an evolution in thinking and strategy, which gave me a firsthand perspective of what is involved. We had to establish a priority: Was it to feed hungry people, or to address the root causes of what made people hungry and try to eradicate them?
The urgent and immediate needs of people who are hungry often overwhelm the more ambitious target. When you look into the eyes of those who are suffering, whether from sickness, cold, or hunger, or just because they lack opportunities enjoyed by the rest of society, it can sound callous to say, “Sorry, I’m devoting my energy to attacking the root causes of your suffering, but unfortunately can’t address your suffering itself.”
Share Our Strength began in 1984 as a grant-maker and for many years funded hundreds of anti-hunger organizations across the country and around the world, awarding more than $100 million in grants by 2010. We didn’t compete for existing philanthropic dollars but brought new resources into the community. We funded the operating expenses of organizations that no one else wanted to fund. We were nonbureaucratic, reliable, and loyal to those we funded. We received great press for our work as well as awards and recognition. Everything we did delighted everyone—except ourselves. We got to a point where we didn’t want to just feed people. We wanted to end hunger. And that required an entirely different approach.
As we thought about how to pivot and achieve that goal we heeded the advice of social science writer Jonathan Kozol, who said that one should “pick battles big enough to matter, but small enough to win.” The battle to end childhood hunger in the United States was just such a battle. Kids in America aren’t hungry because there isn’t enough food but because they lack access to public food and nutrition programs, and that’s a solvable problem. But it meant that, like Brother Thomas, we had to break a lot of our own pots. We had to confront the notion that good was not good enough. It was not sufficient to please other nonprofits, reporters, politicians, or even funders. We had to achieve the best version of ourselves that we could be. We had to work differently.
After extensive research, we decided to hold ourselves accountable to the specific goal of ending childhood hunger by 2015. We invited many of our colleagues to join us. Not all of them were in favor of such a strategic change. At a meeting we convened of about fifty organizations, many of
whom we worked closely with and funded, nearly all opposed the proposal at first. They raised questions about how we would measure progress, how we would fund such an effort, and what would happen if we failed.
Mostly, they were uncomfortable with being held accountable for specific, measurable, ambitious outcomes. Many had found satisfaction and rewards in doing good work and did not want to risk losing that. It took three years, but most eventually came around. Some of that was due to our persuasion, but much of it was because the times were changing. Other institutions were changing as well. President Obama adopted the goal of ending childhood hunger by 2015. Prominent governors asked Share Our Strength to bring our strategy to their states. Funders who had not previously supported Share Our Strength came to the table for the first time. We left some broken pottery on the ground, but that’s something we all must challenge ourselves to do.
What we are attempting in our ongoing quest to end childhood hunger, and what Brother Thomas did with pottery, requires a shift in the way we think about what is possible. And it’s the same shift that is occurring in the scientific labs of visionary malaria researchers. In this book, we will visit those labs and follow the work of one researcher, Stephen Hoffman of Sanaria labs, in particular. Hoffman and the vaccine he is relentlessly pursuing may be not only our best hope for eradicating malaria, but also our best modern example of how imagination, even in its most unreasonable forms—especially in its most unreasonable forms—can lead to breakthroughs.
This book is about more than these scientists—or even their work—because anyone who aspires to make a breakthrough and do what has never been done before can learn valuable lessons from their example.
MOST FAILURES ARE FAILURES OF IMAGINATION
Whether in art, science, technology, or social activism, when there is failure, we often perceive and understand it as a failure of talent, strategy, planning, financial resources, or even execution. But those are not really the reasons most efforts fail. Most failures are failures of imagination. This is especially true for the seemingly intractable problems that have plagued us for decades, if not centuries. Albert Einstein said that “the specific problems we face cannot be solved using the same patterns of thought that were used to create them.” Breaking out of those patterns demands a transformative, imaginative leap.
Examples of such triumphs of imagination are too few, but where they exist they are powerfully convincing.
The Institute for OneWorld Health in San Francisco is, more than anything else, a triumph of imagination by a former Food and Drug Administration official named Victoria Hale, who saw that a pharmaceutical firm could be structured as a nonprofit, released from the responsibility to maximize shareholder value, and made capable of accepting donated intellectual property from others. She essentially “took profit out of the equation” in developing and manufacturing medicines needed by the world’s poor.4 As a result, the institute, her brainchild, helps to actually create markets for drugs for neglected diseases. Established in 2000 as the first nonprofit pharmaceutical company in the United States, and now backed by more than $40 million from the Gates Foundation, it has created a new model for improving global health.
Teach for America, now the top employer of Ivy League graduates in the United States, was a triumph of imagination by a Princeton senior named Wendy Kopp in 1989. Kopp believed that the best students from the best universities would be willing to at least temporarily forgo careers in law and banking to teach in some of the most underserved schools in the country upon their graduation. There were countless obstacles to putting such a plan into action, ranging from the logistics of recruiting and training teachers to the resistance of teachers unions. But they were all surmounted by Kopp’s imagination. Today, Teach for America has 7,300 current members teaching in thirty-five urban and rural areas. They impact 450,000 students annually, and nationwide there are more than 17,000 alums, including founders of charter schools, high-school principals, and school superintendents.5
The Harlem Children’s Zone is a triumph of imagination by Geoffrey Canada, who conceived of the idea that some of the nation’s poorest children should be surrounded, starting in utero, by a safety net woven so tightly that they would not be able to slip through it. Canada was president and CEO of a nonprofit called the Rheedlen Center, an organization that had been helping Harlem’s children since 1970. But he was driven to do more, and in 1997 he launched a new initiative. By creating an interlocking network of services in a twenty-four-block area of Harlem, he wove that safety net, and the Harlem Children’s Zone was born. Children are testing at or above grade level on standardized tests and breaking the cycle of generational poverty as they graduate and enter the workforce. The effort has grown to encompass ninety-seven city blocks, and all the services are provided for free.6
Overcoming failure of imagination can be an enormous challenge. In some fields—including the nonprofit sector—the failure of imagination has become routine. In some ways, it is culturally ingrained thanks to severe and debilitating resource constraints. But imagination cannot be bought and installed like the latest software, or taught in an MBA program. Nor can it be inculcated into an organization by expensive consultants. There are no metrics by which it can be measured. That makes it easy to dismiss it as a “soft” resource, something that is “nice to have,” rather than the “must have” hard currency that is needed to conquer seemingly intractable problems.
Though imagination cannot be purchased, there are ways to purposefully create a culture that acknowledges the primacy of imagination in reaching breakthrough solutions. This can be done by constantly challenging the conventional wisdom and even the most longstanding assumptions. It can be done by asking hard questions about what is possible, even if such questions seem naïve, and by rewarding risk and not penalizing dreamers.
Imagination can be nurtured and elevated by properly funding R&D—which is often considered a luxury—as if it were a necessity, because it is. And it can be stimulated by forcing those in an organization, from the senior leadership on down, to get out from behind their desks and venture into places where their imaginations will be stimulated by bearing witness to people and places very different from themselves.
Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese military strategist who wrote The Art of War, said that every battle is won or lost before it is fought.7 Similarly, every effort to change the world journeys toward its destiny on a path determined by what can be imagined. Not believing that we could end childhood hunger was a failure of imagination, and it distorted and undermined the way in which the anti-hunger community went about its work for generations. Not believing that malaria could actually be eradicated was a failure of imagination that distorted and undermined the way the malaria community went about its work, until someone leaped unreasonably over the hurdle.
IRRATIONAL CONFIDENCE: THE VISIONARY’S DILEMMA
These two strands of belief—that good is not good enough, and that most failures are failures of imagination—when woven together, are held fast by the glue of unshakable belief in oneself. It is old-fashioned advice, this notion of believing in oneself, the stuff of commencement speeches and testimonial dinners. But in certain circumstances, continuing to believe in yourself and your calling, even against all odds, can be determinative. The bigger one’s dreams, the more tangible and important such belief becomes.
The visionary’s dilemma is that the bigger the goal or aspiration, the bolder and more audacious the plan for attaining it, and the more skeptics and cynics there will be. The dilemma is particularly pernicious because it persists and compounds. The more the visionary pushes and pursues, the more the establishment interprets this as a sign of fundamental instability, conveniently justifying its initial opposition. Concerns about the idea are compounded by concerns about the idea’s propagator. Establishments are threatened by visionaries, especially when, as often happens, a visionary’s approach suggests that the solution has been hiding in plain sight all along, notwithstanding
the phalanxes of bright people who have dedicated their entire careers to more conventional approaches.
The status quo yields not an inch of ground without a fight. The establishment always has the advantage of money, credibility, respect, prestige, familiarity, and political support. Just as a daring quarterback’s consistent effectiveness all but invites the defensive line to blitz, the visionary has to expect the pass rush and hold his or her ground.
So a visionary’s best defense to the dilemma is not only having a thick skin, but having reservoirs of self-confidence as well. Because when those invested in the status quo feel threatened, they chip away at not only the upstart’s ideas, but also his or her motives and character. Just as big trucks require big wheels, and tall buildings require deep foundations, people with big dreams need a large reservoir of self-confidence to maintain their balance and go forward. It helps if friends and family can be depended upon to help fill it.
I don’t think it’s an accident that many of the people profiled in the story of the pursuit of a malaria vaccine are directly supported by family members such as spouses and sons and daughters. The original discovery of a potential malaria vaccine in 1968 was by the husband-and-wife team of Victor and Ruth Nussenzweig, who even today, in their eighties, share a lab at New York University. Their discovery was the genesis of future work pursued by several other husband-and-wife teams, including Steve Hoffman and Kim Lee Sim in the United States, as well as Pedro Alonso and his wife Clara Menendez in Spain and Africa. Inherent in such familial couplings is a support system, a kind of anchor that helps such people weather the inevitable storms. Standing alone against the multitudes requires a degree of belief in oneself that simply surpasses the rational.
