Teach A Man To Fish

I read an interesting blog post on the now tired Teach A Man To Fish paradigm recently and found myself spending enough time on the comment on that blog to merit a blog post on my own site.  So...

The Teach-A-Man-To-Fish paradigm is a mess. First, it concentrates on the Man when many studies show that women are better entrepreneurs. Second, people know how to fish. The assumption that you are “helping” by telling some one everything you know is more ego stroking than anything. There are lot’s of people who fish much better than I do. Said another way, knowledge or Intellectual Property, is a fish. In an information economy teaching people to fish equates to a vibrant education system. It also requires that this vibrant education system focuses on critical thinking and the skills necessary to create intellectual property as opposed to a list of history's tired informational detritus. (That is stuff for another post.) 

In an information economy, IP is a commodity. Knowing how to fish is the ability to innovate, to apply insight to opportunity and then operationalize.

 

As some one whose career is in philanthropy I have come to the conclusion that the only engine that has enough horsepower to actually solve the world’s most intractable problems is the market. (I specifically say the market as opposed to Capitalism. Markets are science and Capitalism is religion.) The problem with the physics of making a better world is that we have two competing markets. One that says I have to compete to be the best and win the resources and the other that says I have to collaborate to achieve the goals of a better world.  And there in, I believe, lies the answer. 

We need to collaborate to create a better world.

Don’t help. Solve. Take the problem seriously. Apply your sharpest knife. Find the very best partner(s). Solve the problem. Generic “helping” is useless on a global scale. The boy scout model is pleasant and makes us each, individually feel better because we took a few seconds to help.  However, with out an ability to strategically aggregate our collective efforts to “help” we are just making ourselves feel good.

Find someone who is every bit as good at fishing as you are and point your collective skills at a specific problem and then take the problem seriously enough to internalize the hubris to solve it.

Comments

[Alanna]

I get very tired of the teach a man to fish phrase, especially from people who know very little about local capacity building. Thanks for addressing this!

[Steve Wright (Conches)]

Alana,

Thanks for the comment and for the link to your blog. I look forward to reading it.