Melinda Gates on holding your strategy lightly

I read an incredible book by Melinda Gates over the summer break. She shares so many heart-wrenching stories about how empowering women is so often the key to changing the world for everyone. One paragraph caught my eye because her team's hard-won experience had taught them something that is so true for any strategy - that you must hold it lightly. That is, move forward with a plan, yet be listening for the signals that the plan must change. 

Melinda started out trying to improve agriculture production. She ended up fighting for gender equity in agriculture. The shift came because as they gained deep learning of the context of third world agriculture, they came to realise that the bottleneck constraining the achievement of their ultimate goal of more and better quality food making it into the mouths of all people in the community, was gender equity. 

Ouch. What an insight! That is what I call a strategic insight. It upended everything they thought they knew about changing the developing world through agriculture.  

How did they discover this? After years of tireless work connecting scientists and experts with the needs on the ground, they finally realised that it was the men that were describing the community's needs, providing feedback, and making decisions. Where were the women? Not only was it culturally inappropriate for them to speak to the researchers, they were busy doing the planting, harvesting, cooking and feeding children. So the men were involved in the consultation that drew in funding for new seed types, equipment, practices, and fertilisers, but the women who did most of the back-breaking work growing crops and turning them into food were the ones that actually knew what worked in practice. As a result, oftentimes an innovation would be developed that would turn out to be impractical, so it wouldn't get used. 

The story is easy to get drawn into. I'd highly recommend the book if the topic interests you. But back to the strategy lesson…

A strategic thinker knows what they are looking for, and is ready to discover it when it comes along. And in the meantime? They're able to move forward in the best way they know how right now. 

Melinda's team were doing their best and learning as they went. Thankfully, they picked up on the signals that the women they never saw held the keys. They shifted their strategy. Melinda had the courage to name it - they shifted from perpetuating biases that keep people poor, to challenging them. You can read the book to hear how they did this in a sensitive yet powerful way. 

You might not be working on solving world hunger, but whatever you're doing, this is a call to: 

• Be very, very clear on what your end goal is.

• Realise that whatever you think the solution to achieving it is, it's just your current theory.

• You are human. Which means you are very very prone to seeing things through your own 'glasses' (otherwise known as mental models).

• It takes courage to change directions, change plans, articulate an alternative solution or problem framing.

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