Maintenance and Doing Good
for some time now, I’ve been following The Maintainers — a global cross-disciplinary research network posting, writing, and coming together around the idea that “capitalism is good at innovation and bad at maintenance, and for most lives maintenance matters more.” I love them. The founding essay over at aeon is worth a read. We spend so much time focusing on the innovators, the disruptors, and the sparkling moments of technology in transformative breakthroughs that we miss the quiet revolution of a well-run, well-maintained machine.
Nonprofits are no exception. New tech presents a dazzle gap for nonprofits. The techie shows up and implements something amazing that brings a whole new opportunity, but then leaves, and the nonprofit can’t maintain it within budgets and other constraints. To build with and not for a nonprofit in the technical innovation space means meeting the nonprofit where they’re at — extending them into new territory alongside a solid, boring old plan to keep it going, and updates of that kind are hard to plan for, hard to implement, and hard to fund and sustain.
From my first round of interviews on this sabbatical project, I think businesses trying to do good end up in the same trap. A great idea can get some funding, but getting to the next level — maintenance of an idea, without the constant demand for innovation — is harder. It seems like doing good needs a longer timeline and more patient investors ready to wait out the ROI — but that’s not how things are set up.
Founders of businesses trying to do good get asked daily: “why aren’t you a nonprofit? Are you sure you’re not an NGO?” and it’s a hard choice. Applying for a grant to do good will get some stability into your project — but it comes with its own pitfalls and obvious dependencies. And it sounds like some companies run into questions about why they choose “profit over potential” that mirror investors’ doubts about the choices leaders make about growth. Innovation seems to be short-sighting us.
A confluence of notions is in the air. In “Let’s Get Excited about Maintenance”, Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel tell us to keep an eye out for the neglect of maintenance: “ Americans have an impoverished and immature conception of technology, one that fetishizes innovation as a kind of art and demeans upkeep as mere drudgery.” And then a colleague sent me the best-named thing on the internet: Zebras Unite’s DazzleCon 2017: “Zebras Fix What Unicorns Break calls for a more ethical and inclusive movement to counter existing start-up culture. We believe creating an alternative to this status quo is a moral imperative. The timing couldn’t be better.”
I’m proposing you can’t do good without defining how you’re going to maintain. In maintenance might be the money, and definitely is the longevity, of the work of doing good. In the next installments, I’ll talk more about some of the entrepreneurs I’ve met who seem to be living this every day.
