Your Super Special Skillset Sucks the Soul out of Social Progress.
Dr. Pierce Otlhogile-Gordon is an innovation catalyst, researcher, facilitator, and evaluator, impassioned by the space between transformation and liberation. As the Director of the Equity Innovation studio at Think Rubix, a Black-led social innovation consultancy. Dr. Gordon serves as a shepherd for Equity Innovation to shape our collective future. Learn more about his work here.
Come. Let me show you what I saw, five years ago.
Imagine the warm, dry winter of a secluded desert village name D’Kar. The sand of D’Kar’s gotten in everything, including the metal rods you’ve welded together to create your prototype wheelchair. For the past three weeks, you’ve been building a new product specifically supporting mobility issues for indigenous communities in the Kalahari Desert.
Congratulations! Your team built a cool prototype. But now it’s time to test if it’s even useful. Fortunately, you’re the team member who just finished his Ph.D. qualifying exams, so there’s no one better-trained to build the experiment.
Let’s call this your Super Special Skillset.
You excitedly jump into a rant; discussing some potential research plans. You instantly come up with fourteen or sixteen different studies, each taking into account human weight, different environments the wheelchair might navigate, and dozens of other variables for which we need to control. Once you stop and wait for their thoughts, however, you only see blank faces.
You meatball, they didn’t understand a word you said.
But you all speak English, right? Sure, but your uberPhD tongue won’t work here. You’re working with these people so you have to communicate to work together. Soon enough, your friend quietly translates a few words, moves the wheelchair through the sand, and somehow everyone else instantly gets it. You had some cool ideas, but you couldn’t guide your partners when you needed to. Now you’re standing there, befuddled and embarrassed.
One thought raced through your mind: What am I missing here?
Remember this quote: The words that got me here, failed me here.
When I give research presentations on my PhD research, I usually start my stories by talking about my exploits in this very desert. I was a part of the International Development Innovation Network co-designing local technologies to address the direct needs of the locals. On its face, a 4-week design sprint has all the dressings of a sensational innovation experience:
- It housed a collection of diverse designers from across the world:
- It was built with the theory and practice of co-design at its core:
- It had a tried and tested design journey — from research to prototyping, to testing;
- There were dozens of methods used to improve the projects and the people;
- There was an entire network of global entrepreneurs ready and willing to support the projects after the event died down.
But here’s the thing — in the end, we didn’t reach our goals. What happened?
I’ve already discussed one of the problems: we had to leave the village to keep working on the prototype in earnest. After studying the history of projects in this village, I came across a different problem. If you want to be a catalyst for systemic change, you too have to understand this issue, no matter if you’re a designer, a researcher, a policy expert, in international development, or anything else.
Let’s talk about capacity blinders.
What are capacity blinders?
It means you’ve become so involved in building and exercising a certain capacity — a skillset, an industry, a community network, a knowledge base — that its lessons blind you from seeing reality.
My capacity blinders came from my training in academia. Doing my homework, learning engineering, research, and interdisciplinary studies, and navigating the politics of universities became a performance of sorts. If I spoke, wrote, and connected with colleagues a certain way, my colleagues would trust me more.
Here’s the problem: that performance did the opposite thing when I tried to do social good work with folks at the margins. In those projects, I wasn’t brought in as an expert, but as a partner. As partners, you don’t need to wow people with your wordsmithing, you need to scope a project, divide tasks, communicate, and build something bigger than yourself.
The problem was, I couldn’t turn the performance off when I didn’t need it anymore.
You’ve probably run into this problem too. It affects what you think the problem is, what solutions you’ll suggest, whether people want to work with you, and what solutions you feel comfortable building. If you’re not careful when addressing issues of equity and justice, your Super-Special Skillset can become a wall that neither you nor the people closest to the problem will know how to overcome.
The skills that got you there, might just fail you there.
“What am I missing here?”
I spent the next two years researching the answer to that very question. I decided to explore a whole new research project: What is the history of development projects brought to D’Kar, and how have they affected the village? Over the years, I found more than I expected:
- English-teaching and translation programmes that offered the Bible in the local language;
- Art programmes that sell indigenous crafts and wares to the outside world;
- Entrepreneurship programmes that support community engagement (funny that, since our project, a couple of years later did the same thing — but we didn’t know the past one existed);
- And many more.
Unknowingly, the first Super Specialists built a ‘development oasis’, where the infrastructure from past projects made it easier for future projects to find a home. Unfortunately, each new project didn’t learn about the history of projects before they arrived. It’s almost as if each new project was remaking the wheel while the indigenous communities were left fatigued by the performance. Sure, the experiences seemed valuable, but were they systems-changing? Not in the slightest.
It’s because humans are bad at seeing systems. If you’re limited by the perspectives you bring and can’t see the impacts your influences cause, you stand to sustain the same problems you came to address — or even worse, create new ones. When you’re in the thick of it, it’s so hard to see the forest for the trees and find a better way forward.
This isn’t only the case in D’kar:
- The full scale of the historical problems affecting your community is hidden from view.
- The Super Specialists are limited by the project’s goals, skills, community, and resources to see what was missing.
- And, people’s skills and expertise kept them from recognising whether their work actually changed people’s lives.
We’re not simply fighting against the people, tools, and voids of the present. We’re also aiming to mend the wounds of the past and to expand the limitations of our own minds.
Who should be a part of building the future?
Today, my Super-Special Skillsets are in international development, innovation practice + design, and evaluation. These are knowledge industries built to address issues of equity, justice, and social good. On the surface, these equip me perfectly to build a better world, right?
But here’s the thing: Super Specialists frequently become gatekeepers to actual social progress. It’s their methods, their convenings, their funding, and their stories that determine if the project should continue. Many gatekeepers pride themselves on the fact that they hold such transformative power.
But let me ask you: are you doing social good to make the world better, or to support your ego?
You’re an expert of your own experience — and no one else’s. We mustn’t use our skills to dominate how the future should be built. By doing that, you’re building a world where only Super-Special logic matters. That’s how our world — crisis-laden as it is — was built in the first place.
So, where should you start?
Listen.
Learn from the real specialists — the people proximate to the problem. Your distance is valuable because you can both ask about the past, from their perspective, and ask about the current state of the struggle. But first, shh and learn.
Find ways your Super Special Skillset exploits the people closest to the harm — and break the cycle.
You might not mean to, but your efforts might harm the people they mean to help. Researchers have grifted and over-stereotyped communities through peer-reviewed studies. Entrepreneurs and innovators harvest ideas from local communities and turn them into their intellectual property. Social programmes build ‘impact’ and change metrics that don’t listen to the issues on the ground. If you’re actually going to help, ask: how will you make sure your project is different?
Build a project that is designed to build the agency of the historically marginalized.
These spaces are rarely where the means justify the ends. If you’re there to support the marginalized, they have to be involved from the beginning, or the work’s values and outcomes will ring hollow. If you’re not there to support, you have no reason to be there.
On Decentering Super-Specialists
Come. Let me show you what I see, in a possible future.
Years later, you return to the village. Your friends immediately recognize you and welcome you back to the red sand, which still gets into everything. After a hefty lunch, you ask about the wheelchair project and how things have been progressing.
Turns out, the community’s made a lot of progress. They’ve been making changes to the technology, and to their local houses — by building ramps and the like — so that the villagers with disabilities can more easily travel outside, to church, and to the community locations. Unexpectedly, the wheelchair rig that was left in the location was re-jiggered into a cart powered by the donkeys in the area — they use the tech to move cornmeal and local meat, why not use it to be mobile.
That being said, there’s still technical progress to be made, and you’re excited to support however it makes sense. But, they turn you down.
We appreciate what you brought, and we’ve never forgotten it, they say.
But, we’ve seen a lot of people come and go, and we’ve learned from all of them, they say.
We decided to make something ourselves based on what you’ve brought instead of waiting for the next outsider to come along, they say.
That works for us, so we don’t need you anymore.
My favorite quote about social good work: We’re successful when we work ourselves out of a job. We have to deal with the consequences of this goal, though: If you’ve succeeded, your role in the work must take a backseat.
We might be pleasantly surprised where that journey takes you.
