John Walt

Right before I turned 25, I was in Malawi, and the terrorist group Boko Haram had just taken 300 girls from a school in Nigeria. I was so mad about what had happened that I decided I was going to go there and find a way to help. I went on a run one day, to try and blow off some steam. A few miles in, something hit me. God spoke to me; it wasn’t an audible booming voice, but it might as well have been a megaphone the way it resonated in my mind and heart. He said, “If you spend your life fighting injustice, then you are honoring injustice more than you are honoring what my son did on the cross. Go and build good things.” I was instantly on the ground, weeping. I am sure the Malawians walking past me had no idea what to make of the white guy in a “Cali” tank top on his knees in the dirt next to the road, crying. It was such a strong word that it instantly commanded change in my mind, heart, and life. I got up with tears still running down my face, knowing that I needed to go to Australia to see a mentor of mine. I had made a covenant with God to go wherever He called me and do whatever He called me to. So there was really no decision to make; I was going to Australia.

While I was there, my mentor invited me to go to the States with him, where he was planning a speaking tour of churches. I really didn’t want to go because I was scared I would get trapped. I somehow knew if I went back then the adventure would be over and I would be “trapped” in the US. But again, God told me to go, so several weeks later I found myself boarding a flight to California. Our third stop in the US was San Antonio, Texas. I had never been there before, but I walked out of the airport and met my wife. Literally, Heather had organized for us to come speak at her church and volunteered to pick us up from the airport. We probably fell instantly in love, but it took us a week to officially start dating. I had my stuff from Malawi shipped to San Antonio, and I started looking for an apartment. I ended up totally and madly in love and completely stuck in the US. One year and 2 days after we met, we got married.

When I got up from my encounter with God in Malawi, I knew that I had to learn how to build good things. But how do you learn something like that, and what exactly are good things in the first place? I wasn’t sure, but I felt confident that God would show me. The last 11 years Heather and I have been on a God led education in how to build good things. Along this journey, we have studied so many fascinating subjects and spent a significant amount of time with people of wisdom. Even though I didn’t know what that would look like 11 years ago, God speaking those words to me ignited something in my heart and changed me. I have learned so much since then and had my paradigms about impact, leadership and business shattered and rebuilt. Now I have a little more clarity about what good things are and how to build them, but most of what I thought starting out was wrong.

At first, I assumed building good things meant launching and scaling high-impact initiatives in impoverished and war-torn parts of the world. Then I thought it was about helping businesses design and fund impact projects. Eventually, I got to the point where I thought maybe it was about helping people build better businesses. But ultimately, what the last decade of learning and working with leaders has taught me can seem very counterintuitive at first.

Effective altruism is a philosophical movement focused on finding the most effective ways to help people. It has shown us that most impact work is not very effective at the end of the day. Usually that is because we see a need and we try to address that need but we don’t understand the larger ecosystem around that need. In Malawi I got to see all sorts of western funded initiatives rolled out from feeding people to diggin wells and education. These are all important and the work these organizations did was no doubt meaningful to the people they served. But the problem is most of those projects don’t last. Its called the white savior complex, we come in try to make everything right and then fly off feeling good about ourselves. Locals are appreciative but things are almost instantly back to the way they were before. What effective alruist recognized is that it is much better to first understand the whole ecosystem around the need and figure out from there what can be done.

Here is a real example I got to see working with Joyce Banda the former president of Malawi. The problem that needed to be solved was that many kids don’t stay in school as they get older. This is particularly true for girls. When you ask parents why they pull their kids out of school they will say its because of money. The immediate solution seems to be scholarships, but the issue is more complex than that. It turns out that the bigger problem is that the fathers are often taking what money they make and blowing it on multi-day benders. The next level of the problem is why are the girls pulled out more often than the boys? That answer is rooted in gender inequality that has a long history in tribal culture. So Joyce put her focus on fighting for women’s rights. When she started her political career it was legal to beat your wife and if she ran to the police they would bring her back to you. After decades of improving women’s rights, she started helping women create their own sources of income through business education and micro loans. When the women had the freedom to work and their own source of income the kids tuition was usually safe, food was on the table and improving women’s rights raised the cultural value for girls education. Joyce has worked on this for at least 50 years and the problem is still huge. What I wanted to demonstrate in this example is that often we fail to see the larger environment that we are working in and we spend our time and energy addressing symptoms instead of causes.

Much of what we think is good is often just exercises in ego, or at the very least, ineffective. My term for this type of work is do-goodery. We don’t change the world with large amounts of “do-goodery.” In order to create lasting change, we have to understand how the environment around us functions. We tend to see everything through the lens of Box and Line Thinking (Note No. 8), but in reality, the world doesn’t function the way we try to structure it. We want to build machines with people in them, but that's not how God created things to work. Every group of people, whether it's a business or a family, is a living organism. People are connected to each other through relationships, and each of them plays their part to help the organism play its part.

This shift in thinking is important because, in order to build good things, we have to embrace a radically different theory of change. The health and impact of any group of people is determined by the mental, emotional, and spiritual health of the leader. If the leader is unhealthy, then the family or business will produce degrees of chaos. If the leader is healthy, then the people they lead will produce order. We can see this easily in businesses with tyrannical bosses or families with abusive fathers. The impact of those leaders is chaos and brokenness. On the other hand, a leader who is healthy creates positive impact in every life they touch. The more time they spend with someone, the more impactful they are. We can probably all recall stories that have touched us about these types of leaders.

A better theory of change

What I have learned over the years guides how I think about growth in businesses, families, non-profits, ministries, teams, and much more. Here are three foundation principles I have learned about how to build good things.

Groups of people are living organisms. We can’t think of people as interchangeable parts in a larger machine.
The health of the leader determines the health of the group. Healthy leaders build healthy organisms and unhealthy leaders build unhealthy organisms.
The organization's values should guide all decision-making. Every strategic and operational decision in the business should align with the group's values.

Too often, leaders focus almost exclusively on mechanical solutions to problems in their organization. They implement new rules, enforce old rules, fire, hire, inspire, systematize, threaten, lead, follow, serve, and abuse. Rarely do leaders even consider the personal health and transformation of executives and managers to be a critical factor in their problem-solving and strategic planning.

I have found that most business failures and performance issues are a direct result of ego and insecurity issues in key leaders. People don’t want to admit they are wrong, ask for help, take responsibility, let go of control, give up on their dream, embrace change, make room for new people, and accept the limits of their expertise. Leaders often dress these basic human weaknesses up in sophisticated explanations and excuses, but experienced advisors can see right through them. On the other hand, when a leader is healthy, they aren’t threatened by talented people, great ideas, failures, honest feedback, or their own limitations.

Values in most organizations are borderline meaningless. We can use the Rule Line (note No. 13) to help us move away from rules-based leadership and to focus on the aspirational identity of the organization. Most businesses devolve into focusing almost exclusively on the bottom line, most non-profits get stuck trying to please donors, and most families in the daily grind of life lose sight of their vision. How should we handle significant financial losses in the business? How do we respond when a team member is working against our culture? How should we help when someone is going through a personal crisis? A company's values must help guide leaders to an answer for all of these questions.

What is a good thing?

Now we need to answer the big question: what is a good thing? In nature, we decide something is good if it plays its part in contributing to the larger ecosystem. With some plants and trees, we can evaluate the fruits they are producing to determine if they are good (healthy) or bad (unhealthy). In the same way, we can evaluate if an organization is a good thing by looking at its fruit and its contribution to the larger ecosystem it is a part of. In the case of families and businesses, that larger ecosystem is the community, but in a larger sense, that ecosystem is every life that the organization touches. In the case of a family, it would be positively impacting friends, teachers, Uber drivers, coworkers, neighbors… everyone. In a business, suppliers, employees, customers, partners, vendors, and community members are all directly impacted. I believe that the best definition of a good thing, is a group of people working together to positively impact every life they touch.

A business needs to make a profit, a family needs to raise kids, a team needs to train to win and a non-profit needs to create an impact. But the purpose should be so much bigger than the work they do every day. Most people agree that an organization should strive to positively impact everyone it touches, but they often treat this effort as an additional task beyond their core business responsibilities. Almost like a part that they bolt onto their existing business. In reality, it changes everything when we choose to view our organization as an organism, focus on building healthy leaders, and make every decision align with our values.

I will always be learning more about how to build good things, but what I have learned so far has shown me that who we become as individuals and groups of people is far more important and impactful than what we try to do. We can and should build great products, win championships, and work on impact projects, but the greatest impact we will make in life is in the lives of the people we touch. The businesses will eventually die, trophies will gather dust, buildings will fall, and policies will likely be overturned. The real legacy we leave behind is written on the hearts of the people we touch.

- John Walt

If this note was shared with you and you want to get future notes, you can sign up here.