Anyone who wants to change anything or improve anyone else\u2019s life has to see this arresting TED talk by Ernesto Sirolli.
\nAn anguished observer\u00a0of the comprehensive failure of western aid in Africa, Sirolli innovated a seemingly radical\u00a0approach to community change:<\/p>\n

\u201cYou never initiate anything, you never motivate anybody. Instead you become a servant of local people\u2019s passion. People who have a dream of how to be a better person. So you shut up. You never arrive in a community with any ideas \u2026we sit with local people in a caf\u00e9, or at the pub and we become friends and we find out what local people want to do. The most important thing is passion. You can give somebody an idea. If that person doesn\u2019t want to do it, what are you going to do? The passion that the person has for their own growth is the most important thing.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sirolli\u00a0says the most useful\u00a0role for\u00a0a\u00a0change maker is to be a servant to entrepreneurs by connecting them with the resources to act. And since no one can simultaneously be an ideas-person, a marketer, or a good administrator, the most important resource is the people who can fill the missing roles.
\nI love how he describes that \u201cplanning is the death of entrepreneurship\u201d and why community meetings are always failures (because the local entrepreneurs don\u2019t turn up).
\nThere is so much in this video that I’m using it to introduce my Changeology training workshops this year. It captures exactly the leap we need to make from paternalism to enablement and the way success or failure depends, above all else, on the\u00a0assumptions we bring along with us.<\/p>\n