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You've probably already heard the Eurostar story:
In 2009, the engineers behind the Eurostar train were given a brief: make the London-Paris journey better. Their answer was to spend £6 billion rebuilding the tracks and shaving 40 minutes off a 3.5-hour trip.
Rory Sutherland, the ad man and behavioral economist, had a different take. He pointed out that for a fraction of that cost, they could have installed wifi and turned the journey into productive working time. Or, in his more theatrical version: hire the world's top supermodels to walk the carriages handing out free Château Pétrus for the entire journey, pocket £5 billion in change, and watch passengers ask for the trains to be slowed down.
His point wasn't really about trains. It was about how badly we misread our own problems.
The engineers looked at the London-Paris journey and saw a time problem. Sutherland looked at the same journey and saw an experience problem. The first answer cost £6 billion. The second answer cost a rounding error.
This happens in the social sector constantly.
An organization keeps losing staff, so it launches a retention taskforce. A grantee keeps missing milestones, so the foundation asks for more detailed reporting. A nonprofit can't attract funding, so it writes more grant applications.
These are all engineering answers to what are often experience problems, or clarity problems, or trust problems, or problems of identity.
The leaders who break through this pattern find a reframe.
That reframe is rarely obvious from inside the work. It's almost always uncomfortable, and it almost never comes from a workshop that asks you to generate more solutions to the problem you already have.
It comes from someone willing to name the thing you couldn't see.
If you work with grantees navigating these stuck points, or run events where your audience deserves that kind of honest, direct challenge, I'd love to connect. You can learn more about the talks I bring to nonprofit and foundation audiences here.
