Someone finally finds the right piece of information. A refund arrives without three reminders. A person just starting out understands the problem well enough to propose their own solution. A fragile operation holds on the day the team needs it. Behind every one of these, somebody paid attention to a difficulty, made a choice, and took the time to look at what it produced.
That way of working is what I call building. A builder sets out to understand a problem, improves a concrete situation, and learns from what happens next. You can do it by writing code, by organising a meeting, by keeping accounts, or by helping one person learn. The size of the project depends on your experience and on the means available. The care you give the problem can start right away.
Why this book exists
I went looking for builders, and mostly saw the ones my network made visible. I took the output of that filter for a measure of the level around me. That was my mistake. It was on me to look at the work more closely: the services that held, the problems solved, the people who were learning and the people helping them move.
This book starts from that correction. It gathers practices for building, for getting better, and for making it possible for others to do the same. Several have a long history; the references at the end of the book let you find the sources. My work here is to connect them to situations you will recognise and to moves you can examine in your own context.
“Here” is your starting point. The place you live, the people you work with, the needs you have access to. For this book it also means paying attention to the work being done in Africa, and looking at it for what it accomplishes. References can come from anywhere. What they are worth shows in what they help you understand and do where you are.
Start from what you can do
You open this book with a solid craft behind you, with the urge to start, or with a team to support. Each of those starting points works. A familiar practice gives you reasoning to pass on. A difficulty that keeps coming back gives you a question. One person willing to review gives you a first attempt.
Support hears what goes wrong after use. Sales knows the questions that come before a choice. Design makes a use understandable. Finance sheds light on commitments. Operations sees the handovers. Engineering builds and maintains the systems. Each of these seats gives access to part of the problem. In a personal or community project, one person may hold several of them.
Mariam helps a community group welcome new participants. Several of them turn up in the wrong place. She looks at the invitation with someone seeing it for the first time, spots an ambiguous line, and proposes different wording to the organiser. They agree to try it at the next meeting. Afterwards she asks what still caused trouble, and leaves the corrected text with whoever will prepare the next invitation.
That one attempt is enough to exercise several capabilities: listening, understanding, shipping, checking and passing on. If the message does not help, Mariam has a new question. If it does help, the service rendered already has value. She can end her contribution by agreeing the handover, without becoming responsible for every invitation to come.
Ten capabilities, worked together
The book starts with the mindset: what lets you ask a question, take a piece of feedback, or change your mind. The craft gives you tools and judgement to turn that attention into solid work. Autonomy connects initiative to a problem you understand and to a remit inside which you can decide.
Understanding widens the view to the people served and to the effects of your work elsewhere. Delivery puts a solution to the test of real use. Ownership invites you to follow that result, including when it disappoints, and to make the next step explicit: fix it, ask for help, stop, or hand it over.
Systems make the next time easier, when the repetition justifies the effort. Leverage looks at how useful work can produce more. Leadership is about what you make possible for other people. Being the reference is about what they can learn from your work: a method, an explanation, an example, or a practice passed on.
This order suggests a path through the book. These capabilities grow together, and you can come back to any of them as you need. You may teach what you have only just learned, or discover a basic question after years in the job.
Reading a card, trying a move
Each card carries one idea. Cards marked ⇄ are about the conditions of the work: time, access, decisions, backing, recognition. If you can change them, they are addressed to you.
Pick a move small enough for the time you have. Agree the remit with the people involved. Plan one fact to observe and a moment to come back and look at it.
The rest, paths, workshops and templates, is on the book’s site. Start by looking at what is happening around you.