The Imaginations of Unreasonable Men (3 page)

After extensive research, we decided to hold ourselves accountable to the specific goal of ending childhood hunger by 2015. We invited many of our colleagues to join us. Not all of them were in favor of such a strategic change. At a meeting we convened of about fifty organizations, many of whom we worked closely with and funded, nearly all opposed the proposal at first. They raised questions about how we would measure progress, how we would fund such an effort, and what would happen if we failed.

Mostly, they were uncomfortable with being held accountable for specific, measurable, ambitious outcomes. Many had found satisfaction and rewards in doing good work and did not want to risk losing that. It took three years, but most eventually came around. Some of that was due to our persuasion, but much of it was because the times were changing. Other institutions were changing as well. President Obama adopted the goal of ending childhood hunger by 2015. Prominent governors asked Share Our Strength to bring our strategy to their states. Funders who had not previously supported Share Our Strength came to the table for the first time. We left some broken pottery on the ground, but that’s something we all must challenge ourselves to do.

What we are attempting in our ongoing quest to end childhood hunger, and what Brother Thomas did with pottery, requires a shift in the way we think about what is possible. And it’s the same shift that is occurring in the scientific labs of visionary malaria researchers. In this book, we will visit those labs and follow the work of one researcher, Stephen Hoffman of Sanaria labs, in particular. Hoffman and the vaccine he is relentlessly pursuing may be not only our best hope for eradicating malaria, but also our best modern example of how imagination, even in its most unreasonable forms—especially in its most unreasonable forms—can lead to breakthroughs.

This book is about more than these scientists—or even their work—because anyone who aspires to make a breakthrough and do what has never been done before can learn valuable lessons from their example.

Whether in art, science, technology, or social activism, when there is failure, we often perceive and understand it as a failure of talent, strategy, planning, financial resources, or even execution. But those are not really the reasons most efforts fail. Most failures are failures of imagination. This is especially true for the seemingly intractable problems that have plagued us for decades, if not centuries. Albert Einstein said that “the specific problems we face cannot be solved using the same patterns of thought that were used to create them.” Breaking out of those patterns demands a transformative, imaginative leap.

Examples of such triumphs of imagination are too few, but where they exist they are powerfully convincing.

The Institute for OneWorld Health in San Francisco is, more than anything else, a triumph of imagination by a former Food and Drug Administration official named Victoria Hale, who saw that a pharmaceutical firm could be structured as a nonprofit, released from the responsibility to maximize shareholder value, and made capable of accepting donated intellectual property from others. She essentially “took profit out of the equation” in developing and manufacturing medicines needed by the world’s poor.
⁴
As a result, the institute, her brainchild, helps to actually create markets for drugs for neglected diseases. Established in 2000 as the first nonprofit pharmaceutical company in the United States,
and now backed by more than $40 million from the Gates Foundation, it has created a new model for improving global health.

Teach for America, now the top employer of Ivy League graduates in the United States, was a triumph of imagination by a Princeton senior named Wendy Kopp in 1989. Kopp believed that the best students from the best universities would be willing to at least temporarily forgo careers in law and banking to teach in some of the most underserved schools in the country upon their graduation. There were countless obstacles to putting such a plan into action, ranging from the logistics of recruiting and training teachers to the resistance of teachers unions. But they were all surmounted by Kopp’s imagination. Today, Teach for America has 7,300 current members teaching in thirty-five urban and rural areas. They impact 450,000 students annually, and nationwide there are more than 17,000 alums, including founders of charter schools, high-school principals, and school superintendents.
⁵

The Harlem Children’s Zone is a triumph of imagination by Geoffrey Canada, who conceived of the idea that some of the nation’s poorest children should be surrounded, starting in utero, by a safety net woven so tightly that they would not be able to slip through it. Canada was president and CEO of a nonprofit called the Rheedlen Center, an organization that had been helping Harlem’s children since 1970. But he was driven to do more, and in 1997 he launched a new initiative. By creating an interlocking network of services in a twenty-four-block area of Harlem, he wove that safety net, and the
Harlem Children’s Zone was born. Children are testing at or above grade level on standardized tests and breaking the cycle of generational poverty as they graduate and enter the workforce. The effort has grown to encompass ninety-seven city blocks, and all the services are provided for free.
⁶

Overcoming failure of imagination can be an enormous challenge. In some fields—including the nonprofit sector—the failure of imagination has become routine. In some ways, it is culturally ingrained thanks to severe and debilitating resource constraints. But imagination cannot be bought and installed like the latest software, or taught in an MBA program. Nor can it be inculcated into an organization by expensive consultants. There are no metrics by which it can be measured. That makes it easy to dismiss it as a “soft” resource, something that is “nice to have,” rather than the “must have” hard currency that is needed to conquer seemingly intractable problems.

Though imagination cannot be purchased, there are ways to purposefully create a culture that acknowledges the primacy of imagination in reaching breakthrough solutions. This can be done by constantly challenging the conventional wisdom and even the most longstanding assumptions. It can be done by asking hard questions about what is possible, even if such questions seem naïve, and by rewarding risk and not penalizing dreamers.

Imagination can be nurtured and elevated by properly funding R&D—which is often considered a luxury—as if it were a necessity, because it is. And it can be stimulated by
forcing those in an organization, from the senior leadership on down, to get out from behind their desks and venture into places where their imaginations will be stimulated by bearing witness to people and places very different from themselves.

Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese military strategist who wrote
The Art of War
, said that every battle is won or lost before it is fought.
⁷
Similarly, every effort to change the world journeys toward its destiny on a path determined by what can be imagined. Not believing that we could end childhood hunger was a failure of imagination, and it distorted and undermined the way in which the anti-hunger community went about its work for generations. Not believing that malaria could actually be eradicated was a failure of imagination that distorted and undermined the way the malaria community went about its work, until someone leaped unreasonably over the hurdle.

These two strands of belief—that good is not good enough, and that most failures are failures of imagination—when woven together, are held fast by the glue of unshakable belief in oneself. It is old-fashioned advice, this notion of believing in oneself, the stuff of commencement speeches and testimonial dinners. But in certain circumstances, continuing to believe in yourself and your calling, even against all odds, can be determinative. The bigger one’s dreams, the more tangible and important such belief becomes.

The visionary’s dilemma is that the bigger the goal or aspiration, the bolder and more audacious the plan for attaining it, and the more skeptics and cynics there will be. The dilemma is particularly pernicious because it persists and compounds. The more the visionary pushes and pursues, the more the establishment interprets this as a sign of fundamental instability, conveniently justifying its initial opposition. Concerns about the idea are compounded by concerns about the idea’s propagator. Establishments are threatened by visionaries, especially when, as often happens, a visionary’s approach suggests that the solution has been hiding in plain sight all along, notwithstanding the phalanxes of bright people who have dedicated their entire careers to more conventional approaches.

The status quo yields not an inch of ground without a fight. The establishment always has the advantage of money, credibility, respect, prestige, familiarity, and political support. Just as a daring quarterback’s consistent effectiveness all but invites the defensive line to blitz, the visionary has to expect the pass rush and hold his or her ground.

So a visionary’s best defense to the dilemma is not only having a thick skin, but having reservoirs of self-confidence as well. Because when those invested in the status quo feel threatened, they chip away at not only the upstart’s ideas, but also his or her motives and character. Just as big trucks require big wheels, and tall buildings require deep foundations, people with big dreams need a large reservoir of self-confidence to maintain their balance and go forward. It
helps if friends and family can be depended upon to help fill it.

I don’t think it’s an accident that many of the people profiled in the story of the pursuit of a malaria vaccine are directly supported by family members such as spouses and sons and daughters. The original discovery of a potential malaria vaccine in 1968 was by the husband-and-wife team of Victor and Ruth Nussenzweig, who even today, in their eighties, share a lab at New York University. Their discovery was the genesis of future work pursued by several other husband-and-wife teams, including Steve Hoffman and Kim Lee Sim in the United States, as well as Pedro Alonso and his wife Clara Menendez in Spain and Africa. Inherent in such familial couplings is a support system, a kind of anchor that helps such people weather the inevitable storms. Standing alone against the multitudes requires a degree of belief in oneself that simply surpasses the rational.

The three philosophical underpinnings of breakthrough thinking described above—(1) that good is not good enough, (2) that most failures are failures of imagination, and (3) that irrational self-confidence is essential—are not by themselves a solution for our toughest problems. They are not even a shortcut to such solutions. But they are the necessary architecture for solving them, the underpinnings without which most efforts will falter.

Just look around. We are surrounded by the monuments of men and women who failed to recognize the stop signs along their journey to solving a problem or creating something new.

As Dan Pallotta, founder of the ambitious and wildly successful AIDSRides, bicycle rides to raise funds for AIDS service organizations, once said to me: “Don’t you suppose someone must have argued to Henry Ford: ‘But that’s crazy—you’d have to build these gas station places all over the country and pave these incredibly long roads.’” Great imaginations are almost always unreasonable, but they almost always triumph in the end.

Most of us won’t cure malaria or invent the next automobile. So why are these elements of breakthrough thinking important in our own lives? Can they apply to each of us? They do if we believe that the organizations, communities, and world of which we are a part can do better. They are important if we’re frustrated with the slow and incremental pace of social change, or if we wish to play some small role in lightening the suffering and struggles of those less fortunate with whom we share this planet. They are the qualities that allow some people, gifted with great vision, to insist that, rather than taking the reasonable approach of adapting to the world, the world, in George Bernard Shaw’s words, must adapt itself to the unreasonable man.

—BBC News, “Malaria Treatment Breakthrough,”
April 22, 2003

 

 

 

S
TEVE HOFFMAN IS A DOCTOR who wants to develop a vaccine to prevent malaria. If it works it will save the lives of millions of children. If it doesn’t, he will find company in the ranks of countless others who have gone before him, tried, and failed. And millions will continue to perish in an agonizing death.

While there are vaccines for bacteria and viruses, there has never been a vaccine for malaria, or for any parasitic disease.

The reasons are both scientific and political. The parasite is complex, elusive, and even brilliant, in an evolutionary sense. And most of those whom it infects are so voiceless, vulnerable, and marginalized that there are no markets—economic or political—for serving them or solving the problems they face. They are victims not only of malaria but also of chronic political laryngitis. And their condition persists not because of the paucity of solutions, but because they have no political voice. Society has not been fully persuaded to pay for solutions that already exist. Nor are there many who are willing to share in the sacrifice of time and money that would be required to sustain those solutions and take them to scale.