Welcome to ‘One Beautiful Road’

Most people want to make a difference. Almost everyone, if you ask them directly, will say they’d like to think the world might be a little better off as a result of their philanthropic efforts. And yet so much of that willingness rarely turns into anything real. It’s not because people don’t care, but because the space between ‘I’d like to help’ and actually helping is full of friction. Things like vague asks, abstract causes, amounts that feel too small to matter, and no real sense of what any of it might actually accomplish.

We’re building ‘One Beautiful Road’ to bridge that gap.

What’s different is that none of what we’re building is about giving money. It’s about reducing the distance between someone’s willingness to help and their ability to make a tangible difference.

Every time I spoke to people about how we might all contribute to making the world a better place, two things kept coming up. The first – giving ‘whatever amount you can afford’ – often felt too small to be worth giving at all, so a lot of people simply didn’t. Second, when people did give, they wanted to feel closer to what actually happened with their money, not watch it disappear into a funding black hole.

So instead of asking for a random donation toward an abstract cause, we’ve designed One Beautiful Road in a way that lets someone fund one whole, specific, real thing, for a fixed and known price. This could be anything from a school meal, a water filter or a night in a shelter. A small amount stops feeling like a fraction of a huge, faceless ask, and starts feeling like a complete meaningful act in itself.

But this isn’t all that the app does. It’s built around four simple, honest ‘actions’ that help you make a difference in different ways. Provide allows you to fund a real item for a person, a community or nature that needs it. Choose a cause, choose an item and know exactly what your money does. Time suggests small, private actions you can take in your own life, most of them two minutes or less. Not volunteering for someone else’s project but genuinely small, everyday habits, grounded in real behavioural research on what actually makes change stick. Speak gives you ways to add your voice to a cause you care about, and Learn helps you understand more about the causes you care about in the belief that curiosity often leads to compassion and a different way of seeing things.

All four of these actions are built around the same concept – how to give people agency. One Beautiful Road isn’t trying to tell anyone what to care about, how much to give or how to feel about any of it. But what it does try to do is make sure that whenever someone might already feel driven to act, whether that’s to give something real, change a small habit, speak up or understand more, there’s an easy, honest way to actually do it.

A road is made of steps, not one giant leap. Nobody walks an entire road in a single stride – they walk it one stretch at a time, and every stretch still counts, still gets them somewhere.

So this is what I’ve been working on lately as the key output from a broader initiative called apathy to action, something that I’ve previously written about. One Beautiful Road isn’t asking people for one-off grand gestures, but instead it’s built for the small, real and repeatable things – a meal funded here, a kind action there – that add up to something much bigger over time that you can track and measure.

The app website is still under development, but feel free to take a look if you’d like to see how we’re getting on. And if you’d like to be part of what we’re building you can join hundreds of others through the apathy to action website.

Sixty

I turned sixty this summer.

I’ve been sitting with that short sentence for a while now, not quite sure what to do with it. It doesn’t feel like a milestone so much as a nudge. A tap on the shoulder. Someone leaning over and saying, quietly, you know you don’t have forever, don’t you?

I did know. I’ve known it for years in the same way you know your car’s going to need an annual check-up. But there’s a difference between knowing something and having it sit down beside you at the breakfast table.

A few weeks ago I did something I’d never done before. I sat down and asked AI to write my obituary. Not out of morbidity, though. I’ve recently been working through a few ideas for a new ‘Little Book’ about mortality and impermanence, and the idea surfaced. Rather than wait until it’s too late to read it, why not actually try it? You know, draft an obituary and see what comes out.

So I did. FrontlineSMS was in there, of course. Nigeria, 2007. The Reluctant Innovator, Desmond Tutu, the National Geographic years. All the things you’d expect if you’ve followed any of this for a while now.

While I worked on it I kept coming back to a quote I picked up as a teenager and never quite let go of. In fact, I carried it around with me for years on a little piece of printed plastic card, a reminder of a time to come, casually tucked in the back of my wallet. Those words read:

I’ve quoted it so many times it’s practically worn smooth. But working on that obituary was the first time in a long time that I actually felt the second half of it. Not the passing through bit – the not again part. There’s a Japanese phrase, ‘mono no aware’, a gentle sadness at the transience of things and the strange gratitude that transience makes possible. I’d been exploring that idea for the mortality book, and I realised I’d spent years imagining sixty as ‘somewhere else in the distance’. I feel like I’ve suddenly woken up and found myself there.

I don’t say any of this to be gloomy. If anything it’s had the opposite effect. Writing my obituary made me ask a different question than the ones I’ve spent most of my career asking. Not what have I built, but what have I paid attention to. Not what did I achieve, but who did I make feel useful, or seen, or less alone. FrontlineSMS will get a paragraph, maybe two, in whatever gets written when the time actually comes, but nobody (not even AI) writes an obituary line for the hundreds of ordinary days in between. You know, the ones where nothing happened except a good conversation, or a walk with the kids, or twenty quiet minutes doing nothing in particular. And yet I suspect those days are what it actually felt like to be alive, far more than any of the headline moments were.

I don’t think I’m having a crisis for what it’s worth. If anything it feels closer to relief. There’s a kind of freedom in admitting, at sixty, that you’re not the centre of the story, that the tree you’re sitting under was there before you and will be there after, and that your job was never to own it, only to look after it for a while and then hand it over in the best shape you can.

Time is borrowed. All of it. So are the things we claim to own. I’d rather spend what’s left of mine paying attention and doing what I can to be the best kind of fellow human – a good ancestor, if you will. It’s all I’ve ever tried to do. Wish me luck.

Return of the reluctant innovator

Life has a funny habit of going full circle. At least mine does.

A couple of weeks ago I was talking with my kids about the new UK Defence Investment Plan, parts of which commit us to developing advanced drone technology by 2030. I couldn’t help but make the point that Ukraine were developing new drones almost monthly, and they were under constant attack. Needing four years sounded like a joke. We quickly started talking about the concept of innovation out of necessity.

Then, last night I stumbled across a fascinating paper published last summer by the Swedish Entrepreneurship Forum focussing on Ukraine’s world-leading drone industry, which made the very same point​. They argue it wasn’t created through conventional entrepreneurship, government planning or commercial ambition. Instead, it emerged because ordinary engineers, software developers, volunteers and small businesses were confronted with an existential crisis that demanded immediate action.

The authors describe this as ‘reluctant innovation’, drawing directly on the concept in my book, The Rise of the Reluctant Innovator. In their case they define it as innovation driven not by profit, prestige or long-term strategy, but by necessity and an overwhelming desire to solve urgent, real-world problems. In other words, a full-scale invasion by Russia.

What’s particularly interesting is that, rather than focusing on a handful of heroic inventors, the paper explains how thousands of citizens became innovators almost by accident. Existing technical skills, volunteer networks and grassroots initiatives combined with rapid government reforms, supportive procurement policies and international partnerships to create a decentralised innovation ecosystem capable of producing hundreds of drone designs in just a few years.

But perhaps the most striking finding for me is that the Ukrainian experience reinforces the central argument behind my book that many of the world’s most transformative innovations emerge not because people set out to innovate, but because circumstances leave them with little choice. Faced with immediate human need, individuals stop asking how they might ‘invent something’ and instead ask how they can solve a very real problem. In other words, innovation becomes an outcome rather than the objective.

You can download a copy of the paper, ‘Ukraine’s Drone Industry’,  here. The Rise of the Reluctant Innovator is now out of print, but you can buy second hand copies online or very cheaply on Amazon for Kindle. There’s also a free PDF available on the kiwanja website here.

Thanks again to Pontus Braunerhjelm and Maryna Brychko for a fascinating paper, and for their openness and transparency in the use of my earlier work.

Why every frontier organisation needs an Explorer in Residence

We’re entering an era where our greatest challenges are no longer purely technical. Think artificial intelligence, climate change, space exploration, biodiversity loss, human rights and global health, among countless others. Every one of them demands extraordinary innovation, but innovation alone is not enough.

We also need perspective.

The most successful organisations of the future won’t simply be building better things. They’ll be asking better questions. They’ll understand people as deeply as they understand engineering. They’ll recognise that curiosity, empathy and exploration are strategic advantages, not luxuries.

That’s where an Explorer in Residence comes in.

An Explorer in Residence is not another consultant, not another executive, and certainly not another expert with a ready-made framework. They’re an explorer. Someone whose role is to travel across disciplines, challenge assumptions, connect seemingly unrelated ideas, ask difficult questions and help organisations see opportunities that others miss.

For more than thirty years I’ve explored the intersection of technology, anthropology, conservation, humanitarian work and social innovation. I’ve learnt that the most valuable insights rarely emerge from staying within the boundaries of one profession. They emerge at the edges, where different worlds collide.

Every frontier organisation reaches moments where the next breakthrough isn’t another process or another meeting. It’s a different conversation. So if you’re building something ambitious and believe your organisation could benefit from an Explorer in Residence, I’d love to talk.

The future won’t simply belong to those who innovate fastest. It will belong to those who remain curious the longest.