What you don't do is just say, "I've got all the ideas and all the knowledge, and listen to me."

Activists can get very preachy about things. It's more about understanding people's own experiences and tapping into them.

Economists who studied in the '80s tend to have a pretty crude neoclassical view that's just about freeing up prices and markets, and then you'll get the growth and everybody benefits. And they'll just repeat that, because if you're a minister or a senior civil servant, you don't have time to read anything anymore. You get very fixed in your views.

When you get talking to people in positions of power, you find that often their worldview is framed either in terms of their disciplinary studies at university and/or the country where they first got interest in development.

Floundering around, learning by doing but also by failing, is not only good but inevitable.

Until you have looked in depth at the system and found out where women in Egypt are not being cut through female genital mutilation, or where kids in Vietnam are not malnourished, or where hospitals in America are getting rid of the superbugs anyway - unless you have that level of curiosity about what's going on without you, you will always come in with your great new recipe and just ignore what's going on, and that will make you much less effective at what you're trying to achieve.

Often we're having an argument with something imaginary - a fixed idea of the "enemy" and the good. We need to get beyond that and actually develop a deep curiosity about people and systems and understand them better.