In philanthropy, frameworks can become cages. When we find a promising approach, it’s all too easy to get trapped by it.

My own career is a cautionary tale. After college I worked as a grassroots organizer. The more I learned about organizing the more I saw its power to drive change. I was hooked. But I also found myself shocked that many of my colleagues had convinced themselves that organizing wasn’t just one good way to make change, it was the only way to make change.

Hoping to build a complementary skill set I went to business school — only to find that many of the change agents there were certain that the only way to do good in the world was through markets.

Years later, working at the Hewlett Foundation, I was privileged to meet design thinkers, behavioral economists, and complex systems theorists. Each brought great insight to our work — but many seemed convinced, even unconsciously, that their approach was the only right way.

This tendency appears in both old and new communities. Consider Effective Altruism. In the early 2010s, the Effective Altruism movement brought welcome rigor to the analysis of nonprofit performance. It enriched our collective work. But some advocates overreached, asking that all impact be quantified and subject to the rigors of linear evaluation. Math stopped being a tool and became a trap.

The problem is obvious: the world is too complex for any single framework. We who are working for a better world — whether as users or providers of capital — need multiple tools to engage with that complexity. Whether we call these tools “lenses” or “perspectives” or “strategies,” we need a lot of them. Instead of cages, our frameworks can be building blocks.

Consider how science — that most rigorous of human domains — brings a range of lenses to understand the world. Chemists, zoologists, psychologists, and quantum physicists all bring frameworks appropriate at a certain scale and from a certain perspective. Of course, the range of human understanding extends far beyond science: a poet uses images and metaphor to describe the human brain just as a neuroscientist uses an MRI. Each offers a view of that which is true.

In social change, we must do the same. We can use race analysis and class analysis to understand inequality. We can tell stories and use numbers. We can ask more of individuals and ask more of systems. We can acknowledge the power of bottom-up strategies and of personal leadership.

Philanthropy has fallen into an intellectual trap of its own making. We could have seen this profusion of ways of understanding as a gift. Instead, we have allowed it to be a stumbling block. Now the question is this: can we lift up our heads and see this extraordinary abundance for what it is?

Read the full article about building a better world by Jacob Harold at The Center for Effective Philanthropy.