Looking at all of the recent updates to this blog, you might ask yourself how Spirit of America chooses projects. Of course we coordinate very closely with US forces, but that still doesn't account for which projects we say 'yes' and 'no' to.

A lot of desired outcomes for development projects are systemic. Projects don't just lead to a simple outcome, but a series of consequences that ultimately improve broader society. Defining the success of a project by simply doing it is a classic sign of bad development projects – or any other project, for that matter: if you were to have a surgeon operate on you, you'd want to know that his definition of success isn't "we performed an operation", but "we fixed what was wrong".

But planning consequences of development projects – more akin to social engineering than fixing a single organ – requires leaps of faith: a new library won't just house books, it will encourage the town to read more. Free backpacks will encourage children to go to school. Communities will be better economies by having more trained masons.

Afghan masonry students completing a project

But will they really? Will the new library really encourage passers-by to think, "I should read more." – and cause them to act on this thought? Will backpacks give children a source of pride in education, and meet a need that prevents them from attending? Is adding masons to a community inherently beneficial?

All these questions could be answered with "yes", "no", "maybe". Envisioning project outcomes is more an art than a science. It is inductive rather than deductive. It requires imagination and intuition grounded in a realistic sense of the present and the possible. Even perfect design (unachievable) would still require a good amount of luck due to incomplete information at the time of design, and the vagaries of chaos theory as the broader world continues to advance in a million different ways around the project. Yes, some bad ones are easy to spot – for instance, would a backpack really make a child keener to get an education? But it's the less obviously bad ones that usually trap us.

To make sense of all this, another useful trait when developing desired outcomes is a broad capacity for proactive cynicism – putting full effort into a project while remaining fully cognizant of its likelihood and potential sources of failure. These sources include both uncontrollable factors and poor previous choices during planning and implementation that unmistakably rests on one's own shoulders but could easily be blamed on others to preserve a fragile ego. As a rule of thumb, anyone implementing a development project who thinks it's a guaranteed success is probably a fool destined to fail. But beyond that, the gloves are off.

In the next post: why masonry?

Toby Bonthrone
Afghanistan Field Rep.