What Does It Actually Mean to Help?
Clear Path Development Blog Post — April 2026 Two books, a common thread, and what they're teaching me about practice. I've been doing a lot of reading recently. Not the kind that's driven by CPD targets or the pursuit of new frameworks to add to the toolkit — more the slow, reflective kind that happens when something catches your attention and won't quite let go. Two books have been doing that lately. And while they come from very different worlds, they've been pulling me toward the same set of questions about what it means to do this work well. Ripples from the Zambezi: The Cost of Assuming You Know Ernesto Sirolli's Ripples from the Zambezi is, on the surface, a book about international development work. But anyone who has ever worked in an advisory, coaching, or leadership role will find themselves uncomfortably reflected in its pages. Sirolli went to Zambia in the 1970s with a group of well-resourced, well-intentioned development workers. Th...