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. They identified what they thought was an obvious opportunity — the land was fertile, the climate right — and set about teaching local people to grow tomatoes. The project failed completely. Not because of a lack of effort or resources, but because no one had asked the community what they actually needed, wanted, or already knew. When the tomatoes began to ripen, the hippos came out of the river and ate the lot. Every local person in the area had known this would happen. Nobody had thought to ask.

That experience became the catalyst for a lifetime's work. Sirolli went on to develop what he calls Enterprise Facilitation — an approach to economic development that starts not with the outsider's agenda, but with the passions and ambitions of local people. The facilitator's job is to listen. To ask. To support. Not to prescribe, not to impose, not to assume that expertise confers the right to override context.

The book's central argument is deceptively simple: that most well-intentioned help fails because it is built on the assumption that the helper knows best. Sirolli's corrective is radical humility — the willingness to sit with uncertainty, to subordinate your own ideas, and to trust that the people closest to a problem are also closest to its solution.

Good Work: Excellence Isn't Enough

Good Work, by Howard Gardner, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and William Damon, approaches things from a very different angle. It's rooted in psychology and professional ethics, and it asks a question that I think deserves more airtime in organisations: what makes work genuinely good?

The answer the authors arrive at isn't simply about competence. They identify three dimensions that, when they converge, produce work that is truly meaningful — excellence (doing it well), engagement (caring about it deeply), and ethics (doing it in a way that serves something beyond your own interests). Their argument is that each of these is necessary, but none is sufficient on its own. A technically brilliant professional who has lost their sense of purpose isn't doing good work. Someone deeply passionate but cutting ethical corners isn't doing good work either.

What strikes me about this framework is how honest it is about the pressures that pull these three things apart. Institutional demands, commercial incentives, performance targets — all of these can erode the alignment between what we're capable of, what we care about, and what is right. Maintaining that alignment, the authors argue, is not a passive achievement. It requires ongoing reflection, genuine self-awareness, and the courage to push back when the environment pulls in the wrong direction.

They also introduce the concept of generativity — the desire to create work that contributes something meaningful to those who come after you. That idea has stayed with me. It shifts the frame from personal achievement to something more relational, more enduring.

Where They Meet

Reading these books alongside each other, I kept being drawn back to a tension I recognise in my own practice — and one I see regularly in the organisations and individuals I work with.

There is always a pull towards certainty. Towards arriving with answers, frameworks, solutions. It's understandable. It can feel like that's what's being asked for. Leaders want direction. Schools want strategies. Individuals in coaching want to know what to do next. And sometimes that's exactly what's needed.

But Sirolli and Gardner et al., from their very different vantage points, are both pointing at something else. They're pointing at the limits of expertise deployed without humility. At the damage that can be done when the helper's confidence crowds out the other person's voice. At the long-term cost of work that prioritises the appearance of competence over the slower, messier, more honest business of genuine engagement.

The Enterprise Facilitation model — listening, facilitating, trusting local knowledge — maps surprisingly well onto what good coaching and organisational development practice looks like at its best. And the Good Work framework is a useful mirror for any of us who hold professional roles that carry responsibility for others: are we bringing excellence, engagement, and ethics together, or are we allowing one or two of those to quietly crowd out the third?

What This Means for Practice

I think the honest answer, for me, is that these books have sharpened a few things I already believed — but also made me sit with some uncomfortable questions.

Am I listening as much as I think I am? Am I creating space for other people's thinking to emerge, or am I filling that space with my own? Is the work I'm doing genuinely generative — oriented towards the long-term growth of the people and organisations I'm working with — or am I sometimes more focused on demonstrating my own value?

None of those questions have clean answers. But I think the willingness to keep asking them is probably part of what it means to stay honest about practice — in coaching, in leadership, in any professional role where the relationship with the other person is central to the work.

If either of these books is already on your shelf, I'd love to know what they've prompted for you. And if they're not — they're both worth the time.

 

 

 

John Dooner is the founder of Clear Path Development, a coaching, mediation, and organisational consultancy practice working across education, public sector, and corporate settings.

www.clearpathdevelopment.co.uk  |  jdooner.cpd@gmail.com