Yes, and. . . .
A note on the diversity of the development industry.
In 2015, Kelly Leonard and Tom Yorton of Second City, a renowned Chicago-based comedy group, published a business book called Yes, And. Leonard explained in an interview that they initially intended to call it The Revolution Will Be Improvised, but changed it after a “yes, and” improvision lesson for their publishers was popular.
For those unfamiliar, the idea is roughly the following: imagine you are on stage, improvising. One person says, “Is someone knocking at the front door?” The next can say, “No,” and then they basically need to keep pumping to get the improvisation started. Or, they could say, “Yes, and—.” Maybe the full response is “Yes, and it is your mother-in-law.” Maybe it is, “Yes, and the flames shooting out from under the kitchen door are now blue.” Either way, the improvisation is off to a great start.
The book itself was so popular that Yorton quit comedy and became a business consultant.
Simplification and expansion.
I have not read Leonard and Yorton’s book, though it seems from online discussions of it, including the interview linked above, that it was about more than just the “Yes, and” exercise, which is mainly a good way of managing what in business studies is often called a brainstorming session. Leonard talks about how things that get said “yes” to will often be weeded out later, and also about how sometimes the best of what has been improvised gets reified into a standard script. As an old 1950s business-school version of this goes, the process moves from storming to norming to performing.
But there is an extent to which any set of ideas gets reduced to its most easily digestible nugget. For Leonard and Yorton’s book-length work, that nugget was: saying “yes.”
In the professional sphere, “yes” is a powerful word. In the twentieth century, a “yes man” was less politely known as a “brown noser,” which itself was a more polite term for someone I will just call a “kiss-up.” As these phrases all attest, the idea of constantly saying “yes” in a business environment came to be associated with a certain combination of professional aspiration, lack of shame, and lack of critical thinking capacity. Successful improv actors are themselves famous for putting a lack of shame to a socially productive and often hilarious use. In any event, their critical thinking capacity is quite high.
Over the last ten years, it has been increasingly common for managers to try to run their teams according to the Cliff’s Notes version of Leonard and Yorton’s book. While no manager would ever say, “I want you all to be yes men,”1 or “let’s not ever exit the brainstorm stage,” managers increasingly would try to run meetings, several-day workshops, and even standing departmental operations according to the “rule of improv”: everybody must say “yes” to whatever was said before.
Ok, so what does this have to do with international development?
Everything is development.
There was a time in African studies when almost everything was classified as anthropology. African history? African religion or African philosophy, considered together or separately? African biomedical expertise? African art history or contemporary African art? African architecture? African archaeology? African education? The study of African social groups? African political science? African law? African economics? African business? African literature or orature, together or separately? European colonization of Africa? They were all the subjects of anthropology. A big part of the reason that “anthropology” is, to this day, a pejorative term for many Africans and members of the diaspora is the memory of this not-too-long-ago time when all that was African was assumed to be ethnographic fodder.
The end of that time is quite welcome. But there is an extent to which much that was once anthropologized is now lumped under a new label: “development.”
The study of how individuals, households, and societies change over time? African political science? African politics? African policy? African education? African microeconomics? African macroeconomics? African infrastructure? African healthcare? African human rights? Wars and large-scale conflict in Africa? African climate? African migration and mobility? African technological innovation? It’s all “development.”
There are all sorts of development experts, with “development” in their titles, their graduate degrees, the name of their employers, and so on, who are no more expert in some very important part of the total spectrum of development than a 1930s expert in Poro society masks might have known about social structures east of Lake Kivu.
And my subsector is flourishing!
This became relevant earlier this year when it was announced first that USAID would be cancelling the overwhelming majority of its projects, and then that it would be closing its doors.2 For several decades, USAID’s participation in development has been primarily focused on the health sector, most especially the fight against HIV and AIDS. Several development experts either volunteered their opinions or gave them when asked: this would not be a particularly big deal.
Now, if you are an expert in the macroeconomic policy of African governments or total factor growth rates in African economies, USAID can often seem like a really noisy neighbor who does not quite interfere with your work, but also does not help it much at all. People who do not understand development will often, in conversation with you, assume that USAID’s work has a lot to do with your area of expertise. But it doesn’t. Very few of the professional contacts and friends you will have made over the course of your career will work in areas affected by USAID’s funding. It is only people way over there, mostly people who don’t seem to be well-versed in your area of expertise, who think that USAID has any importance to development. If asked, you can say, backed by the full weight of your expertise, that yes, USAID is closing, and it is not important, as any of the experts you know could also say; what is more, fascinating trends in macroeconomic policy are unfolding on a daily basis! These trends about which you are prepared to speak in detail affect African development as you understand it far more than does something that you do not study.
The same goes for people interested in interhousehold cash transfers (a type of capital exchange that economists are historically very bad at measuring, and which are called “remittances” when they cross international borders) and any number of other topics that are rightly called “development.”
Oh, and?
On 30 June, the Lancet published an article finding that USAID’s programs had saved more than 90 million lives this century, and that their cancellation would lead to approximately 14 million deaths over the next six years, mainly concentrated in Africa. That’s largely a health development finding, but, because the number is so big, it can be hard to wrap our heads around it. It will likely need to be recalculated, but as it stands now, it is equal to more than two Holocausts. I haven’t found a lot of experts in non-health, non-humanitarian development sectors, including ones who said with great confidence that the closure of USAID would not be a matter of great import to the continent’s development, addressing the Lancet article.
Now, I am not saying “we should all stay in our lanes.” A lot of the best and most important writing and analysis comes when experts stretch beyond their areas of greatest expertise. Nor am I looking to celebrate negativity: no-but-ism.
So here is the claim: we should all try to limit the breadth of pivot we make in the “and” of a yes-and statement unless we also take the time to collate data around the initial question. Can African governments overcome the closure of USAID? Given the clusters of spending, we might say, “Yes, and it may be painful, in some countries more than others, while in the short term they seek out other partners in health and humanitarian sectors” long before we say, “Yes and expansion of the African Continental Free Trade Area could be a game-changer for the continent.”
How do you manage?
In 1532, the late Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince was first published in Italian. In 1684, The Politician’s Breviary, frequently if likely inaccurately attributed to Jules Mazarin, was first published in Latin. The manuscript remains of Arthur Schopenhauer included a text on persuasive logical fallacies that was subsequently published as The Art of Being Right (a friend of mine said acidly of the book, “All the French politicians have it”).
All three books should be studied as much by managers as by people who must read and decide whether to be persuaded by texts. Not to follow them, but rather in hopes of understanding when not to follow them, even in cases where it might be easier, more improvisational to do so. To what extent and at what points in time are tools like yes-and fair? To what extent and at what times are they inappropriate shortcuts to rhetorical or phenomenological power? Not everything that Machiavelli, pseudo-Mazarin, and Schopenhauer suggest is truly bad, but their suggestions can be read as a map of the shallows we should all avoid.
I find that I am less successful than I want to be in avoiding the shallows. But every once in a while, I open up The Politician’s Breviary and, looking at a random page, think:
Yes, and I should talk ever less like that.
for reasons of gender parity as much as those otherwise covered in this post.
To be fair to the people who may have either intentionally or inadvertently yes-and-ed their way through the relevant discussions, I will not be linking to their writings in this section.