Technology. Spirituality. Change.

I’ve spent much of my life working at the intersection of technology and social good, something many of us used to call ICT4D. Over the years I’ve been involved in projects that use mobile phones to improve healthcare, increase access to education and give a voice to people often left unheard. But behind the code and connectivity something deeper has quietly shaped the way I approach this work – a sense of inner purpose, reflection and what I now understand to be a kind of spirituality.

I didn’t set out to bring spirituality into my work all those years ago. In fact, I probably would have fought back at any mention of the word earlier in my career. But looking back it’s clear to me now that the most meaningful, sustainable and human outcomes I’ve witnessed have come not from rushing into solutions but from slowing down. Listening, learning and connecting with something larger than myself. In the early days of FrontlineSMS I wasn’t trying to create a shiny tool. I was trying to solve a problem in the most grounded, respectful way possible. I built something small, free and adaptable because it felt like the right way to do it. That quiet intuition, that humble attention to the real needs of people on the ground, that’s where I now see spirituality showing up.

For me, spirituality is less about religion and more about values – empathy, humility and intention among them. It’s about recognising that the world is complex, that our actions ripple out and that we are not separate from the people we’re trying to help. These aren’t just nice-sounding words. They’re critical when working in communities where trust is everything and where well-intentioned outsiders have often done more harm than good.

Too often in the tech world we rush. We build before we understand. We act before we listen. We measure before we ask what matters. Spirituality, at least the way I’ve come to understand it, reminds me to pause. To reflect. To ask not just ‘How can I fix this?’ but ‘Am I the right person to be involved?’ and ‘What is my intention here?’

One of the things I’ve come to realise is that real change starts within. When we focus only on metrics and outputs we risk losing sight of the human journey – ours and others. But when we start with purpose, with a willingness to be transformed as we try to make change, we create space for something deeper. Something more lasting. I remember once visiting a project in rural Zimbabwe that used FrontlineSMS to improve maternal health. The technology worked, but what struck me most wasn’t the system or the data, it was the care. The community healthcare workers were deeply committed, personally invested and full of heart. The tech was just a tool to them. The real change was happening in relationships, in trust, in human dignity. That’s spiritual work, whether we call it that or not.

So, what does spirituality offer the ICT4D or tech-for-good worlds? It offers a way to slow down in a fast-moving space. A way to stay grounded when the problems feel overwhelming. A compass when the path isn’t clear. And maybe most importantly, it offers a reminder that our work is only as good as the care, awareness and humility we bring to it. In a world that often rewards speed, scale and shiny objects I still believe in small, quiet and purposeful work. I believe that asking the right questions – things like ‘Why am I doing this?’ to ‘Who am I doing it for? ‘ and ‘Am I genuinely listening?’ – are as important as any technology we build.

In the end, I’ve come to see spirituality not as something separate from social change work but as something essential to it. It’s in the pauses, the reflections and the relationships. It’s in the way we show up. And perhaps, just perhaps, it’s in recognising that making the world better starts with becoming better versions of ourselves.

You can read more about my philosophy in my latest book, The Little Book of Mindful Social Change. It’s available in paperback, hardback and e-book on Amazon, or as a free PDF here.

Welcome to ‘One Beautiful Road’

Most people want to make a difference. Almost everyone, if you ask them directly, will say they’d like to think the world might be a little better off as a result of their philanthropic efforts. And yet so much of that willingness rarely turns into anything real. It’s not because people don’t care, but because the space between ‘I’d like to help’ and actually helping is full of friction. Things like vague asks, abstract causes, amounts that feel too small to matter, and no real sense of what any of it might actually accomplish.

We’re building ‘One Beautiful Road’ to bridge that gap.

What’s different is that none of what we’re building is about giving money. It’s about reducing the distance between someone’s willingness to help and their ability to make a tangible difference.

Every time I spoke to people about how we might all contribute to making the world a better place, two things kept coming up. The first – giving ‘whatever amount you can afford’ – often felt too small to be worth giving at all, so a lot of people simply didn’t. Second, when people did give, they wanted to feel closer to what actually happened with their money, not watch it disappear into a funding black hole.

So instead of asking for a random donation toward an abstract cause, we’ve designed One Beautiful Road in a way that lets someone fund one whole, specific, real thing, for a fixed and known price. This could be anything from a school meal, a water filter or a night in a shelter. A small amount stops feeling like a fraction of a huge, faceless ask, and starts feeling like a complete meaningful act in itself.

But this isn’t all that the app does. It’s built around four simple, honest ‘actions’ that help you make a difference in different ways. Provide allows you to fund a real item for a person, a community or nature that needs it. Choose a cause, choose an item and know exactly what your money does. Time suggests small, private actions you can take in your own life, most of them two minutes or less. Not volunteering for someone else’s project but genuinely small, everyday habits, grounded in real behavioural research on what actually makes change stick. Speak gives you ways to add your voice to a cause you care about, and Learn helps you understand more about the causes you care about in the belief that curiosity often leads to compassion and a different way of seeing things.

All four of these actions are built around the same concept – how to give people agency. One Beautiful Road isn’t trying to tell anyone what to care about, how much to give or how to feel about any of it. But what it does try to do is make sure that whenever someone might already feel driven to act, whether that’s to give something real, change a small habit, speak up or understand more, there’s an easy, honest way to actually do it.

A road is made of steps, not one giant leap. Nobody walks an entire road in a single stride – they walk it one stretch at a time, and every stretch still counts, still gets them somewhere.

So this is what I’ve been working on lately as the key output from a broader initiative called apathy to action, something that I’ve previously written about. One Beautiful Road isn’t asking people for one-off grand gestures, but instead it’s built for the small, real and repeatable things – a meal funded here, a kind action there – that add up to something much bigger over time that you can track and measure.

The app website is still under development, but feel free to take a look if you’d like to see how we’re getting on. And if you’d like to be part of what we’re building you can join hundreds of others through the apathy to action website.

Sixty

I turned sixty this summer.

I’ve been sitting with that short sentence for a while now, not quite sure what to do with it. It doesn’t feel like a milestone so much as a nudge. A tap on the shoulder. Someone leaning over and saying, quietly, you know you don’t have forever, don’t you?

I did know. I’ve known it for years in the same way you know your car’s going to need an annual check-up. But there’s a difference between knowing something and having it sit down beside you at the breakfast table.

A few weeks ago I did something I’d never done before. I sat down and asked AI to write my obituary. Not out of morbidity, though. I’ve recently been working through a few ideas for a new ‘Little Book’ about mortality and impermanence, and the idea surfaced. Rather than wait until it’s too late to read it, why not actually try it? You know, draft an obituary and see what comes out.

So I did. FrontlineSMS was in there, of course. Nigeria, 2007. The Reluctant Innovator, Desmond Tutu, the National Geographic years. All the things you’d expect if you’ve followed any of this for a while now.

While I worked on it I kept coming back to a quote I picked up as a teenager and never quite let go of. In fact, I carried it around with me for years on a little piece of printed plastic card, a reminder of a time to come, casually tucked in the back of my wallet. Those words read:

I’ve quoted it so many times it’s practically worn smooth. But working on that obituary was the first time in a long time that I actually felt the second half of it. Not the passing through bit – the not again part. There’s a Japanese phrase, ‘mono no aware’, a gentle sadness at the transience of things and the strange gratitude that transience makes possible. I’d been exploring that idea for the mortality book, and I realised I’d spent years imagining sixty as ‘somewhere else in the distance’. I feel like I’ve suddenly woken up and found myself there.

I don’t say any of this to be gloomy. If anything it’s had the opposite effect. Writing my obituary made me ask a different question than the ones I’ve spent most of my career asking. Not what have I built, but what have I paid attention to. Not what did I achieve, but who did I make feel useful, or seen, or less alone. FrontlineSMS will get a paragraph, maybe two, in whatever gets written when the time actually comes, but nobody (not even AI) writes an obituary line for the hundreds of ordinary days in between. You know, the ones where nothing happened except a good conversation, or a walk with the kids, or twenty quiet minutes doing nothing in particular. And yet I suspect those days are what it actually felt like to be alive, far more than any of the headline moments were.

I don’t think I’m having a crisis for what it’s worth. If anything it feels closer to relief. There’s a kind of freedom in admitting, at sixty, that you’re not the centre of the story, that the tree you’re sitting under was there before you and will be there after, and that your job was never to own it, only to look after it for a while and then hand it over in the best shape you can.

Time is borrowed. All of it. So are the things we claim to own. I’d rather spend what’s left of mine paying attention and doing what I can to be the best kind of fellow human – a good ancestor, if you will. It’s all I’ve ever tried to do. Wish me luck.

Return of the reluctant innovator

Life has a funThe Return of the Reluctant Innovator: Lessons from Ukraine

A couple of weeks ago I was talking with my kids about the new UK Defence Investment Plan, parts of which commit us to developing advanced drone technology by 2030. I couldn’t help but make the point that Ukraine were developing new drones almost monthly, and they were under constant attack. Needing four years sounded like a joke. We quickly started talking about the concept of innovation out of necessity.

Then, last night I stumbled across a fascinating paper published last summer by the Swedish Entrepreneurship Forum focussing on Ukraine’s world-leading drone industry, which made the very same point​. They argue it wasn’t created through conventional entrepreneurship, government planning or commercial ambition. Instead, it emerged because ordinary engineers, software developers, volunteers and small businesses were confronted with an existential crisis that demanded immediate action.

The authors describe this as ‘reluctant innovation’, drawing directly on the concept in my book, The Rise of the Reluctant Innovator. In their case they define it as innovation driven not by profit, prestige or long-term strategy, but by necessity and an overwhelming desire to solve urgent, real-world problems. In other words, a full-scale invasion by Russia.

What’s particularly interesting is that, rather than focusing on a handful of heroic inventors, the paper explains how thousands of citizens became innovators almost by accident. Existing technical skills, volunteer networks and grassroots initiatives combined with rapid government reforms, supportive procurement policies and international partnerships to create a decentralised innovation ecosystem capable of producing hundreds of drone designs in just a few years.

But perhaps the most striking finding for me is that the Ukrainian experience reinforces the central argument behind my book that many of the world’s most transformative innovations emerge not because people set out to innovate, but because circumstances leave them with little choice. Faced with immediate human need, individuals stop asking how they might ‘invent something’ and instead ask how they can solve a very real problem. In other words, innovation becomes an outcome rather than the objective.

You can download a copy of the paper, ‘Ukraine’s Drone Industry’,  here. The Rise of the Reluctant Innovator is now out of print, but you can buy second hand copies online or very cheaply on Amazon for Kindle. There’s also a free PDF available on the kiwanja website here.

Thanks again to Pontus Braunerhjelm and Maryna Brychko for a fascinating paper, and for their openness and transparency in the use of my earlier work.