Failing at agriculture but finding education: Reflections on planning, fate, and flexibility in a career

This essay explains some of the choices that shaped my career, to help colleagues in the early or middle stages of theirs. The tips I provide are not meant for geniuses, who may not face the same constraints as the rest of us. Four tips are crucial. First, be open to changes forced by fate. If you’re well-prepared—and maintain the methodological skills that led to your MA or PhD—you can exploit almost any forced change. And if you’re curious and open-minded, forced changes will feel less like an imposition and more like an opportunity. Second, choose carefully among careers in academia, large development organizations (such as the World Bank and UNICEF), and NGOs (whether a front-line NGO like World Vision or a research-based one like RTI). Large organizations are more bureaucratic and will often assign you less meaningful tasks. All organizations require that you “pay your dues,” but especially large ones. That said, large organizations can provide more engagement with governments and data to work with. You can always switch between types of organizations. If that’s your intention, it might be wise to first work for big development agencies. Note that it might be hard to switch to academia if you have not kept up your writing, especially by getting published in peer-reviewed journals. Third, if you want to be a warrior, you must fight noble battles. You cannot simply seek to be a warrior for fun and glory, then look for causes. To be a warrior, you’ll have to choose between being a “guerrilla” (going alone to go fast) or part of a larger “army” (going together to go far). A nimble guerilla helps advance advocacy and get things started, and coalitions of guerrillas can get a lot done. But to reach scale, you’ll ultimately have to work with governments and large agencies. Fourth, recognize that in most cases you won’t be implementing anything. That’s the task of your colleagues in the countries where you work. Working through and with those colleagues requires trust, which is built by doing the hard work together. To earn and keep trust, you must ensure that your advice is solid and effective, rather than just derived from the latest intellectual fad or institutional agenda. Advice based solely on bureaucratic mandates often fails. And though bureaucracies rarely lose face, you might. Finally, trust involves understanding the local political economy and identifying who to work with. Many groups may not like your advice: what’s good for kids is often not good for elites, and elites are not always the obviously privileged. Knowing how to work the scene, with your colleagues, is far more likely to get the results you seek than relying only on research and data (though data are obviously crucial).