Beware the tool you reach for first
Why it's so crucial to break out of default mode
A few weeks ago, Brink’s East Africa Director, wrote a piece about the way funders tend to default to the same small handful of familiar formats when they’re under pressure. In that article Alice looked at how accelerator programmes in particular often fall under pressure to commit to a format before they’ve had time to ask whether it really fits the problem.
“In many ecosystems today, accelerators feel less like a deliberate design choice,” she wrote, “and more like a default setting.”
In each issue of the Cognitive Download we explore how the behavioural sciences can be harnessed to create real world impact on some of the world’s most urgent and preventable crises. This month we’re looking at why that ‘default setting’ is so entrenched, and introduce you to a tool we’ve been building that we think can push against it.
Of course there’s a German word for this
In 2008 a research team led by the cognitive scientist Mehmet Bilalić gathered a few chess grandmasters and put them in front of a puzzle that had two solutions. One was a familiar pattern that resolved in five moves, and the other was a less obvious sequence that resolved in three. As you might have guessed by now, the grandmasters consistently chose the familiar but longer route. The researchers called this effect Einstellung, after a German word for being mentally set in a particular position.
As humans we tend to reach first for the pattern that is most ‘cognitively available’. And if you’re running a fund then what’s usually cognitively available to you is whatever you ran last time, or whatever your peers are running right now.
What was really notable about the German study, was that even when the grandmasters reported that they had been actively looking for alternative strategies, when researchers tracked their eye movements they found their gaze had stayed locked on the recognisable one.
The lens you’re looking through has likely been shaped by the previous problem rather than the one that’s in front of you.
For all us non-chess grandmasters, what that means is that, even though you might feel like all the potential options have been rigorously explored, the lens you’re using to do that exploring has likely been shaped by the previous problem rather than the one that’s in front of you.
Legitimacy by default
There’s a sector-level version of all this that’s even harder to dislodge than the individual one. Described by the sociologists Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell back in 1983, it shows how organisations operating in the same field tend to converge on the same forms over time. They copy the dominant template because, in a context where success is hard to measure and reputation matters, looking like a serious organisation requires looking like the other serious organisations.
They called this ‘institutional isomorphism’, and it’s the reason an accelerator commissioned in 2026 will more than likely look suspiciously similar to one commissioned in 2018. By the time a fund design reaches a grantee, the menu of formats has already been narrowed by an inherent reflex and so, instead of the design of the fund being shaped around the problem it’s meant to solve, it’s shaped in a way that is reassuringly recognisable.
As Alice pointed out in her piece, the appeal of the default format is largely administrative. An accelerator gives funders a clean structure to manage and a recognisable shape to report progress against, even though ventures rarely face the same problem at the same time. The result is a programme that fits a funder’s reporting cycle more than it does the work it’s meant to support.
Designing against the reflex
The need to break this default has only grown over the past year, with USAID gone, European development budgets being redirected toward defence, and African organisations being asked to keep going on whatever capital they can find.
At the Skoll World Forum a few weeks ago, we ran a session with Enabel’s Innovation Hub on what it takes for non-profits to move beyond grant dependency, and there was a palpable appetite in that room for new ways of doing and thinking. As Abi wrote afterwards, necessity breeds business model innovation and fluency, but the shift in mindsets and skillsets needed to turn that appetite into reality is not insubstantial.
The aim is to facilitate the design of funds that serve their purpose, by putting fit before familiarity and context before comfort.
What helps is a shared vocabulary or framework with which to have a different conversation that intentionally strays from the well worn patterns of thinking. At Skoll we introduced people to a tool we call the ABC framework for those looking to explore non-profit and hybrid business models. For fund builders we’ve been developing something else.
The Fund Builder tool is designed to be a guardrail against the Einstellung instinct. It asks you to examine the fund’s fundamentals (no pun intended), like the purpose driving it, who the stakeholders and target portfolio are, and the real constraints the fund is trying to address. Then it presents a toolbox of methods for every stage of the fund, from financial support, through ‘engagement and application’, to ‘selection and rejection’. At each stage, you can explore the different methods, use them to spark conversations with your colleagues, and save the ones that fit your context until you’ve built your strategy brick by brick.
The tool is a prompt to slow down, avoid the defaults and be intentional. Overall, the aim is to facilitate the design of funds that serve their purpose, by putting fit before familiarity and context before comfort.
If you’re designing a fund right now, we’d love to know what you’re seeing and if the Fund Builder tool is useful in overcoming some of those challenges. Let us know at coffee@hellobrink.co.
This month’s mystery links
Your reward for reading down this far…
The hard truths behavioural science must face in conflict settings
Strategies of living things that can serve as inspiration for human innovation
There are now 1,771 of you reading this newsletter. In 1771, a self-taught Edinburgh printer named William Smellie finished compiling the first edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica. Most reference works of the day translated the French Encyclopédie and called it a job well done; Smellie went a different way, mixing long thematic essays with shorter dictionary entries and selling the result by subscription to ordinary readers.
If you know someone who prefers to find the right way, even if it’s not the most comfortable, then why not share this issue with them: