It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble...

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It's what you know that just ain't so.

For years, everybody working in global health knew that US foreign aid wouldn't pay health workers’ salaries.

The logic seemed obvious: salaries are recurring costs. They come round every month, forever. US foreign aid doesn't do forever. It funds projects, catalyses change, builds capacity, then leaves.

But wait, doesn't the US government fund recurring costs all day long?

It pays for drugs, fuel, electricity and building maintenance, as well as the diesel that keeps the generator running and the mechanic who fixes it when it breaks. It even funds bed nets, which wear out and need replacing.

Almost the entire apparatus of global health runs on recurring costs.

Then my friend Raj took over at a major US foreign aid agency and did something no one had ever done before: he looked for the rule that banned funding salaries.

There wasn’t one.
No policy, no clause, no regulation.
Behind the thing that everybody knew, there was nothing at all.

Every institution runs on a mixture of actual rules and things people say, and it's critical to know the difference.

For years, people with good ideas about paying health workers never even submitted the proposals. They remembered the thing everyone knew, assumed the door was closed, and wrote something else instead.

Every untested certainty can mean missed funding, wasted effort, or opportunities nobody bothers to pursue.

What is folklore costing you?

Try this

Separate policy from perception.

If you're in government or an institution, write down the sentence you hear most often about what can’t be funded, approved or changed in your work. What's the source?

If you're in philanthropy, ask your three largest grantees what they believe you won't fund. It takes two minutes to ask. The answer might reveal a constraint you've never imposed.

Sometimes the fastest route to innovation is not finding a clever workaround. It's discovering that the barrier never existed

🌿 Measure twice, cut once.