In December of 2023, I was on the brink of joining Brink.
I had just returned from a trip to Lagos where I had been working on building contextualised learning experiences for students of the African Leadership University (ALU). My work in Lagos was a representation of why a 21-year-old me decided to abandon the pursuit of a masters degree in African Studies, and leave the UK to learn about Africans right here on the continent.
For those who know me, that statement might sound ridiculous. They would say, “Hamza, weren’t you born and raised on the continent?” and they would be right. However, it was not the ideas of this continent that raised me, rather the perception of it through the lens of a western ideology-based education system.
To make a long story short, like most young African men my age in the African Diaspora at that time, I was suffering from an identity crisis. I was trying to bridge my understanding of the world as I was being told it was, and how I was actually perceiving and experiencing it.
The work I’d been doing in Lagos and across other cities on the continent (Kigali, Addis Ababa, Nairobi and Kampala) centred around designing learning experiences that would allow students to participate in social innovation. Not by using a lens to assess their realities and propose solutions from their often flawed perspectives, but by actually participating in the creation of these solutions, alongside those affected by the social issues they aimed to resolve.
This work, for me, brought to life ideas shared by Walter Rodney, a Guyanese historian, political activist, and author. He worked extensively in Tanzania, where he taught at the University of Dar es Salaam, contributing to critical scholarship and Pan-Africanist movements that challenged colonial and neo-colonial exploitation of the African continent:
Through the ALU Hubs Learning experience, we learned that contextual realities can be barriers to ideas of change, especially if the systems in which we look to innovate are resistant to change.
After incidents including visa denials for students and unjustified arrests, it became apparent to us that the system would not budge. Nonetheless, we persisted in hopes of creating a cohort of students capable of addressing challenges in their communities by understanding their root causes.
Following some of these incidents, I had to address these students to help them understand what might be behind this behaviour they’d been victims of.
To help me with this, I drew on Frantz Fanon’s work. Fanon was a Martinican psychiatrist, philosopher, and revolutionary, widely known for his searing critiques of colonialism and its psychological and cultural impacts. In his renowned book The Wretched of The Earth, Fanon exposed how colonial domination dehumanised both the colonised and the coloniser, explaining that the response of the oppressed to oppression is to become the oppressor themselves. When an individual finds himself in a system built on ideas of oppression, he or she will learn accordingly how to use oppression to produce desired results.
This simply means that humans, as much as any other species on earth, are products of their environments. As obvious as this sounds, we often seem to overlook this fact when strategising to build better functioning societies.
That realisation, that people are profoundly shaped by the contexts they live and work in, stayed with me.
I began looking for places and people who were not just designing solutions, but intentionally trying to understand why people behave the way they do in the first place. I didn’t have the language for it then, but I knew I was looking for an approach to innovation that put human behaviour at the centre.
That’s when I came across Brink.
This insight, about people and how they’re shaped by their context, is what Brink is built on. It is at the core of our Behavioural Innovation methodology, because we know that humans are unpredictable and irrational, and they respond differently depending on where they are and what they want.
When I joined Brink, I came across a publication the team had put together: 10 ideas that make Brink. One of those ideas is “Get curious about the vinegar.”
It’s a strange phrase at first. But it captures something I’d been circling for years: the idea that people behave in ways that make sense in their environment. Just like you wouldn't blame the cucumber for turning into a sour pickle without at least looking at the vinegar it was submerged in; you can't really understand a person until you explore the context that person is 'submerged 'in.
That’s what Brink does, it doesn’t just design programs or products. It gets close to the context. It asks why people behave the way they do, and then it works from there.
If we think, design, test and execute with this in mind, we achieve very different outcomes compared to innovating as a force; bending people into submission to progress.
It’s no coincidence for me that I ended up here at Brink.
When I joined the team, I asked Lea Simpson, one of our founders, "Why the name Brink?", and she said:
“Initially, we wanted to call it Common, for common good, but it just didn’t feel right, Brink had more energy to it, it allowed us to ask: “What are you on the Brink of?”.
This interaction had me continuously asking myself this question, and so, as the French would say...
A year and a few months into my time at Brink, I can return to that question with a different lens.
Before, I thought I was on the brink of finding answers. Maybe even certainty.
But what I’ve found instead is an approach that embraces the messiness of being human. An understanding that people aren’t problems to be solved. They are shaped by context, and so am I.
At Brink, we don’t try to bend the world to our ideas. We learn to work with the grain of human behaviour.
In the past few years, my work has taken me into classrooms where young people wrestle with the future of work, into organisations which are rethinking the meaning of leadership, into ecosystems where climate and agritech ventures are trying to survive, and into networks of innovators searching for ways to make sexual and reproductive health not just accessible but dignified.
Each of these has been shaped by the same reality: We are living in a world where crises are multiplying. From the climate emergency that is reshaping food systems, to forced migration that disrupts education, to the erosion of trust in institutions across continents.
If we want to change outcomes, we must first interrogate the assumptions and principles that underpin society itself. Why do things happen the way they do? What contexts shape the choices people make? What are the unseen “vinegars in the jar” that need to be understood before they can be transformed?
My experience across learning, ecosystem building, and venture support has taught me that meaningful change begins with curiosity, not prescription.
So, maybe I'm not on the brink of answers. But I am on the brink of better questions. Questions that start with people. That challenges power, acknowledges history and seeks dignity.
And my hope is to keep finding others who share the conviction that improving society begins not with fixing, but with understanding.
