Planners and searchers

“A planner thinks he already knows the answer. He thinks of poverty as a technical engineering problem that his answers will solve. A searcher admits he doesn’t know the answer in advance; he believes that poverty is a complicated tangle of political, social, historical, institutional and technological factors... and he hopes to find the answer to individual problems by trial and error... A planner believes that outsiders know enough to impose a solution. A searcher believes that insiders have enough knowledge to find solutions, and that many solutions must come from within.”
– William Easterly