The Pyramid

On needs, nonprofits, linearity, and the quiet distortion of Maslow

For years, I worked in the nonprofit sector where Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs was treated like the law of gravity. It wasn’t presented as a theory to be explored or questioned. It was presented as the truth. Clean. Ordered. Predictable. The kind of framework that makes complex human lives feel manageable.

But before it became that, before it became an infographic, a training tool, a quiet doctrine, it was something else.

Source: getwallpapers.com

In 1938, Maslow spent time with members of the Blackfoot Nation, and that experience deeply shaped his thinking about human needs. What he observed there complicates the version many of us were taught. He encountered a community where belonging was not conditional, where well-being was embedded in relationships, and where human development did not appear to follow a strict, upward climb. Needs were not experienced as isolated steps to be completed in sequence; they were interwoven, relational, and cultural.

That part of the story is rarely emphasized when the theory is taught. Instead, what most of us learned was the pyramid.

I remember how it showed up everywhere in my work, case plans, grant language, intake forms, and program design. It quietly structured how we understood people and, more importantly, how we decided what they were ready for. If someone didn’t have stable housing, we assumed they weren’t ready for therapy. If they were in crisis, we assumed they couldn’t engage in conversations about purpose or identity. If their basic needs weren’t met, it was believed that higher-level needs were simply out of reach.

People’s lives became compartmentalized in ways that mirrored the pyramid itself. Case managers addressed food and housing. Therapists addressed mental health. Workforce programs addressed skill acquisition. Funders reinforced the separation by requiring outcomes to be tracked in categories. Each need had its place. Each role had its boundary.

But the people sitting across from us did not live in categories.

They were grieving and visionary at the same time. They were navigating instability while imagining entirely different futures for themselves. They were creating meaning amid conditions that the model would have labeled as “lower-level need.” The framework said their lives should unfold in sequence. Reality refused to cooperate.

The assumption underneath it all, the one that held everything together, was linearity. The belief that needs must be met in order. That one level unlocks the next. Human development moves upward in a predictable progression.

But even Maslow himself didn’t argue for that kind of rigidity. As later scholarship has clarified, he believed that people are often “partially satisfied and partially unsatisfied in all their needs at the same time” (MacLellan, Quartz, 2022).

That nuance didn’t make it into our trainings. What survived instead was the cleaner version, the one that fit neatly into systems, reporting structures, and program logic.

The pyramid itself isn’t Maslow’s.

Despite how widely it’s attributed to him, Maslow never depicted his theory as a pyramid at all. That familiar triangle, the one burned into our collective memory, was developed later, emerging from management and business contexts (MacLellan, Quartz, 2022).

In other words, the image that shaped how entire sectors understand human needs was not created by the person whose name it carries. It was a reinterpretation, and not a neutral one.

The pyramid aligned neatly with organizational thinking: hierarchy, efficiency, upward movement, and the optimization of human behavior. In one early business application, the model was explicitly framed as a tool for managers to motivate employees “at lowest cost” (MacLellan, Quartz, 2022).

The irony is difficult to ignore. A framework shaped and refined in the business world, one that mirrors hierarchy and managerial control, became foundational in the nonprofit sector, where the stated goal is human care and support. We adopted it, taught it, and operationalized it, often without questioning how its structure might constrain the very people we were trying to serve.

Asking what human beings need is a worthwhile and necessary inquiry. The issue is what happened to Maslow’s attempt to answer the question. The answer was streamlined, visualized, and repurposed until it became something else entirely, something easier to teach, easier to scale, and easier to apply, but also easier to misuse.

Needs don’t line up in clean sequences. They don’t wait for one another to be fulfilled. They coexist. They overlap. They contradict. People create, love, imagine, and reach for meaning in the middle of instability all the time, not after, not once they’ve “earned” it, but right in the midst of it. And more often than not, those needs are met, or left unmet, not in isolation, but in relationship.

The human condition resists categorization, and that makes me happy.