Leadership, culture, and systemic change in humanitarian work. Field notes on the people, judgment, and courage the work runs on.
We prize the leader no one can replace, and we should fear them instead. Walk into many of our organizations and you will find a person who holds it all together. They carry the donor relationships…
We design the entry in exhaustive detail and treat the leaving as an afterthought, so we depart in ways that undo the good we did.
We built safeguarding to protect people. Too often it has quietly become a system that protects us from the people we failed.
The wall that held has no photograph, so we promote the person who arrived after it fell.
We seat people by grade and then act surprised when the person who can see the problem has the quietest chair in the room.
We hire a protection team and let everyone else off the hook. Safety and dignity are not one department’s specialism. They are a thread that runs through every distribution, every clinic, every line we make people stand in.
Good decisions need a short distance between the room where they are made and the place where they land.
To move money we need a face, and too often we take it at the worst moment of a life that was never ours to spend.
In high-stakes operations, the most dangerous sentence is the one that never gets said. A field officer senses a partner is overcommitted. A finance lead spots a number that does not reconcile. A n…
Most of us in this sector are good talkers. We brief, we frame, we align. We are far less practiced at sitting still while someone tells us our plan is wrong, our pilot did harm, or our own presenc…