Surge was designed for the moment the floor falls out. A new crisis breaks, the existing team cannot absorb it, and we send people and money fast to hold the line until the situation steadies. That is a sound idea for a rare event. The trouble is that the rare event stopped being rare. We now run surge as the standing condition of the work, and a tool built for the exception is quietly carrying the everyday.
Look at how a response actually staffs up. A shock lands, and we scramble for people who are free this month, deployable this week, willing to drop everything. We pull them from rosters, from other missions, from short consultancies. They arrive, they learn the context at speed, they carry an impossible load, and then their contract ends and they leave, taking the context with them. The next shock arrives and we do it again. We have built a machine that is permanently starting over.
This is not a failure of the people who deploy. They are often the most committed in the sector, and they hold responses together through sheer effort. The problem is structural, and because it is structural it is ours to redesign. We treat readiness as something to summon in the moment rather than something to hold in advance, so we pay for it at the worst possible time, in the most expensive possible way, with the least possible continuity.
Why we keep surging
The honest reason is that funding arrives the same way the crisis is declared: suddenly, and tied to the event. An emergency appeal can fund a wave of deployments. Almost nothing funds the quieter capacity that would have let a team absorb the shock without a wave at all. Standing staff who are not yet busy read, on a budget, as cost without output. So we keep our permanent footprint thin and lean on surge to cover the gap, again and again, and the gap never closes because we never resource it to.
The cost lands in three places. It lands on the people, who burn through their strongest years on back-to-back deployments. It lands on the work, because a team assembled in week one is still finding its feet in week six, exactly when sharp judgment matters most. And it lands on the communities we serve, who meet a new face every few months and have to explain their situation from the start each time. Continuity is not a comfort. It is the substance of a good response, and surge as a standing model spends it faster than we can rebuild it.
Surge should be what we reach for when the rare thing happens. When it becomes how we run every day, it is no longer a response. It is a sign we never built the capacity the work has been asking us for.
Building standing capacity
The fix is not to abolish surge. It is to shrink the share of the work that depends on it, by treating predictable need as something to staff rather than something to scramble for. A few moves make that real.
Fund readiness as a line, not a hope. A region that reliably faces the same seasonal shock does not need to be surprised by it every year. Standing teams, pre-agreed rosters of people who already know the context, and capacity held a little above the calm-day minimum are all things we can budget for in advance. The people who fund this work share the interest here, because capacity bought ahead is cheaper and steadier than capacity bought in panic.
Keep the knowledge when the person leaves. If a deployment must be short, the handover cannot be. Build the time and the systems so that what a departing colleague learned stays with the team rather than walking out the door, and treat that transfer as part of the job rather than an afterthought squeezed into the final week.
Grow capacity where the crises are. The most sustainable surge is local capacity that does not have to fly in at all. Investing in national teams, standing local rosters, and the systems that let them lead means the next shock meets people who are already there, already trusted, and not leaving when the contract ends.
None of this asks for heroics. It asks us to stop being surprised by the predictable, and to pay for readiness on a calm day rather than buying it at a premium on the worst one. A sector that is permanently surging is a sector permanently paying its highest price for its least durable result. We can build the standing strength instead, and keep our best people long enough for their judgment to compound.
Surge is what a healthy system reaches for when the rare thing truly happens. The work now is to make the rare thing rare again, by building the everyday capacity the sector has needed for years and kept declining to fund. That is a choice in front of us, and it is one we can make together.