Acting, or Acting?

We're freestyling a bit today. Kim, you've just been on a conference season. Well, we've all been in various conferences and stuff, but you've just mentioned, well, before we recorded, you just mentioned it's taken you a... You said it in a surprising way, a surprisingly long time to process your thoughts from the conference season. What's going on? Why is it taking so long?

Three conferences, two weeks. I was at the UNGA side events in New York City in September, and then I flew right to Montreal for the WINGS Forum, and then I came right back to D.C. for two days at the InterAction Annual Conference. So for an ambivert who's mostly introverted, it was a lot. And there was that, and I always expect that. Obviously, also very interesting good conversations. But I took a book of notes, and I think I thought I was going to come back on the Monday and just make sense of it all, turn it around.

And here we are three weeks later, and I'm just... It's just starting to settle in, I think. And I think it just took that long to kind of percolate and digest and sit down, and it will continue to.

But the headlines? The headlines, and we can pick up on any of this, is same language being used across all three events, same buzzwords being used, trust, solidarity, collaboration, humility, all over the place. But in different ways, which I think is interesting. And at first, I was feeling kind of angsty and grumpy, if I will, about like, okay, we can't stop. We've been using these words for decades, enough with the trust, enough with the collaboration, unless you put action behind it, then it just becomes kind of words.

And at the start of the WINGS Forum, in the opening, there was a line that was said that has stuck with me, which was, the theme of the WINGS Forum was act. And they were talking about how act, as a verb, has multiple meanings. You can take action and do something, or you can be an actor in a performance. And so it made me think, when we say these words, are we performing a part we think we're supposed to play in an industry, or are we actually walking the talk, living the values, doing the action?

And that's where I was getting grumpy, because if you're actually trying to walk the talk and act, let's go. But if you are performing a part, because you think you're supposed to be saying the words, so you don't get canceled, of course, there's kind of all of the in between, with the good intent that doesn't always lead to action. That's where I'm losing my patience. And so kind of since then, everything has been sitting along that spectrum. And it very much is a spectrum. It's, I don't think it's all or nothing.

And it's not often the big things. It's the small decisions. It's the small decisions of, how do I trust by being trustworthy? How do I elbows down collaborate, instead of talking about the importance of collaborate? And that all adds up. So that was one of my big takeaways. And then the second was just kind of reflecting on the differences in audiences, and the different scales. So UNGA was very much about your traditional, the governance of development and humanitarian assistance. Doing a lot of still diagnosing. What is, how are the institutions holding up?

Short answer, not well. What was built 80 years ago is maybe not fit for purpose in 2026. And what does that mean? So still diagnosing a lot of those pieces. On the philanthropy side at WINGS, philanthropy is very much, this is the moment reform or die. It's time. There is no more time to talk. And then we talked about, and InterAction, which is primarily US-based INGOs, when there was talk from like a US perspective, it's still very much in protect mode. How do we talk to the American people about the importance of this work?

How are we communicating it in that way? So it was interesting. Same words, same conversations, different, different angles coming out of it, different positioning, I think, or posturing. And what, one thing that occurs to me is everyone, we were just talking about this earlier, Thomas, there is no one truth. There is no one point of truth. So in any given room, if those are my people, I don't know that the other conversations are happening. Oftentimes I have the privilege of kind of straddling all of these worlds and seeing the differences and the similarities.

If I don't, then I just think my reality is my reality. And yet we all sit in the same sector. So this is where this idea of, we need a more coherent way of thinking and talking about this, even if we don't agree on tactics. Here comes an end play. So other than that, AI narratives, systems change, all of the topics, take a look at that.

Yeah, I think, I was also in Brussels last month, and literally it was the same observation. And I spoke with multiple people who are working with different organisations, including donors, it's exactly the same. I think it's the same messages, it's the same talking points, the same words. And yeah, I could, I feel exactly the same. And it makes me frustrated sometimes. But I think for me, when I, especially when I do projects with Middle East, and I speak about it in Arabic, these words, they don't have a meaning.

So when you translate them from English to Arabic, the meaning just sounds so vague and cloudy, and they really don't have a meaning. And actually some of them, they just sound a bit naive to be honest. So it's so interesting that even when you want to translate those to other languages, literally they are just empty words. So not only if you want to translate them from that terminology to operationally, or from strategic side to operationally. No, it's even like when you want to just talk about them in different language, they just don't have a meaning.

What are the equivalents?

So you have to share a description, and the description is how it will be operationally. Like for example, like when we talk about, I don't know, trust, solidarity, humanity, equality, inclusion, belonging. There are so many, those words, like let's say when I say them, I understand what it means. We used it so many times in project design or strategic design, or when you are looking at governance, or principles or something like that. But whenever I want to speak about them, especially in Arabic, it just, I need to explain the description of that, because they are just a word.

But then what does it mean? Like how it looks like in practice. So I think sometimes, whenever I want to work in Arabic context, or translate a document or something to another language, it's always tricky. And I always find it, I think it's so interesting that sometimes I get invited to speak in a webinar that is in Arabic or a podcast that's in Arabic. And because my brain think about those words in English, not in my native language. So I find it hard to, I'm thinking about those words in English and then try to translate it in Arabic because it just either it doesn't have a meaning or I need to explain exactly what does that mean in practice.

As a native English speaker, and ashamedly only an English speaker, but having worked in context with dozens of different languages and have got comfortable sitting in a room where they're talking in a language I don't understand, the terminology of the multilateral sector is all in English. So it can be a whole paragraph in another language with a cluster system. And it really does exemplify just how Westernised, just how one track minded, how unique the system is in that sense.

But I want to come back, Kim, you mentioned the conferences, you mentioned the language being the same and predominantly all English speaking, I guess, based on what we've just said as well. And as you were talking, I was like, I bet there's people listening to this that are going to be like, yeah, you could put any date, any year associated to this sort of reflection of the conference, right? It's same language, it's same messaging, it's the same desire to do something. It's the same kind of, oh, let's not just make this a talking shop, let's do something about it.

And then the following year, the same narrative again, which suggests that everything that preceded it failed on the idea of acting in the sense of doing something. But then you mentioned there was a difference. My question to you was going to be, what was different this year, if anything? And you mentioned that posture was different this year. In what way? Say more about that. How did you see a different posture?

So it's funny because, so this is my notebook where I was taking notes and at one point I flipped through and I was like, oh, this must be my notes from this event. And it was dated from like nine months ago. Couldn't tell the difference. Same words, same thoughts.

Same, okay, exactly.

No, I will say, I will say, and here's my caveat, and I think this is true for everyone. There is no such thing as a trend. It's all just signals that you're listening for. So it's all biased. The sessions that I went to are the ones that I'm interested in. So there's probably sessions out there that negate what I just said, and I wasn't there. And the notes that I'm taking are the ones that I'm listening for, not what, you know, you would take very different notes, both of you probably would.

So I am very aware of that and that I come from a very specific perspective. But the posturing, I think some of it is like attitude. Some of it is where people are at. And I don't think it's good or bad. I just think it is where it is. And we've talked about this that, you know, there are some that are going to be transitioning to the new systems and there are some that are going to be actively reinventing it from the outside. And I do think that there is room for all.

I think philanthropy's role probably should be to be pushing us in a more agile way, in a more kind of being on the edge, if you will. And so that posturing is more, do we get rid of the grant system altogether? Do we get rid of one-year grants altogether? Do we think about how we are still taking part in a economic environment that is set up kind of against the values that we're talking about and what does that look like? So those are the big ideas, I think that, and that is different than let's say five years ago where probably, and I wasn't at the WINGS in the last one, what I didn't hear at WINGS was locally led development, shift the power.

That was all already assumed. That's already been absorbed into the consciousness that is assumed and now we're moving on, my opinion, from what I observed. At, let's say, InterAction, there's still very much, I am an INGO, how am I living my values through the locally led development agenda. intent, different posturing, if that makes sense.

It's interesting, and I'm curious. conferences are an imperfect thing, right? No one expects them to be the moment stuff changes. Significantly. And everyone will go in with a sense of skepticism around what is likely to be achieved and because the world works the way that it does, everyone then sort of equates that to a return on investment financially or is it worth the money and all the rest of it. And I'm slightly more sympathetic to that, I guess. I can certainly see the value in convening and I see the value in continuing to discuss as long as it is in the sense of at least aspirationally acting to achieve progress.

If people are consciously turning up there to act, and I love that double meaning of the term act, that if people are consciously turning up to perform, that's a problem and they don't need to be there. But as long as people are turning up with the spirit to engage, which I suspect most people do, it's fine. But there's two things in my mind, I guess. One is in five, 10 years' time, when multilateral structures and systems and architectures will no longer dominate the way that they have done because that's the trajectory that we're on and there'll be people listening that get triggered by that, but it's true, not eradicated, but certainly shifted in its dominance.

How likely is this conference season to be recognised and seen in hindsight, in historical terms almost, as a significant moment of pivot, or is it just going to have become part of the noise that took place in this type of moment and become nondescript in that sense? And that's why I was interested in what you said about posture, because for me, posture signifies moment of pivot or could potentially signify a

moment of pivot.

So here's the hopeful bit, and I really am trying, because I agree, people often go in being critical in these spaces, and yet I'm trying to be as balanced as we can. And I'm interested to hear if this resonates with you, Ali, because for me, I think the pivot, and from what I am listening for, is there is a signal in even the language that is being used, that it's shifting towards a more relational and moral language. So think about it, solidarity, humanity, collaboration, versus the technical language of efficiency, effectiveness, risk that maybe we heard before.

Yeah.

And again, it could be the spaces that I'm opting into, but if we're moving, and there really is this talk about it, this whole underpinning of the narrative is, there's been an assumption from 80 years ago that the values, this idea of what is the spine of what we do, we haven't kept refreshing it. There's a whole new generation that may need a reminder, or they may need to increase their own personal ownership of this set of values. And sometimes I think we shy away from it, because we want to be neutral.

But if you don't really defend this kind of humanistic set of values as a spine to everything you do, then the alternative is someone else is going to replace it with a different set of values. so that is much more of a relational moral language. And even if it feels still like this idea of we need to work together still feels a little bit like we're playing the part, it still is signaling a shift.

Yeah. No, it is. You're right. And reflecting on it with that historical timeline associated to it, right, running the comparisons to previous moments. And I think that what you just mentioned there, that noticing of a, and it won't have been exclusive, but from what your experience was, and let's take that as not unique and alien to the majority, and you're probably there in, and you'd have picked up major signals of things. That shift from mechanical, managerialist language of measurement, effectiveness, cost, risk, et cetera, into the relational connectivity values base space. That's an important pivot that I haven't heard being called out before.

Yeah. Now, the opposite is in other rooms, there was still very much a country first, which is happening not just in America, but in other countries too. So like there are these tensions.

Yeah. But I have a couple of thoughts here and reflections. Maybe they are not on the same arc, but they just came to my mind while you are mentioning these things. So the first one, and I'm not sure, I'm just thinking about it. Do we have a class, like a social, maybe economic class that is living in the abstract and in those terminologies that indirectly in the sector, we also created that at country level. Because just for example, those who are maybe listening to this and they live, I don't know, in Jordan, in Lebanon, in Syria, in South Sudan, in Nigeria, at least those countries where I worked before.

There is an NGO class. And the NGO class, they are kind of like, they enter this abstract, a bit elite, they get paid very well. And they are in their own way of thinking, they go to specific coffee shops, they sit in specific places, they speak specific language. Did we, indirectly in the sector, created that class that there are so much in that abstract of certain things, but from community, social dynamic, social science perspective, it doesn't really match the reality. And it's mainly in certain kind of like high-level abstracts at that elite level?

I don't know, I'm just thinking, because I see that when I saw that, at least when I lived and worked in those places. This is the first thought. The second thought that came to my mind that we are really good at, you know, practicing, adapting our terminologies. Like each period, each year, each trend, we just find a new set of terminology, we use it, we practice it. Sometimes we reuse, we recycle certain terminologies we had from before and then we use it. And sometimes it works.

I mean, at least for funding, it worked before. So are we just getting very good at adapting terminology, but not behaviour and practice? Also, I don't know. Maybe just something to keep in mind. The third thing that I want to mention also came to my mind, you know, the other day I was filling a survey and it was talking about things. What do you think happening outside the sector? What are the things you are seeing outside the sector and the first thing came to my mind.

Everything is happening outside the sector. What are you talking about? Like economy, debt and credit, geopolitics, internal order disorder, climate, innovation. Like literally, everything is happening outside and the sector is just like, it's not like it's the centre and everything moving around it. No, there is a larger ecosystem and the sector is part of that. And I think many people sometimes they forget the fact that large part, people don't like to hear this, but large part of the funding that goes into international aid and development, I would say the majority, they are taxpayers' money.

I'm sorry, taxpayers made certain decisions and now the money is challenged through that channel. So if taxpayers or the people are not happy with how it went, they have to go and vote. Because I think sometimes we forget the fact that in the end of the day, this money coming with certain decisions that the people in certain countries they made when they voted or took a decision and et cetera, because in the end of the day it is also taxpayers' money. So we also have to be proactive instead of just when there is a cut here or change there or et cetera. We just changed the language and now we want everyone to follow that. This is what came to my mind.

I agree and there was a brilliant book that I read ages ago called Dull Disasters. Stefan Dercon, former DFID economist. Very, very, very good because he looks at the financing in multilateral aid and he highlighted exactly what you just said, Ali, right? It's about votes. It's about getting elected. It's about how your public perceived the issues and the cause and if you speak their language then you'll get voted.

But I wanted to come back to the point on everything's outside the sector and it was going to be my question back to you. My second question to you, Kim, on the conferences is what was missing? Whose voices were not in those spaces and how much of an echo chamber of just internal multilateralism was it? And then the other bit, yesterday I had two conversations yesterday with different entities, two different entities within the kind of Somerset, where I'm currently sat, right? The local community here and the conversation was around community resilience, the state of community resilience in Somerset and there are very economically deprived areas of this county and there are some very affluent parts of this community and depending on where you sit, you don't see the other, right?

And interestingly, one entity within the sort of wider ecosystem of institutionalised support that should be available to people across the county. One element was recognizing that they historically have held very prominent positions within community as a source of support, as a source of hope, as a source of health, as a source of education. It was a very holistic set and they now no longer occupy that space, right? But there's probably a perception that they should but they're seen as quite archaic and that entity was very critical of another component that's perceived to be part of it.

And that coincidentally, I then had a conversation with someone from that element and they were saying, oh, but what role can they play? They're too out, they're too there and was very defensive about the role that they're offering and they're playing. But what was common across both of them was a realization that, and to your point, Kim, on language of connectivity and relational elements, purpose all unified, all agreed. Oh, no, no disagreement whatsoever. It's not like there was an, oh no, they don't need help when they do or what are you talking about?

All in utter agreement that these areas are economically deprived. They need an uplift, right? And we are disproportionately supporting the county. We are struggling compared to neighboring counties. So very aligned on that. Also very aware that they are well connected. They said that warm relationships is what was mentioned in terms of how they are connected. The education system, the health system, the emergency services system, the council system, the religious systems, both at local and national level. There's very warm connections there. You can have the business community in there as well.

Warm connection. But they're not doing anything with those connections. Nothing's coming. There's no value contribution other than they have nice chats, right? And that to me is the next step, right? So it's nice having the relational bit and to have real impact, to have real purpose, to have actual change in moving the needle on social indicators you need the connectivity in the relational element but you also then need the action to go along with that. And that's where I think the translation from nice conversations into action is where you start to get the difficult things around compromise and around collaboration and the messiness of collaboration. And that's, I think, a step that is yet to be taken maybe.

All right. So not to sound like I'm just in like a one track, just beating the drum. Collaboration is a discipline. It's a skill set. It's not just an aspiration and a hope.

It doesn't happen on its own.

It's so hard. And it's a skill set that needs to be recognised, resourced, and built.

Hugely. Absolutely.

did I want to say? So in answer to your first question, I don't know who was missing. I don't know which rooms I wasn't in. I will say at UNGA everyone is there. And yet are they still, is everyone self-selecting into their silos? Probably. AI was everywhere. Everyone is involved with AI that cuts across everything. I will say one thing that came up was a good amount of talk about the middle actors and the increased role that middle actors will play, both middle states and companies, high net worth individuals.

The fact that because of technology, one really smart group or group of people can have outsized impact even more than a nation state at this point and what that is going to impact. And then one thing that came up that was just not something that was new for me or that I don't typically think about is in someone was asking, okay, what's the one single thing that would change the most? And multiple people were talking about tax reform. Because tax reform is the thing that allows wealth to accumulate in the first place.

And if you can kind of reform that, then there aren't these hordes of money with outsized power to begin with. And I thought that was interesting. But the other piece that I think both of you are getting at, which is we change the words, we refresh the words, but we can never really get to the action, and picks up on something where we end at our last episode actually, which is Thomas, you and I talking about what is it, is it structural constraints or is it psychological?

Is it the individual's inability to move from like, I'm performing a role and this makes me feel good and I'm patting myself on the back for saying the right things and doing the right things, but I'm not actually gonna let it cost me anything because real change costs something. Real, if I really want to embody these things and embody accompaniment, I'm gonna have to give something up. Or is it the structural piece that sets us up for fragmentation, that sets us up that no individual or even frankly small movement can break because it's so big and it's outside of even our sector. It's how the global order works.

pleasure in our own displeasure, which is a lovely saying that I heard before that we, better the devil, you know is the more colloquial way of saying it. We're comfortable with what we currently know doesn't work and we're more comfortable bemoaning that than we are actually moving into a place of unknown discomfort. And that's a very interesting phenomena that takes place. For me, it's what we mean when we talk about creativity and innovation and being comfortable with change in leadership discussion and leadership circles. However, I wonder whether actually any leader who steps up and says, oh, I'm comfortable with change, are you actually comfortable with change or are you just familiar with running change processes? Because those are two very different things. And that's a big point of self reflection that individual leaders need to be having themselves.

think it's a mix of all those different things. And if I just look at the past two to three years, at least with those initiatives that I was involved in, the organisational transformation, the change management and all that, it's really a mix of all that. Sometimes people, they have certain knowledge and certain organisational history or something like that. And that's actually the main barrier of a shift. Other times, we simply find that we forget the fact that systems and organisations, they are people and people, they have their own emotions and their own rhythms and their own things that they are worried about and their own things that they are concerned about.

And maybe that change doesn't match any of that. Other times, I think the way organisations are structured, especially in international NGOs with all those different layers of field, country, region, HQ, representation, working groups, task force, committee, it just makes it extremely hard to take a decision. And then sometimes we have the, I would say, the leadership style of engaging, consulting, building that, you know, consent across multiple layers. And then we end up in a loop of consultation that doesn't generate a decision. So I think there are so many elements and so many things within that.

And I think recently I had this experience where I was working on a process within an organisation and establishing that process was just simple, easy, straightforward workflow and then the description. And it's just so simple. But then when people started adding their comments and suggestions and recommendations, what I was feeling is that people are trying to defend their roles and present the value they bring to the organisation, not the technical part, not the flow, just like, this is my role, keep it, I'm valuable, I'm important, you know, like those kind of things. So I think it's a mix of everything together.

am seeing things change. And I don't know how representative of a kind of wider movement of acknowledgement this is, but certainly, for example, right now, I'm engaged with three different organisations, all completely isolated from each other. There's no connection between them. Three different organisations, all of which, as a leadership team, either the CEO or the board chair, they are asking and they are saying, you know what, our current leadership dynamic is not working. It's not what we need, right? And there's different approaches that they want to adopt with it, but it's all asking that critical, difficult question of, what do we need to be doing differently to lead more appropriately in the future?

And there was one lovely framing that I thought was very articulate. One was, you know, we're comfortable with inherited uncertainty, i.e. the context and the environments and things like that. Comfortable with that, right? And that's a safe space for people to jump to when they say, oh, we're comfortable with change or comfortable with agility. We're very agile. Yeah, when it comes to the work or the environment, yeah, something, where there's huge discomfort is on the internal ambiguity when it comes to the structure, when it comes to the strategy, when it comes to the contradictions between language of leadership and actions of leadership, when it comes to the lack of relational connectivity that they've got, the lack of trust, the sort of toxicity of the culture and the sort of shadow world that undermines a lot of the other work.

When those dynamics are not functional, that's the inherent, that's the internal ambiguities that cause the friction. And it's very difficult. We don't often disassociate those two, right? We often just say, oh, comfortable with change and we assume you can translate one skill set to the other as well and it's not working that way. But like I said, the fact that there's three organisations all come into the same conclusions and all reaching out for help is, I think, an excellent signal. Now, how representative that is, I don't know, but it's better than not having any signal in that direction, right?

And I mean, I was the one in the last episode that pushed back against you and said, no, a lot of it's structural and I do believe that, but now I'm going to contradict myself and say that, you know, and to your point, Ali, yeah, systems are made up of people and so there is no movement. Movements have to and social change has to come through individual transformation first. Like that takes time. So this is not like a one, two year, like let's do this. This is like a long-term thing, but when you think about it, if you say, okay, there is no risk-free choice, right?

I was in a session and Nana from WACSI asked this question to a panel. When there is no risk-free choice, how do you act? And then I was in another session at InterAction on Leadership and they were talking about these crucible moments, the crucible moments where you are forged through hardship to make a decision and you have to decide how do you act? And I think part of it is just recognizing when those moments happen, because it's really easy to be like, well, let's kind of gloss over it and pretend that it's not these crucible moments.

And some of it is, to your point, Thomas, they're recognizing it and saying we need outside help. We need someone to help us work through this so that we get it right. So if you are coming to a personal or an organisational crucible moment where there is no risk-free choice, what do you do? And my favourite answer from somebody was that you pick the side that's best for humanity.

Yeah.

And maybe that's not a simple solution, but that feels like a good, good guiding north star.

Yeah, I think I'm actually lucky that I worked and I work with people from different levels, those like grassroots or country, region, HQ, board level and all that. And to be honest, they are all struggling in their own ways. And sometimes people when they are at country level, it's so easy to point finger at HQ and if you are HQ, it's so easy to point finger at a country. And when you are within HQ, you always say the management, the management, but who's in the management?

You know, like those things. And when you are with NGO, you say the donor and all that. But after my trip to Brussels, I had a couple of meetings with donors and they are really struggling. They are having also their own restructuring. They are having their own shift in focus and priorities. They are having their own organisational and personal shocks. And at that time, I was thinking that if you sit with NGO, at any level, they will say, donors should do this. Donors should prioritise that.

Tat, tat, tat. When I sat with the donors, they are in their own emotional, organisational, individual, institutional exhaustion. And it felt like, oh, last year or this year, working with organisation individuals and large part of that, providing that emotional support, I was sitting with donors. I felt like literally I'm doing emotional support before any conversation. So I think sometimes we also forget the fact that, you know, there are also people on the other side. And they are also struggling.

They absolutely are. I loved what you mentioned there about the sort of, you know, the blaming of others, right? And it reminds me, I ran a workshop recently, and the heart of it was about collaboration. So exactly to your point, Kim, about the fact that it's hard and it's messy, right? This was two days where it was all focused on just collaboration. And there was an exercise that I ran at one point. It was spontaneously run because, you know, conversation had gone a certain way, right?

But, and I love it. It's such a simple one. You get people to line up facing each other and you put their fingers sort of pointed out like that and you lay a pole along the top of their fingers. And the task, very simple, the task is, they have to put the pole on the floor but they have to all maintain contact with the pole at the whole time, right? That's it. It's no more complicated than that. Yeah, every single time this happens. The pole goes up, right?

And everyone's like, what's going on? What's going on? And it's carnage and they are just utterly, utterly bemused as to what's going on, right? And you do it two or three times, right? It gets to the point where there's only two people touching it. So, right? Start again, right? The same thing happens again. And they were like, oh, it's witchcraft or, you know, you're some sort of magic associated with this pole or something like that. But it's not. There's two things that are playing out with that exercise that you can directly correlate to the world of work.

One is an othering of the problem, right? Everyone is stood there going, well, I'm not pushing it up, therefore, but it is going up. So someone else must be. Someone else must be pushing this up because I'm not and yet it is going up, right? So it's an automatic assumption that there's a direct attribution to the problem by somebody else. The other thing that's happening is, right? The task is to go down. Yet all the noise is saying up, right? And as the facilitator, This is my, I'm the one. who said, you're not touching it.

You've got to keep your finger on it. No, no, you've gone too far. No, you've got to keep your finger on it. All my instruction is saying go up. All the noise is about up and the actual task is to get down. So in the world of where we are, how much of our daily narrative, how much of our daily work and noise is countering the direction that we want to be going in. And yet we're stuck in that cycle because that's, no, the task is keep your finger on the pole.

Keep your finger on the pole. Keep your finger on the pole. And that's leading you up. It's very, very interesting. And as soon as you had that exercise and we sort of, debriefed it, clicked it, subsequently things changed dramatically. And that's sort of seeking to understand that conversation about, okay, let me assume positive intent by everybody. No one here is consciously trying to derail this collaboration. Where are we going then? What are the sticking points? Why are we not seeing eye to eye? And let's map that out.

Let's understand where different people's perspectives are and start seeing the challenge from their point of view, not assuming my point of view is the only way to understand the problem and the challenge. If you start that conversation, that's where collaboration can suddenly start to happen a lot easier. But just the simple exercise to unlock that was fascinating.

That's fascinating. I'm going to steal that. That's great.

It's so interesting.

Well, how would you pull that out into this broader conversation if all of the noise and the signals are saying counter to what we're trying to do? What should the signals and the noise be instead?

So interestingly, go back to how did they finally actually get it to go down? Everyone does eventually get this pole on the floor. But you do it when you actually start becoming attuned with the other people in the group. Instead of lots of voices taking place, they all just defaulted to one person's voice. And one person suddenly started and it wasn't frantic. There was a lot of very calm, very methodical discussion. And then there's a lot of go with that person's breathing. One of the people tended to was breathing, particularly loud or something.

So go with their breathing. So they're breathing out, we go down. Okay, pause. When they breathe out again, we go down. So it was that unspoken connection as well as their noticing what is working that got them all working on the same task, the same objective, the same thing. Without the blame, without the franticness, without the haste, without the concern and panic that was taking place, suddenly they all started to work and then it became self-fulfilling, right? Suddenly it was like, ah, so this is working now.

Ah, this is working. And then hope came into it. Positivity came into it. Energy, creative energy was there and it suddenly, collective achievement, collective success became self-fulfilling. And you're working that way.

In the language of our sector, I just heard collective sense making. I heard an abundance mindset. This is the way what we talk about, but that's what it looks like in practice. How interesting.

But it's also, crucially I think it's that sort of assume positive intent piece. It's that seek to understand. It's that recognise that we're all pushing in the same direction. And also that it's not just that system. It's not just that multilateral architecture. One of these conversations I had yesterday was talking about this pie chart I used to always use, right? You put one little figure in the middle of it and that figure can represent anybody in the world, right? Associated with somebody that you've engaged recently in the work, right?

That individual has a support network around them, right? And that support network is made up of an entire ecosystem. Whether that's their family, their neighbourhood, the community, the civil society, the religious community, diaspora, private sector, government, local, national, et cetera, and the aid sector in one shape or form or another, right? International multilateral or not. Susan from St John was on recently. It was a wonderful conversation about how you can function internationally without being part of a multilateral architecture. At no point does anyone in there largely, but especially those in the sort of multilateral space, do we start to go, do you know what % of that support are we offering at the minute?

There's a default assumption that we offer 100%. We are the beginning, middle, and end, especially the one-size-fits-all structures. And yet if you start to recognise, actually there is an entire system there, if you just open up a conversation about seeking to understand that, recognise who those other players are in any given context, in any given ecosystem, you can have a conversation about complementarity, you can start attuning into where different people are contributing different things. There's a question about motive, and it sounds much more simple than it is.

There's always going to be friction in some of those things as well because you've got commercial interests taking place, you've got financial stability that people need to try and achieve, you've got humans in the mix, right? People are people and it doesn't always click immediately. But that for me is the first step in this process is just one, recognizing that no one is potentially deliberately pushing this in the wrong direction. And second, recognise what others are trying to contribute and work towards that. And scale that up and down, depending on what level you're engaging with and where you're at.

Interesting. I started writing notes while you are talking and then I was like, oh my god, no, we record this conversation, I would have the transcript later.

Well, I was just thinking as, because the attunement piece is so interesting that everyone is attuning and that I'm thinking, well, how do you scale attunement up at a global scale? But I think that's where the humanity piece comes in, right? If we can just, if the common denominator is we are attuning with every decision is what is best for humanity and just people to people, then that seems like the first step.

And I think a critical element to that scaling of the attunement piece is recognizing that humanity more at a macro global level isn't one thing. It's not the rollout of big, it's the culmination of small. And once you start that mind switch into that perspective, you can still achieve scale, right? It's just not directly attributable to you and you're no longer in a sort of race to the top of how many people you've reached, how big your budget has been. But the collective outcome on humanity should be huge.

Yeah. And I think if you think about it from executive level or board level, the conversation when it comes to growth, it's always about the portfolio, like finances, how many employees do we have, your footprint in how many countries, etc. But it's actually not focused at that. And of course, you see the terminology when you see the annual report, but aside from that, that's the focus at board level or at least that's my experience, all the boards where I sat before. But something interesting happened with me today.

I was telling you just before starting this, that I was in the university and I was speaking with students and we had a similar conversations. And of course, we brought the conversation around humanity and the humans and climate and innovation and all that. And someone was saying that it just, it feels there is a huge gap between how the people are living and seeing things because that person was talking about, I think it's like a new rule in an AI tool that if you are a bit rude to that tool or something, it will just shut down and block you out.

And now some people are doing this advocacy for AI rights and what could come there and how to behave with them and all that. And today this student was telling me that there's a huge difference. We are trying to talk about basic things and meeting certain things in this XYZ region. And now the conversation started shifting toward AI rights and how to behave with AI tools and not to be rude. And it just so interesting, right?

I mean, AI rights, that's what a world have we moved into. As a side comment, I do have a friend who's constantly polite to their AI bots so that when they do eventually take over the world, they'll know that they were a nice person.

I'm 100% in place. You don't want to get on the wrong side of the overlords.

Don't get on the wrong side of AI, no.

I do just want to come back. No, because if there are exec C-suite boards listening, we've painted a very simplistic and a moralistic based dilemma there, right? And you can't overlook the need for financial stability in an institution, right? And the pressure to be financially scalable and the growth mindset is real, right? And there is, whilst it can go to an extreme that becomes a bit mercenary in its nature, there is a requirement in today's world to balance the budget and to be in that space and competitive because you're fighting for money.

It's not a simple stop that, do this mindset. The biggest leadership challenge is measuring the two, it's keeping the balance, it's adjusting those and holding a very real financial conversation with the moral purpose at the centre of the decision-making is hard and it gets very, very sticky when you get to, well, we've only got a million surplus, so do we spend it on this or do we spend it on that? And you're only ever going to get criticised for the decision that you make in that space, right?

Right, but I think that's where the system constraints come in at all of the levels, right? It's easy to say when your values are competing against each other. At that point, you have to either make a transparent decision and feel okay about it or you have to find the right balance.

Yeah, I think it's a little easy.

Or is it a one-size-silver bullet answer to it? There's not a templated off-the-shelf ego and the challenges that people are needing to face now, precedent is increasingly irrelevant as well, right? So that's the bigger uncertainty and that's where that need for deep -seated comfort would change, not just, I know how to run a change process, right? It's that deep-seated stepping out of the known displeasures and into those really unknown discomforts. That's where you've got to be. That's where the true leaders are. thriving at the moment.

And when you are inside that system and that machine, it's really not easy. It's extremely hard. And I see it either when I am part of an organisation or working with someone who's part of that organisation, you are driven by those numbers and that portfolio and that, because that's the definition of progress and growth. So it's extremely hard to balance that out. But I really think, for me personally, because I struggled with that also on my professional life, to be honest, those conversations that we have and some other conversations I have with friends, they help me take a step back, reason and then approach it again.

Because I could see it personally when I am part of an institution. I'm the same. I go into that definition of the numbers, the progress, the growth, et cetera. But when I have those spaces to pause, think, zoom out and look at the full picture, then I balance that out. But yeah, I have to acknowledge it's extremely hard.

It's the discernment. Every time I think of, I always think of you, Thomas, when I think about the discernment and the pause.

absolutely. We just do not budget for time or anything else.

It's all true.

So we started with your sense-making from conferences, Kim, and we've landed on leadership.

As always. Every time. Every time.

One word, closures, thoughts on where you're at?

will say I'm feeling a little bit more clarity. When we were talking about, I think, last week, and my head was a whole jumble, and I am feeling more clarity about what is happening. And I think it is a mix of same old, same old and a little bit of optimism. That's not one word.

It never is.

No, I think for me, it just reminded to myself and maybe to those who are listening that systems and organisations and institutions, they are people in the same way we struggle. Those who are on the other side or the other levels, they are also people who are struggling in their own things. And yeah, just to keep that in mind.

I'm leaving with that act and the dual meaning behind it and the sense of performance and the performative pressure that one version can have versus the tangible progress that can be achieved with the other.

Am I acting or am I acting?

Nice.

Lovely, thanks both.

That was nice. Thank you.

As always.

Yes.

We'll see you both soon.

So we'll see you at the end of the week. Thanks all.

Bye-bye.

Take care. Cheers.