The Justification Fatigue

We're without Ali today, but we have an excellent guest, Ahmed Ibrahim. Or as I know you, Ahmed, Ahmed Vision. I don't know if that's still how you're referred to or not. But welcome, Ahmed. For those listening, would you like to just quickly introduce yourself?

Yeah, good. Thank you very much, Thomas. Hi, Kim. It's a pleasure to meet you. My name is Ahmed Ibrahim. I'm Somali. I have been working in East Africa for the last, I think I'm completing my 20 years since I joined the NGO world. Many people think I'm too young. I'm not also that young. Of course, I'm not also old. Yeah, but I spent most of my career working in NGO sector, mostly in Somalia, but I also have been to South Sudan, Sudan, Kenya, Ethiopia, and briefly Rwanda, Burundi. Yeah, so that is briefly me. I worked with the UN. I worked with international organisation. I worked with the private consultant firms.

I worked my own consultant firms. And I also worked with the education institutions, including university. And I briefly worked with government institution as consultant, not as an official. Yeah. So maybe that is a brief of me. But looking forward to have this interesting discussion. I'm really happy to join this forum.

Excellent. Thanks very much, Ahmed. Kim and I and Ali, we started this just to kind of help sense make where we're at in the world with all the changes that are taking place with everything that's emerging and on. And so from your point of view, you just narrated a wealth of experience there across a region of the world that tends to be and will probably always be, at least for the foreseeable, the sort of centre of gravity when it comes to human security index challenges and humanitarian need, et cetera. Just as the world's sort of turbulence changes at the moment, as the status quo of global power with the shifts at the US, with the China and Russia. How are you experiencing that dynamic changing for you in East Africa now compared to when you started maybe 20 years ago or so?

Yeah, good. No, thank you very much, Thomas. I think this is a very interesting question because I remember when I joined the world of NGO in late 2006. It was the peak time when the world interest to this part was the highest. So many resources. I remember in 2007, we were responding displacement outside Mogadishu, where close to a quarter of a million people get displaced. And I remember water trucking only used to spend half a million every day, only to deliver water in one area. That is how plant and easy resource was. And it was not how much money you have. It's who can deliver the water?

Where can it be taken? And think about how much money is spent the rest of the sectors, the food, the health, and establishment of shelter for these displaced people. And then you come to a time that less than 10% of the resource that used to be available to this part of the world is available. You still have the same organisation. You have much larger people in need. I remember that time. I think the number of internally displaced people, for example, in the case of Somalia, were less than half a million. And then you come today where you have more than three million internally displaced people.

So you see how huge the needs has grown and then how much the resource available declined. And if you come into that context and you put the shoes of a humanitarian worker, you feel the pain. It's not only that we have less resources. It's also the issue of changing attention because of the number of global crises happening that, you know, Somalia or maybe Ethiopia or even South Sudan kind of context is not as feasible as it used to be because of what's happening in Ukraine, what's happening in Sudan, and now what's happening in Gaza and the Middle East. And I think that has impacted overly when you try to sell the crisis of this region.

And people talk about donor fatigue, which has been a very popular word for a while, but I can tell you we have the justification fatigue. We have the change fatigue here in our context because you can think about having a structure today and after five months, shrink of resource, you have to change again. And then another three months, you have to change it again. And then you get so tired of changing things that you say, okay, maybe it's time to stop all over. And rather than changing several times, maybe it's time to stop. And I think that is why many organisations ceased already, and they're not doing anything in this context.

So it's very difficult, but most worryingly is the ambiguity of the future. You don't know what's going to happen in the future. You don't know how things will drift in the future. But with the assumption on how things were moving the last two, three years, I don't see a strong foot for aid sector working with the current level of operations, not only in terms of capacity or physical presence, but also availability of this kind of free aid that we receive. Yeah.

Interesting. You call free aid at the end there. I think it's a signal to kind of how perceptions of it have been over the years. But what I heard, what I found interesting in what you were saying there was this kind of back in the early 2000s, 2006, 2007, as a peak period of resource. And the picture you described there was almost the kind of issue that's created dependency on multilateral aid and dependency on a certain system, a certain architecture that has become increasingly normalized and entrenched in a certain way of being. And I used to constantly talk about the elitism of that multilateral structure in the context that you described Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, Ethiopia, et cetera, have been well kind of entrenched in that elitist system for a long time.

And now it's getting to a point where that's no longer serving them or providing the wealth that it once did. And so that notion of free aid, as you talk about it, is not what is coming out anymore. Have you noticed, is there any new ways of humanity being exercised that you're starting to see emerge when that system, when the wealth from that space has sort of declined? Or are you witnessing the gap and the void that's been left behind? And if so, what does that look like for you?

Yeah, so absolutely. I think there are two things we can look to when we're looking how things shift under current status. One is how do organisations react to these challenges because it's not only the country office or, you know, at my level that will decide how we react. It's organisational agendization, how they are going to react because shrinking resources in Somalia has a direct impact to the structure of the organisation at headquarter level. And I think it's very interesting. And I think I have to accept it because I can be also depart whatever kind of conclusion we make is that we shrink our operations starting from the lowest, not from the highest, where we say, OK, if we have less resources, let's close the field offices.

And then everyone comes to the country office, which means you have less connection with the actual beneficiaries and communities on the ground. And because, you know, I am the decision maker, I will take advantage because I have to keep my job last before we close. I think it's something we always feel guilty when you make decisions. And it goes up and up until it reaches the highest office that makes the ultimate decision how the structure looks like. So looking structurally how organisations adapt, it seems we do not do enough proportionate structuring where we always focus the lowest and then we focus more technical level. And then, you know, you can have a big skeleton of directors with less technicality because, you know, big people who make decisions always stay back.

It's one, I think, front that we have the challenge. The second thing is the issue of localizing and transferring some of these resources to more agile, smaller local organisations because if we are too big and our machinery is too expensive, are we able to transfer these resources or at least a capacity we have to more local organisations who can do the work? I think that's not also working well. In my assessment, because of the shrinking resources, there is less resources go to local organisations because we have to and bigger international organisations need to survive. For them to survive, they have to reduce the amount of money they transfer to local organisations.

And that increases the gap of the resources available directly to the communities and the local organisation. And as you rightly mentioned, Thomas, the dependence to aid has been there for so long. And now this is an unexpected shock because it did happen gradually. When USAID, for example, were closed, it was not only USAID. It was a major impact that quickly spread to all the donors across globally and specifically this region. And because of that, it became a shock that you have to close the office, you have to leave a community without proper transition. And that has created more risk of people who are facing more hunger, more humanitarian crisis.

But at least from where I am, we are trying to advocate maybe with the little resources we have, it's time to invest in preventive actions rather than responding because it will be too difficult to respond to all these groups. For example, how can we prevent the displacement and what kind of action can we do at our level? So I think that is the current situation. The gap is too big, but I don't see us solving with our current way of keeping the biggest coloton of organisations. And I think unless we transfer some of this responsibility to more a local organisation, which also needed definition, we will have the current challenge.

Feels like you're very much in the middle. First of all, the way you're describing it all is making me feel exhausted just listening to it. So my main question is how are you doing? How are you? But it feels like you're very much in the middle and getting kind of push pulled, especially in your unique position. So how are you dealing with that? And how are your peers dealing with that? I mean, it's a whole set of individuals and roles and how are you managing this transition?

Yeah, thank you, Kim. I think one of the questions I was asking was, you know, when you have a team of 10 people, for example, and because of the resources, you have only five. The next thing that will happen is you have to take the responsibility of the five people you removed, which means you have to double your capability and capacity. That's one. And that is in the scenario that you will be working with the same organisation, same programs, same specific sectors you are doing. But now, because of the less resources, you have so many questions and demands that, you know, the organisation's global office expects you mobilize more resources.

You know, in a time it's very difficult to mobilize resources, which means you have to get times two of your effort to look for resources, which, you know, not the easiest. And then secondly, for you to prove that you can do with the small money you have with more work and more impactful activity, it means also you have to increase your efforts on delivery in the field where, you know, $10 used to help, you know, one kilometer of driving, you need $10 to 50 kilometers, which means, you know, it's a very exhausting and stretching, you know, time for people like me or people who are leading the field operations.

And, you know, since you are the one who is the link between the field, the actual implementation and the global offices, you always have to observe all these, you know, shocks that come from the down and push from the up for you to solve all the problems. And it's very interesting when you have so many unhappy people, whether they are the top people or the lower people, because of what's happening in terms of resource management. So I think it's not easy. But one of the tools and always ways I try to manage is, and I had this discussion, one of my supervisors many

months ago was, you know, when you ask me do more on this, tell me also what I need to stop. Because if you always ask me to do more on this, but you never tell me to stop some of the things I was doing, then, you know, I'll be inheriting crisis. And ultimately, I'll be frustrated, exhausted. And maybe I will even do much product and, you know, it might be even I leave the organisation, which, you know, has brought another prospect of thoughts into the discussion, not only increase or change the things you do, but also because context situation have changed. Let's think about what we need to change.

Do we need to stop some of the reports? Do we need to stop some of the meetings that we do, which sometimes exhausts our engagement? Do we need more on creative thinking? And, you know, I want to say this. When you are overwhelmed, you lose the point of creativity. You will never think. You will focus only responding to crisis. And that is -

You're putting out fires and there's no oxygen to reflect.

Exactly. You will never reflect. And then you're responding to this problem. And that leads ultimately, the whole system collapsed. I will not be helpful. Those who are sitting in the global might not be helpful. So that's why I was saying whenever you are adapting something new, plan to stop some of the things you were doing previously.

I hear this all the time. I heard this when I was with SAVE and we were there together. I remember that conversation taking place. And there was a sort of general, you know, agreed that change was necessary. Everyone agreed that you can't do more with less. And so everyone was on board conceptually with the idea that you had to drop something until it came to their thing. Their thing didn't need to change. Everyone else's thing needed to change. And I've heard that continually all the way through the work I'm now doing with leadership teams and individuals. But one thing I've been hearing come out in addition to that is a kind of a moral and ethical challenge. It's people feeling like leadership based decisions from those that are more senior than them are coming without much explanation.

And the decision is feeling like it's an assault on personal value and that people are feeling deeply, deeply hurt and are going through a process of managing that that level of hurt, as well as needing to put out all the fires, which, as you said, both of those things compound each other and they result in a complete lack of creativity. And in fact, what they do end up doing is perpetuating patterned behaviour. People repeat what they've done in the past. And so I guess the question for you, the thought, I'd love to hear your views on is from a leadership point of view, and Kim will chuckle because we tend to always land on leadership as the challenge here.

But as a leader, and you're the country director at the moment, so you very much are that interface piece and hold that level of responsibility. As a leader, what are the main challenges you're facing and how are you embracing the leadership dynamics at the moment? Or do you find yourself searching for the safe ground of what's worked before and what you've done in the past?

Yeah, no, thank you very much. I think one of the interesting things is as an organisation, not only at my level as a country director, but, you know, go up to the executive director. Across all the organisations I've worked with, there was a very strong vision toward, you know, change what we need to do differently to adapt to a specific context, to be an agile organisation that moves with the dynamics that's happening around us.

And I think organisations do able quickly to adapt that strategy or that vision in terms of strategy, plans, and priorities within the organisation. But the biggest question comes back when you have great vision, plans, and priorities in terms of thoughts. But when you look at the organisational bureaucracy and operational guidelines and policies, it's not going along. You know, these two are two different lines. And you see a great initiative, but people sitting in operation or finance or human resource do not understand these shifts because it focus only the thoughts. You know, let's do the localisation. Let's transfer the capacity and the resource we have to the national organisation.

That's a commitment in our strategy. But how will that look like when it comes to our partnership department, when it department, it's not clear. And maybe because of the friction and that hindrance, you have the thoughts, but they never translate into an action. And I can give you, for example, the biggest concern of a finance director is how to get as much resource as you can for the organisation in order to be able to cover all the operation costs. While the other side, you know, the technical team are visioning, transferring more resource to local partners. So these two commitments are not going along. So I think one of the challenges that I do think are happening is creating convergence between the thought leaders within the organisation and the operational delivery team so that we are going to the same direction.

I think that is one thing. The second thing is, you know, incidents of errors, whether it's, you know, poor performance, corruption, misuse of resources,

other kind of safeguarded issues can happen certain place within the organisation, in one field office, in one country office. But the biggest challenge is what incident quickly translates to new rules and new bureaucracy without looking whether this is a widespread thing or it's an incident. And, you know, when I am punished for an incident that has taken place, for example, a very far country and an organisation puts as a rule, I think brings into a new challenge, especially at this time that you have less resources and you have less team and then you have more restrictions. I think it puts us into a more difficult situation to achieve more with less, as you, Thomas, put it.

And maybe the last point is, and I think, Thomas, this is something that I remember in our discussion you used to raise is, how do we embrace failure when it's genuine? You know, there's nowhere that, you know, as a team, we decided to do something that's not the best interest of the organisation or the donor money, but sometimes fails. And if you want to have zero failure and you cannot report back, and in case of one incident, it will have negative consequences. I think it will be very bad, especially at this time that you have to be creative and find a different way to manage the resource crisis, the limited capacity, the changing context.

I think we need to be creative and take some risks, but if smallest failure leads to negative consequences, I think it's very difficult. And I think that's the thing that needs to change at a higher level rather than at a filler level.

So, Ahmed, I was laughing because what you said at first, this is pretty much what my day-to-day is. This is my life, the intersection of these big ideas and strategic operations. And it's interesting that you raised that that is one of the big barriers to change and one of the big points of friction between, you know, meeting the mission, doing the work, getting the water to the people, doing the things that need to be happening and this back office function that helps make it work. So often we talk about, this is what needs to happen. We have these big commitments and we believe it. The intent is real.

Everyone believes it. And then how it translates, in order to actually make it happen, at some point it is going to hit into operations. And this is where I sit at the intersection of, you know, ideas and let's make this happen. And it used to be that we talk about operations. I now call it strategic operations because that is where that kind of that intersection is. If I am talking about locally led development or if I'm talking about shifting responsibility, what that actually means is what am I giving up control in a headquarters or at, you know, at these kind of more centralized spaces? Who's making the budgetary decisions?

Where does the budgetary sit, budget sit? What is the risk tolerance? Who gets to make those decisions? It is all of those different types of things. And it is interesting to hear you talk about how it is getting stuck because it makes sense in theory. But at the end of the day, it is the finance manager, it is the compliance officer who has to say, I understand it. I am absorbing it. This is part of my value system. I am living it and then I am willing to give up something. Because you don't get to accompany and be in solidarity with if you are not giving up something.

So that feels like the crux of a problem. And it is both systems and people, which Thomas, we always are like, is it systems or people? It is both. So what do we do about it? I am interested in both of you have to say, what do we do about it?

Ahmed, what do you think?

Yeah. So, yeah, I think this is the things that we need to change. Because if our operational strategy and operational priority not aligned with our, you know, technical plan and, you know, thoughts plan, I think what we need to do is a change that is supposed to come from the whole organisation rather than from one department of the organisation. So when it is a commitment of the organisation, it is not, you know, the programme team's commitment. It is not, you know, the business development thoughts. It is an organisational commitment. And I think this is the challenge when, you know, the sector become just, you know, an average industry where people come just for jobs rather than, you know, quickly understanding and adapting to what you're doing.

So what I think is number one, coming up a strategy that are responsive, both operations and strategic thoughts concurrently rather than only focusing on strategically what we need to change. Secondly, I think we need to change operational and bureaucratic approaches like the way we are changing our thinking because that is the part that also needs to be agile and adaptive like the way our thinking is adaptive. Because those who think always engage with external actors, external situations, unfortunately, operational people rarely engage with external actors. They only engage within our team. And that makes them also less understand what's external and what forces this change. So I think allowing them to get exposed to these situations, taking them out from the rooms and see what's happening outside the organisation will be very helpful rather than, you know, also presuming they are difficult people who don't understand because people are always shaped by the environment they are living. So maybe let them make exchange of responsibility in certain times.

But you also mentioned something important, Ahmed, which is that sometimes there are just going to be two values at odds with each other, right? So when there was enough money flowing into the system, oftentimes you could find alignment between the way an organisation needed to run and meeting the mission. But when resources become scarce, all of a sudden you're deciding, well, it's my value to meet my programmatic impact, to have the mission do the work, but it's also my value to take care of my people and have a self -sustaining organisation. And what do you do when those two values are not aligned or sometimes they're at odds?

Sometimes it's just calling out and having the conversation that we're going to have to make some trade-offs. But that takes courage and bravery to have that conversation and clarity. Thomas, I know you have something to say about that.

I do. I have quite a lot to say about this.

In my consulting work, I talk about organisational alignment, which is everything you've just described, Ahmed, in terms of the finance team's decision-making about how they fund the budget and the operations team's how they perpetuate and sustain programming and service delivery and leadership's decisions around strategy and is everything contributing to the outcomes? But at the same time, I also talk about the attunement of the organisation. And the attunement is where you have emotional connectivity, where you have trust, not just within your little team, you have trust across departments. And the description we made earlier around, oh, yeah, I recognise we've all got to change, we've got to stop doing things, but not my bit.

They're of attunement, a lack of trust, a lack of the ability to be able to realise that the organisation is not doing things out of some sort of conspiracy. It's not doing things out of some sort of cynicism to kind of perpetuate a corporate machinery, that there is a value base behind the decision-making and that it is hard and that they are tough decisions, as you said, Kim. Now, if you've got levels of attunement taking place, then you can hold the difficult conversations. That groundwork has been laid, that trust exists that you can then hold a difficult conversation. You are holding it from a place of understanding the implications and the potential perspectives that are going to come from it.

And then it becomes an easier conversation to have. It's still difficult and it's still hard and it will still hurt. But because you've got the attunement and that connectivity, that relational trust that exists in the organisation already, it's a lot more receptive to that level of conversation. And if you hold the conversation correctly, and it's a skill set, a leadership skill is holding difficult conversations. And I don't think that is necessarily a skill set that is widely available to people at a senior leadership level. We haven't had to do it for long years. The other thing I think that we need to realise is that there is no one-size -fits-all answer to this.

We don't have a template model. There's not a precedent out there. There's not a nice simple framework that people can reach for off the shelf and go, right, we were doing X, we're now going to start applying Y, and this is the mechanism by which you can't other the solution in that way, in the same way that you can't other the problem. And I think a constant narrative around it's the fault of the donor, it's the fault of this, it's the fault of that, that we've had to, you can't victimize yourself as an organisation and as a leadership team in terms of making the decisions that you've got.

You've got to start asking, well, it's my responsibility and it's our choice to react and respond the way that we do to this situation. We can't change the dynamics that have been out there. And I think if people do a lot of soul searching, they will start to realise the executive order stuff.

Donald Trump is not the cause of the problems that we've been having. All of the need for change that people are now living through existed before USAID was shut down by Musk and DOGE, right? We are not living through something that wasn't seen. We're just experiencing the trigger of it from an external factor. In a very acute... In a massively acute way, 100%. Yeah. And maybe in 10, 20 years time, the history books will reflect this as the necessary trigger and nudge that was required. Change wasn't being done proactively and deliberately. And so it needed an acute trigger to force it, right? Natural processes of evolution can start to be applied, maybe in the abstract and maybe in the long term to that.

And then the last point I would have, sorry, then you come in Ahmed. The last point I would say is leaders have to start having very, very humble, honest, self-reflective depth related questioning about themselves. Their own self-awareness needs to increase in terms of how am I responding to this? How are my actions versus my words complimenting each other or contradicting each other, right? And you've highlighted it Ahmed multiple times with the kind of reference to the different teams and the way that different responses take place. Many, many, many leaders know the language of change. They know the language that they're supposed to say. They understand the rhetoric that is supposed to come out.

Their actions don't back it up. There's no real conviction coming through with it. And that sends mixed signals. Teams pick up on that. And so it creates hesitancy. It creates a chilling effect. And ultimately it leads to this sort of sense of, well, I can't put myself out there. And back to what we were saying earlier, I can't be creative. I can't fail fast. I can't lean into this because there's uncertainty and ambiguity in the way that this organisation is working and the decisions that are being made. There's no real clarity in terms of the point for those conversations. So I think depth reflection by leaders and a lot of the time is benefited by having a conversation with another person, whether it's a spouse, whether it's a partner, whether it's a trusted colleague, whether it's a peer or whether it's a more formal coaching based relationship.

I don't know, but they're having a conversation with someone else certainly helps you to understand that depth reflection piece. Ahmed, you've wanted to come in, sorry.

Yeah, no, absolutely. No, I wanted to bring And thank you for shedding light to this, Thomas. I remember one of our forums, we were together. I remember you asked a question. What's going right? What's going wrong? What can we reorganize so that it works better? And I remember some of the colleagues saying, you know, everything is going right. You know, I don't have problems. Ask me a question. Do you think we have a problem? Do you think we're not performing well? And I remember you said, okay, then we don't need this meeting. If everything is going right, then why do we need to come together and, you know, discuss and find a solution?

And I think this is the notion that we need to change being defensive. You know, I'm not attacking the way you're doing things. I'm not saying you're doing a good, bad job or this is not efficient. There's a better way to do the way we're doing things. And that's why we need to brainstorm and come up, you know, a better solution that is adaptive to a changing context. And I think this is where leaders who work in organisation need to think differently. You know, build on a thought that says, we are doing okay, but always we have to get a way to drive change without drifting from our mission and our thoughts, sorry, our commitment as an organisation.

And this is where you, and I think Kim mentioned, when values clash. And I also asked this question one time, you know, leadership team meeting, you know, my boss, what's your vision for the office? What do you want to achieve ultimately? Tell me like the two big things you want to achieve. And the answer was, for example, one, mobilize resources. And then I say, so what is that, you know, something we wanted to achieve by the end of the mission. And then you feel that is maybe the vision of the mission development team. Let them think about that so that they focus on mobilizing resource.

But, you know, as sitting here, our responsibility is to ensure how do we, why do we need the resource? Actually, first, you need to answer why do we need resources? And what are we going to do in case we have resources? If we have enough resources, if we have less resources, and you need to plan all the scenarios. And it will be if our own mind is focused on how many offices do we have? How many resources do we have? How many projects do we implement? If that is what's exhausting our mind, I think we are not going far. We are aiming a very low target.

And in my thinking, you know, if you are a director, if you're a leader, what you need to think about is what change do I need to drive in the next two, three, five, four years? I don't know how many years I will be here. If it's one year or if it's 10 years, what are the changes that I want to bring in? And I wanted to tell you, for example, when I moved from a big organisation to a much smaller organisation, of course, flexibility is less, but also management, you know, and engagement directly with the highest people in the organisation is also much easier than, you know, big organisations.

And when I came, the biggest question that people will ask, you know, we have resource classes, we have less fun in the organisation, we have less visibility for the organisation in areas we work. But I decided, okay, I don't think so I can change that. That's a problem existing. What I can do is let me pick one problem that if we contribute will bring a change to the life of those people we want to serve. And that's why in the first eight months I joined the organisation, we did able to adapt, for example, we work on civilian protection, the national civilian protection policy adapted by the Somali government, which became the first policy adapted by an African country.

I said, okay, that will be something I can say I have achieved. Alternatively, if I could have put a lot of effort meeting all the donors working in the country, and you know, maybe I bring a few more million of money, and then still have the money, I wouldn't felt, you know, the level of comfort and feeling compared to that. So I think we need to think beyond the box of these things that we always work as leaders in the organisation, and focus the change, focus on the solutions, rather than always listing so many problems and looking for money.

What's coming up for me across all of this is this word attunement. And you mentioned this last time, Thomas, with your story about like holding the, holding the pole and going down in our last episode, about this idea of in order to all work together collectively, there needs to be attunement across people. And that is not a technical skill. Well, maybe it's both in how you do it, but it really is something that involves trust and involves communication and involves all of these things. I think when you were explaining that story, you were also saying that it's also about talking about the positive. It's not about saying what you don't want to do.

It's about talking about what you do want to do, which is what I'm hearing from both of you as well. And I mean, you said it yourself with, you know, bringing the officer into closer to where the work is being done so they can understand, is getting them to be attuned to the broader vision and the broader mission of an organisation. But what I'm also hearing about is, is trust and the role of leaders in trust. When someone comes into a conversation and you're automatically defensive, there's elements of power and there's elements of trust. And I've been thinking about, you know, I came across the definition in one of conference sessions I was in recently where trust is about sincerity, reliability, care, competence, and safety.

So think about all of those things that a leader needs to do. You need to be reliable. You need to be consistent. You need to be sincere and care. And then you need to be competent. That's a lot of things to be demonstrating all at once, not just through your words, but through your actions. Now what I'm hearing from you, Ahmed, is that your role in the middle is about making sure, is about kind of facilitating this attunement, whether you wanted that job or not. Because you're like this middle linchpin between how am I going to help the people we set out to help and business development.

And all I can think about as you're talking about, it's a lot of emotional labor to do that code switching. And that's not in your job description. And you probably never got training on how to do the emotional labor of code switching to do the attunement. And there's so many people out there doing that. And it's a lot to ask. It's a lot to ask in the best of times when we are going through a sector wide transformation where the old way is dying and the new ways is being built and bridged. How are you and your peers managing, is there an acknowledgement of that?

Or how are you processing all of this? This is a space for us to process out loud. How are you processing this role that you're playing, whether you want to or not?

Yeah. No, thank you very much, Kim, for bringing the important issue of trust in such situation.

I actually learned that trust is expensive. If you have a little doubts, no matter how hard you work, it will always look ugly. You will not get the vibes of understanding and support and encouragement if the trust does not exist. And I think one of the things I have learned across my experience is build a relationship of trust with the people. It starts with your people because when they trust you, that's the time they will be performing better. They will get motivated. When they feel they have been trusted, they feel the confidence that you talked about. So I always use this word, psychological safety. It's not necessarily that I'm directly threatening, but people need that reassurance.

Okay, listen, what's your problem? I don't agree the way things are happening. Maybe I do not agree the decision you made last time. It was not helpful. Maybe it was much easier. Then give reassurance. Okay, I was wrong. I apologize. Maybe you are the expert who knows better than me on this issue. So I always say creating that psychological safety for the team is very important for the performance of the organisation in general. And this applies across all the layers of the structure from the country director to the executive director. If I do not have that trust and reassurance and support, it will be very difficult to work and perform well.

That's why I was saying one of the fatigues that we have is the justification fatigue. You have small things and you will be asked 10 times to explain the same thing again and then you finally say, okay, next time I will not bring anything new because it's so exhausting to bring one small thing. And it takes all my time and energy. And I remember it's actually one of my experience. I say one time, listen, I'll bring something only when it's necessary because it's not luxury anymore. It cost me so much energy and time to bring one solution. And in that case, I have to only be selective and I know it's responsive to the cost.

So yeah, absolutely, Kim. I think it's a challenge. And I think building the trust is the corner, I think, rock for any successful mission or any organisation.

So we've landed on trust and trust architecture being built within institutions as something that maybe others and those listening can take away and start having some internal narrative around. Ahmed, as we come to the end here, thank you for being so honest and being so candid. But what are your reflections on this conversation?

Yeah, thank you very much, Thomas. I think this is a very helpful and provocative discussion. You can sometimes get emotional. I apologize because when it really touches what you do on the ground, you can sometimes cross a line and it might not be the easiest thing to say. But I think these are very helpful. And I think it's an important time to have these discussions because we are going through a difficult time in terms of change. But with all these parties, if people could get a place that they can come together and breathe and share the thoughts, even if it's not working within the institution they work, I think would be very helpful.

And I think the more people we engage and give platforms, the better. So thank you very much. I think this is a very encouraging and very motivating and thought-provoking platform. And I'm looking forward to listen and keep following the stories you put here.

Excellent. Thanks, Ahmed. Kim, what are you thinking? What are your reflections on this?

My big words that I'm taking away are attunement, justification fatigue. I think I wrote that down. I think that's something that I'm going to be thinking about quite a bit. And the opposite of justification fatigue, what you're saying, Ahmed, is creativity and curiosity. And there's some sort of trade-off there that I think we need to kind of maybe unpack a little bit more because we won't be able to get where we need to get to if we're all so tired and burnt out by the grind of the system and we can't be curious and creative because that's what we need folks to be putting their energy into. What about you, Thomas?

Another one of our favourite words, discernment. I think to get to that realisation. And I would challenge trade-off as a framework because that becomes zero-sum when you say it's not that, it's that. So I think it's more a case of if we've got a current way of doing and a way from because that justification fatigue is noise now and we've got to start thinking creatively and curiously, I think we need to make that jump to go from one mindset to the other requires discernment. And within that discernment is everything we've just spoken about in terms of understanding where the trust sits within the organisation, trying to build trust where it doesn't sit there and understanding your own responsibility and not othering the challenge and the dynamics too much.

Don't be a victim in all this. That's where I'm at, I think. Cool. In which case, let's call it. Thank you so much, Ahmed. Absolutely wonderful. Thank you, Kim.

Thank you very much. Thank you. Bye. Cheers. Bye-bye.

Cool. All right, Kim, we just had a chat with Ahmed. What did you think?

I thought it was, it's both fascinating how there are the same through lines of, I think, themes and topics that we have been talking about for the last year, but also different, in a different context, a different voice, a different perspective.

Yeah, absolutely. He was quite careful to stay away from any specific examples that could give organisational details away or be in that space, which is fair. He doesn't want to jeopardise or compromise his own space at all. But what he was speaking to, as he said, incredibly familiar. And I love the way you framed it back to him, as he's in that middle spot. He's feeling the tension and he's being challenged with that role of...

I don't know if it was his body language or the words, but I was feeling it in my body of like, oh gosh, this is... And it did make me reflect that, I think I mentioned the emotional labour bit of it. How many times have I been in a room where the person who happens to sit in that, either it's the role or the graphical location, is the one that's like, but to what end? But to what end? What about the people? What about the people? And it's like, I both understand it and it is exhausting and it would be nice for them not to have to hold that role.

Absolutely. I completely agree. And it makes me think of a dynamic that I kept hearing and coming up against when I worked the region, which was that in-between role. And I keep hearing it now again, which is, we don't want to bother them. We don't want to bother people. We don't want to... Because they're overworked. They've already got too much. There's already too many demands going on them. And so we don't want to bother them. Now, what I also hear with that, I get the sentiment behind it. And it's certainly in response to lots of requests from Ahmed's level, a country director and country SLT level around, we're overworked.

There's too many demands. You're asking too much of us. There's too much, et cetera, et cetera. But then what it defaults to is just the BAU. It's the KPI performance. And you brought up the example of the pole that I was talking about. Now, a big takeaway from that exercise is your task is to lower the pole, yet all the noise is about raising the pole. And this is the equivalent in reality. All of the noise, all of the communication to Ahmed and to the teams is the noise around lifting the pole up. It's the noise around sustaining BAU. It's the noise around meeting your budget.

Don't overspend. Don't have a structure that's too expensive. Hit your log frame indicators. Make sure the outputs are measured. Spend on time, on budget, all the rest of it. And yet they're excluded from all of the conversations that are potentially in that creative space because - That's generative. That's generative. Exactly. Because we don't want to bother them. They're overworked. There's too much to going at them already.

What if you put down the noise and streamline the reporting and streamlined all of that and or made it less exhausting to bring up things because that takes up a lot of brain that whole, you know, the justification fatigue, all of this. If all of that was put down, would there be more space for creativity and to meaningfully join in on these really important conversations where it's necessary?

Exactly. I remember distinctly sitting in a workshop. We were in a horrible space. It was about five stories underground in this hotel basement and the fire alarm kept going off and we're like, we don't know if there's a test. We ain't risking it because we don't get trapped down here. There you go. Those who are in the room with me will know exactly what we're talking, which event it was. I remember in that room challenging institutionally this demand for data, this demand for the BAU stuff. The mindset behind it is around control through a compliance mechanism and it's about global aggregation. It's about being able to have at our fingertips all the information we need at that senior global level to be able to make comparable based decisions because it's a zero sum mindset that we're in.

I was like, can we flip the mindset? Can we flip it so that all the data requirements are being put forward off a country office management based decision processes and we're collecting the data to do a lot of the backend analytics and cleaning to then be able to present it back so that the country level SLT have the data they need to be able to make the agile, acute, creative, curious based decisions they have. The need for global aggregation and the need for the rest of it behind the scenes, that becomes a secondary priority. It's not dismissed because there's value to it, right? Globally connected or the rest of it, but the mindset isn't that way around and as a result you constantly end up in this process which is extractive.

It would also promote cross-learning loops horizontally that don't go vertically. Horizontally, country office to country office to really develop those relationships. I know there is a lot of work happening right now around that. There is something about how do we tune out the noise that is unnecessary or causes fatigue and how do we amp up the spaces and so much of that I think is now at the risk of bringing in AI because that always comes in too, is how do you use the technology we may not have had five, ten years ago to help reduce the noise so that we could spend more of our time in abundant generative creative pursuits?

It's fascinating to say that for the first time earlier this week I had a pitch that I'd put forward, a proposal I'd put to a potential client and they were like strip that bit out because we're happy for AI to do it. Now thankfully it wasn't at the expense of my time and so we can spend more on this. Let's focus the time, focus the effort on the face-to-face dialogue and engagement which I thought was quite an interesting use of it. There's one bit that I didn't get around asking Ahmed that I was particularly keen on and that I'm mulling over and pondering which is we've spent a lot of time on this pod talking about humanity as a value not as an institution and a business and all the conversations that we've been having with others like CHL and etc are very interested in that kind of space beyond the multilateral industry and stuff and we didn't really get to that with Ahmed.

I tried to tease it out a little bit but there wasn't much coming through and the question I'd like to ask him as a Somali, the role of leadership at a societal level, the oratory nature of the culture, how in five, ten, twenty years time, where do these acts of humanity start to come from from his point of view as a Somali in East Africa because as I've said in a previous pod, I can't help but wonder whether it's the culmination of small rather than the rollout of big and he narrated a very beautiful picture of what the rollout of big looks like right with his early 2000s based narration of free aid and the wealth that was there.

That's gone. So where will these acts of humanity come from and what role will leadership at a societal level play in being able to help galvanize that? That would have been a fascinating question if we really got around to it. Maybe we'll have to have him back. All right

Ahmed if you're listening let us know whether we press record or not we can talk about it.

Exactly get back in touch with us because that would be fascinating or maybe it's something that we ask someone in the future for another one.

Yeah I love it.

Cool. Anything else come out for you?

No just this is the first time we didn't have Ali.

Yeah yeah he was missed yeah Ali would have brought wonderful storytelling examples that would have backed up a lot of this wouldn't he?

Yep so we'll be interested to hear your his thoughts as well.

Yeah well we can start the next one on it.

Yeah I love that.

Yeah cool let's do that. Excellent. Cheers Kim always a pleasure.

See you later.

Take care. Bye.