The Trumanitarian on Bringing Agency and Non-Hierarchy to Orgs

What's working on Purpose anyway? Each week we ponder the answer to this question. People ache for meaning and purpose at work, to contribute their talents passionately and know their lives really matter. They crave being part of an organization that inspires them and helps them grow into realizing their highest potential. Business can be such a force for good in the world, elevating humanity. In our program, we provide guidance and inspiration to help usher in this world we all want Working on Purpose now. Here is your host, doctor Elise Cortez. Hi there, welcome back to Working on Purpose program. Thanks for turning in again this week. I'm your host, doctor Elis Cortez, joining you live from Dallas, which is home based for me. If you don't know me yet, I'm a management consultant specializing and meaning and purpose, organizational logo therapist, inspirational speaker, social scientist, and author. You can learn more about me and how we can work together at Elis Cortez dot com or Gusto Dashnow dot com. Let me let me thank my partner and sponsor Work Proud. We are a perfect collaboration. Everybody wants to know they matter and that the work they do is meaningful and appreciated. Work Proud is a mobile platform built to encourage employees to share stories and recognize each other's contribution. Work Proud empowers hr and business leaders to help create company cultures where all employees are inspired to feel proud of their work and proud of their company. Learn more at work proud dot com. With us today is Lars Peter Nissen, who has worked in the humanitarian sector for more than twenty years and lived and work for extended periods of time in Latin America, Africa and South Asia. He is the director of eight Caps, and organization he co founded in two thousand and nine, and also serves as the interim director for H two AH Networks. He teaches disaster management at the University of Copenhagen and hosts the weekly podcast True Meditarian. We're talking about his dedicated work to the humanitarian sector and his particular approach in doing so. He joins today from Denmark. Normally he's in Geneva, Switzerland, but there it's midnight for him and five pm for me in Dallas. Lars Peter, welcome to working on purpose and staying up for us. Thank you very much. It's so great to have you. In fact, viewers who are watching this can look right behind him and see the clock and now that we are not kidding about that there it is just a smidge after midnight and you still look marvelous. Thank you. I didn't look this called at five o'clock in the afternoon, but absolutely. And let me first thank our mutual friend who brought you to me, Paul Skinner, who wrote the book Collaborative Advantage. She is the one that brought me to you. So thank you Paul for uniting us. It's great minds here. So, Lars, Peter, you are up to a lot, my dear. Here you are if you're at eight CAPS and each to each network. So I want to help first our viewers and listeners to understand what each of those organizations do. So what is eight CAPT and what's your role there? Yeah, So ACAPS in a sense helps shape the humanitarian narrative when we see when we see disasters across the world, we don't think of them as stories, but actually they are the way we think about crisis. It's a story we tell ourselves and some of the choices we make in terms of two we desire to focus on Botswana or Ukraine or Bangladesh really determines how we then respond to those crisis. So what we do is essentially try to give as much evidence as we can on how big and how bad a crisis across the world in order of a decision make us to make the right choices. So we have scarce resources, we don't have enough money to help everybody. Where do you actually spend your money? That's the decisions we're trying to inform M. I really appreciate you how you brought us right into stories. The narrative is story. You're so right, that's so interesting. I don't know that I really considered it from the Nagle before, so I love it already. But then what about H two eighth network? What do they do sixty some agencies? I believe so if you look at my career, for example, the first twenty years was basically a traditional sort of humanitarian career with the International Committee of the Red Cross, with different endows with the UN. But then some years ago I started working with a CAPS which is fundamentally different from those organizations because we don't we don't hand out blankets, We provide data, we enable response, We are in a sense B to B, so we're not. You know, so H to EH is essentially B to B for the humanitarian sex. That means humanitarians are humanitarian. And it's a group of some sixty organizations who, in different ways, either by providing standards, training, analysis, data on how to use new tech, all sorts of things enabled better humanitarian responses. Let's make sure we get more of a more bang for the buck if you want beautiful, okay, so then let's sketch back. So here you are today, you're working within these two organizations. I want to take us back to when this all maybe started to begin or it began to brew. And you said somewhere, I think it was on one of your one of the podcasts that I listened to, but you said that your long and early career working in this and with human concerns actually began with your first mission at age nineteen, when you went to El Savador to understand faith and conflict. Let us in what happened, How did you get the experience? Why'd you go? What was going on? To some personal context? I got in touch with a very socially conscious church in El Salvo, and I wanted to to understand what the church was in a Denmark it's a very quiet place, and the church's place a very quiet role. If you we have a very elaborate welfare state that takes care of a lot of things. So the church basically preached the gospel. But if you go to a country like El Salboro doing a civil war like the one we had back then, then the church is challenged in different ways. I wanted to understand what that was like, what faith was in a civil war basically, or in in a much more active role for the church, a much more challenged context. And I have to pull that back further Lars Peter, and that I wonder to what extent I know your father studied theology, It did that at all inform your choice to look at faith? Absolutely absolutely, it's not out that I got that from from home and and seeing seeing my dad who's very who's very active sort of internationally also in the church work. What's an inspiration for me to also get involved and understand what my role should be. I really admire that, Lars Peter, and I'm just if we just pause for just a second and we let our listeners and our viewers let this sink in and get that you were nineteen years old and you have a pretty informed, guided choice here in terms of how you wanted to reach into the world. That seems pretty astounding to me. I will just speaking to a fifty some year old man by now who'll probably rationalizes his life. I mean, it didn't feel like a choice. I just had a strong urge to figure this out and place myself in the situations to see what would happen. And it seemed right. But I don't think I had a grand plan. But I had I had, I had a lot of had itchy feat I think it's fantasy. Okay, all right, now that's even more interesting to me then. So I a couple of weeks ago, I had Ken Banks on the show. I don't know if you've had a chance to talk to Ken Banks. Amazing human being he is. He's done all kinds of things to empower non governmental agencies across the world through technology as well. But he talks about about twenty years of what I call wildlife scratching. In his case, he was reaching for a purpose. So what I hear you saying, which I really want to call out if it's if I'm getting this right is that there was this internal what I call an internal divining rod, right that was pulling you to something and you had the good sense to listen to it. Yeah, yeah, I think that's probably right. And then I think once I got involved that really spoke to me. I think it never seemed like a choice, It never It was just something that I really liked doing that I seemed to be quite good at, and that made a tremendous amount of sense to me. Well, I think a lot of listeners who listen in regularly to the show would like to be able to find that internal like you got that internal guide that you've got and are grasping for it so that you've that you had it it Rettribute nineteen is just I don't want to overplay it, but it's just it's really remarkable to me. Yeah, I don't know that that's how it was, that that's that's how it was, and but I think it's what always has been important for me is that that when you when you when when you're in this space of trying to be driven by something, a purpose whatever. I mean for me, the three ms always I always thought of myself as a healthy mix between a missionary and mercenary and a misfit in a sense that in the sense that I really do believe in what I'm doing and I am driven by that, and that's that's obviously the missionary right, But the mercenary part is I really enjoy it. I get a tremendous amount out of it. I'm enumerated in so many ways for working and I feel so privileged to be able to do this. And then thirdly, I probably have two easy feet to work in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and then many sort of hierarchy or whatever waver I might end up I couldn't. Yeah, I'd be fired with in two weeks. And so I think for me, recognizing those three sides of it, what I believe in, what I get out of it, and my need to press the self destruct button so a certain extent is probably what drives it. Okay, Well, that gives me to my next question. And by the way, I already love this yummy conversation. Thank you for letting us come right into your cave, if you will. So one of the things that you sent to me either I think it was on our pliminary phone conversation, but you told me that you discovered early in your working life that you were quite good at working in messes. Quite another great thing to discover early in your life. And so first I want to understand how did you discover that particular talent, and then of course I need to know how to use it. Yeah. Well, I mean I went to a salvo or to sort of work with a church and volunteer, and I ended up in the middle of a war zone, a very active one, And so that was a profound loss of control, you know. And I think I think experiencing that profound loss of control at a very early age and a very formative part of my life, I think shapeshow and and certainly there are a lot of things you don't take for granted. And if you then draw that experience to what I'm doing today, what basically what I do today is trying to figure out, if you take, for example, the pandemic we're experiencing right now, where should we focus What's most important? Is it Peru? Is it the Rohinga and Bangladesh? Is it the states in the US with low vaccination rates? Is the Botswana? Is It'simbabwe? The countries with high HIV prevalence, where should we look and so that sort of level of ambiguity that we're dealing with because of this pandemic. For me, there's a very, very there's a straight line from from that very lost nineteen year old in sal and then building on that experience to figure out how to deal with such a level of ambiguity as we see today. M hmmm mm hmm. Yes. And what I've been what I've been becoming present to about you as I studied you and listened to your True Meditarian podcast. A couple of visions to that is that you are you like a big playing field, right, You're very comfortable and vastness, I guess yeah, m hmm, yeah, that's an interesting way of looking at I think that's right. Well, what do you mean by that? Actually, maybe I could ask, well, the world is a big place. Let's start with that. You've been galivanting across the world and living and immersing yourself in these various cultures across the world. And you the way it seems to me, the way that your mind works is that you know you here, you are, You're You're trying to apply a systematic approach to understand data and how which informed decisions, which inform actions, And that's just there's that's very chewing. Now, I do know you studied political science in the nineteen nineties, and I want to hear about that. So I think your mind already gravitates towards complexity, right, and nuance. But this is definitely this. I would definitely say the work that you do is messy. Yes, yes, I think that that's right. I think extreme levels of ambiguity black Swan's messiness. However you want to deal with the complexity, I think it's a good way of describing it. That's what I do. Okay. So then now that we sort of service this idea, I know you study political science. How has that study informed your approach to humanitarian work or even maybe your interest in pursuing humanitarian work? So I think I think the I think it's around the way. At least I was taught in political science was it was okay to have an opinion once you entered this study, and it was okay to have an opinion once you left. But if it wasn't shaken up while you were studying, then you were doing something wrong. So we were really forced to argue all cases and take all sides and really look at the data and argue the case. And I think, really what you need if you work in message, it's two things. You need some fairly clear guiding principles and then you need to really look at data and see how that applies and combined the two. Right, So, if if you're a humanitarian, you would want to know who are the most vulnerable, where do I focus, where do I put my scares resources? And you want that to be data driven, not by whatever. So I can give you an example when when the pandemic first struck, I spent four years in Zimbabwe. It's a country I love a lot and I care a lot about and that's very vulnerable and it has a very high prevalence of HIV. And so the first thought that entered my mind was, oh, my god, what's going to happen in Zimbabwe? You know, we it's such a vulnerable country. We have a whole bunch of people who are it's a really positive it's going to be a disaster. And for a while it was like, apparently not, but then certainly now it comes right now it seems that there's a much higher level of infection than people are really beginning to die. And so for me, that's a good example of how my preconceived idea and knowledge of Zimbabwe and love Zimbabwe drove me to think and focus on that. But really it was a couple of contients in Latin America that got that was hard hit in the beginning. Then it changed later, right, And so if you want to maneuver in missus, you on once, I'd have to have some principles. For example, look at the most vulnerable, make sure you focus on them. And then secondly, you really have to have a very strong mythological and data driven approach, which I think I got from my studies. Beautiful and great. When you take us into our very first break, I'm your host, Doctor Release Cortez. We were on there with Laurence Peter Nissan, who's the director of ACAPS, an organization he co founded in two thousand and nine that is directed to see the crisis change the outcome. We've been talking a bit about how we got into the space and how he navigates it. After the break, we're going to hear more about ECPs and what it does stay with us. We'll be right back. Doctor Release Cortez is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose and inspirational speaker and author. She helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite a lease to speak to your organization, please visit her at Elise Cortez dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is working on Purpose with doctor Elise Cortez. To reach our program today or open a conversation with Elise, send an email to Elise ali Se at Elise Cortez dot com. Now back to working on purpose. Thanks for staying with us and welcome back to working on purpose. As I walk to the pandemic continue on. We look for ways to help companies support the employees handle their anxiety, stress, depression and feeling disconnected while also helping to lift and inspire them with ongoing professional development. So we now offer a well being webinar learning series called Grab Your Gust Out Vital Wellbeing from the inside out. You can learn more about it at a last Cortest dot com or shoot me an email to at least at least cortest dot com if you're just joining the program. My guest today is Lars Peter and easan director of a CAPS, an organization he co founded in two thousand and nine. He also serves as the interim director of H two H Network, which comprised sixty highly innovative humanitarian agencies creating an enabling environment for humanitarian action through service delivery. He judged today from Denmark or he's on vacation. Normally he's in Geneva, Switzerland. I'm your host at last Cortesse. Okay, so I do want to get into and you speak it so interesting, how humble you are about this, Lars Peter. You talk about working with ACAPS, but yet you co founded it. You don't just work with it. You created this beautiful thing. And I understand it's to help humanitarians with assessments and see the crisis. So where did this organization come from? And really, what are you up to today? Help us really get behind or under the hood, if you will. So it's it's it's been quite a journey for me actually to work with DAYCAPS. I spent the first part of my career being actively involved in response in conscious like Afghanistan, North Korea, Zimbabwe, wherever, and then suddenly here I am starting this organization that's supposed to to help people like me make better decisions. And really what I came to discover was that probably I wasn't as good at what I was doing as I thought it was. And very often, once we have worked under extreme conditions in in the human same sex, we don't often know what the problem is. It changes very frequently and you have to do something really quickly. It's it's a very very difficult decision making situation to be in, and so working on figuring out how to quickly appreciate what's happening and provide a good evidence base for decision making really made me, I think, question my previous work. In some ways. I don't think I did well enough. I don't think we as as an industry, if you want, did well enough. And so what I strive to do today, or what the ACAP strives to do today, is to help provide a second opinion if you want, and operationally independent point of view, to make sure that we we make the right decisions once we try to help people who are falling through the cranks. M At first, I want to acknowledge what you've said about where was it maybe doing a good job, right. It's amazing when we go through our careers and we accumulate more experience and knowledge, we can see things differently. We have a different lens, and so we can maybe see those areas that maybe we miss the mark on because we have different eyes, more informed eyes. Yeah. I mean, I think if you have figured out the world at the age of twenty three, it's going to be a pretty boring world. It's in that right, give it up, right, exactly right. And so I love the idea that once we were the older we get, the more we realize we just don't know. Yeah, or you you you you. I think if you are thinking human being, you challenge yourself more and more and and I think hopefully you gained some insight, but you also gained some humility. I think I would hope, yes, yes, I would hope so too. Yes. Okay, So at this point I want to dive deeper into this whole COVID thing. You started to talk about it before, but then I heard your interview with your on your podcast Truemanitarian, great name for a podcast by the name Truemanitarian. You're wrong with Sarah Spencer and on the episode called arms Race for Data, and you said in that episode that you think the secondary effects of COVID will make the first ones look minor, and you're worried we won't manage to adapt to the fallow up with business. What do you see? What are those I see? Yeah? So so first, I mean, just to be clear, the primary effects obviously is the people who get infected and who will become sick or even die from from the pandemic. The secondary effects around lots of livelihood protection issues, all these other derived effects we see, and I think we only at the beginning of the We're seeing the tip of the iceberg. If you want, in terms of the secondary effects, you can just take three recent news stories. If you look at what's happening in Brazil, in South Africa and then Thailand. You know, you have demonstrations in all of those countries. You have the leaders of these countries being challenged because of the way they've handled the pandemic. You've had the worst violence in South Africa since a patide. You know, it's these sure just examples. You could probably pick out fifteen to any thirty countries that are being severely destabilized because of this. If you then go to the refugee camps, or if you look at motorcycle taxists in Kampala, Uganda, who makes his money during the day and then he spends it on food at night, and he's then locked down for three weeks, and you see the impact that this crisis is having. And then you have the rest of us thinking about whether we should get a vaccine or not, and trying to get a pet for our kids because they're both sitting at home. I mean, it is a highly discriminated This pandemic discriminates, and it is reshaping humanitarian outcomes across the world. And I think you are going to see is cascading effects over the coming years. I think we only see in the beginning. Now we are very resilly. We you and I are lucky. We live in very resilient societies with a lot of resources to bail out companies, to send checks to individuals. That's not the case in Nigga, right, and so I think you will see it's very corrosive and I don't think we can predict. Actually, the thing I try to do these days is to just not make up my mind, but to really just acknowledge how much we don't know and what levels of ambiguity we're dealing with, and then to keep my eyes wide open. I don't know if that made sense. That was a bit rambling, but you know, I read the statistic about mascara and oh I makeup and lipstick issues, right, yeah, I think I heard you talking about it. Yes, go ahead, So lipstick drops because we're all wearing masks, and the eyes you put makeup on because you need to look good on soon. Now, that's one small example that I had never thought about before I heard it, And I think that are fifty examples like that of much more magnitude that we haven't thought about, of changed behavior that's gonna create effects that will hurt the most vulnerable people we have in this world. So I think COVID nineteen is reshaping humanity and outcomes as we speak, and I don't think we've understood get how that is. M Okay, So then let's go back to your core, which of course is is data. So you also talk about the challenge of how to factor in the voice of the local community to help humanitaring responses and so how can technology and its help there? Yeah, so I think I think we all into human term states. I have this dream of having an humanitarian Airbnb that fixes the shelter needs of people on the move, that we can find a way of somehow leveraging the fantastic power of technology. And actually this is you you mentioned Paul skin Or earlier. This is one of Paul's ideas. He talks about United Beyond Nations turning every person into a humanitarian and finding a way of creating a platform where we can collaborate, so you, in a sense create a marketplace where some people want to to give and other people have needs. And then that's that's a great idea. Yeah, it's fantastic and we are hunting for that, but we haven't cracked it yet. We haven't. We haven't found a way of really doing that. And I think, I think, I think it will happen at states. But the problem we have is again back to messages, right, that the situations we work in are just very messy, and when societists fall apart, it can be really hard to then get these solutions to work. Hmm. I think one of the things that you and Sarah Spencer were talking about if if memory serves me with regard to using technology, especially to incorporate the local community with something along voice recognition, do I have that right? Is that part of what you were talking about? So Sarah and I spoke a lot about some of the dangers that are around the AI and and how I mean we are humanitarians are very paranoid people. We think a lot about how how things can go wrong because we work in situations where they do go wrong and where the most vulnerable people are I hit the hardest. And so if you have a population that, for example, has fled their country, and you apply AI or machine learning and you're able to identify individuals, for example to a voice recognition or other things, so you do, say any sort of biometric identucation at the individual level. If that data is handled handed over, for example, to the state that these people have fled from, that's an incredibly powerful tool in some real bad actors. Hence, and so it's a double its sort, right. We can all see the potential, We can see how fantastic effective it is and how we could scale responses in ways we've never been able to and at the same time, we are also really scared of the concentration of power and the level of control that this gives to people who may not have the best intentions. I like that you're having that you're afraid of that. I appreciate that that fear. I think that's extremely healthy. And I certainly would want somebody who's looking through data and trying to help to have that kind of a len so I versus being, you know, willy nilly about the whole thing. So I certainly appreciate that. And having lived in Spain and Brazil myself and gone through all over South America and seeing a lot of these different populations that are really really very vulnerable, very exposed, I really appreciate that. So and and to that end, I think there's something else on the other side of that that I want to cover next that I think is really important and perhaps and probably connected. And that is what I have discerned is a very strong value for you around non hierarchy. Yeah, and so first I want to know you know why that is, and I want to talk a little bit more about that. So where where it seems like it almost like it gives you like to use my word before the Willies. That word alone just seems to bother you. Hierarchy. Yeah, yeah, I think no. I'm I'm obviously probably quite an anti authoritarian in many ways, and I think I have a very deep rooted skepticism thwarts the exercise of power. I think it has to be done an ethical way. And probably this thing that scaves me the most is for myself to abuse power. And so when I became a manager and began to move off to the hierarchy, then the thing I asked myself was, how how do you avoid this having power changing you? How do you avoid that you become a different person, and and how do you do the right thing with this power you've been given? And for me, a lot of that answer is around seeing your success through the agency of others, in the in the sense that you're there to enable others to be base they can be in the position day rather than you pushing through your small ideas. M So when I was when I was living in Brazil, I was doing my master's degree at the time, and so I studied the I was very interested in the environment and what was happening there. So I studied the social, economic, and political contributions of the deforesting of the Amazon and talk about power, right, So I really understand what you mean. It's it's really something to behold. And there's a couple of other things I want to talk with you about that when we get a little further into the conversation. But further though, let's just while we're on this notion of non hierarchy. One of the things that you said that it need be great for our listeners to hear about is I know that Frederick Lulu was a great influence for you and that you appreciate his thinking around organization. So why him, Why why his thoughts? Yeah, I when I he has written a great book called Reinventing Organizations that has been I found that really inspiring. What I liked about it is that he portrays a vision of a company that is it's not that it's non hebracical, but it's like the Heroci is very right. So it's whoever is best suited to solve a certain problem solves it. It's not it's not always it doesn't always end up on the same desk. And the type of organization describes its very evolving and sensing its environment, sort of changing with the environment. And not only do I think that that's that's a great way of working because it gives great agency and freedom to individuals to bring all of themselves into work. It also is probably more effective than sort of a more new public management approach to things, I think, And so it really speaks to me. It's also very difficult to implement, but it really speaks to me to create an organization where were for example, the first value of a CAPS we have we have own values. Our first value is we choose to create a CAPS as an enabling platform. No, we we trust each other to create an enabling platform for excellence and professional growth. Right. So it's a platform where we trust each other. We want to excel and we want to grow professionally. Right That, that for me is the key that that if we can create a work environment like that, then I think we get the best out of people. And for an organization as a capshere eighty percent of our cost starchess salaries. If people are not happy, they're not getting your money worth right. Well, now, bringing that over, it's not this idea of hierarchy into into humanitanean if it's one of the things that you and Sarah Spencer talked about in the Race for Arms episode, is how humanitarian efforts are run and funded through a hierarchical way. Help us understand what that means. The fundamental problem we have is that, And I should say when I use this whole market language, I don't think that you can reduce the humanitarian effort to a market issue. It people have rights, and I think that changes things. But if you think of it, who is the customer actually in a humanitarian crisis? Is it the person affected by the earthquake or they don't know who signs the check? Right, So there's a disconnect between what we could call the upward accountability towards the persons who fund the taxpayers ultimately in primarily in the Western world, who foots the bill, and the people who receive the assistance. And a lot of it is around are we really responsive enough to the wants and needs of the people effected by crisis or are we driven by other agendas that that's that's what it boils out. Okay, that makes a lot of sense. And one thing that you did also say that I thought was quite fascinating with regard to data is that and you correct me if I say anything wrong here. But what I what I remember you saying was that you have plenty of data from from the donors. You know exactly who those people are and how you find them and how you can target them and talk to them. But with regard to operation, operate knowing data operationally, that's a whole other, whole other beast. Yeah, yeah, I mean it's we we are dealing with such levels of ambiguity and uncertainty that that often we have to operate in very murky situations. And I don't for me, that's not It's not that we are not professionals. I think some of the most professional people I know work into humanistend sexism and the most driven people I know. But we just work in really really difficult situations where we often don't actually understand fully the christ is probably dealing with, whereas dealing with a government financial regulations and their strategic framework. That's very well. Let territory got it. Let's grab our last break here. We've been on the air with Lars Peter Nissan, director of ACAPS, and organization he co founded in two thousand and nine that is directed to see the crisis and change the outcome. We've been talking more about the work that he does in humanitarian angles across the world. After the roy we're going to hear more about the ethics of data collection. Stay with us and we'll be right back. Doctor Release Cortez as a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose and inspirational speaker and author. She helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite a lease to speak to your organization, please visit her at Elise Cortez dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is working on Purpose with doctor Elise Cortez. To reach our program today or open a conversation with Elise, send an email to Elise ali Se at Elise Cortez dot com. Now back to working on Purpose. Thanks for staying with us, and welcome back to Working on Purpose. I mentioned after the first break about the Grab Your gusta wellbeing webcast learning series. The content of that program is adapted from part one of my recently published book called Purpose Ignited How Inspiring Leaders ignite passion and Elevate Cause, which is now on Amazon. I wrote that book to a waking leaders to their passion and purpose and helped transform them into inspirational leaders who enliven the workplace and elevate the contribution of business to all stakeholders. That's white'sport if you're just joining us. My guest is Lars Peter Nesan. He is the director of a CAPS and he also serves as the interim director of H two Arch Network, which comprises sixty highly innovative humanitarian agencies creating an enabling environment for huditary action through service delivery, each of today from Denmark. Normally his home is Geneva, Switzerland. I'm your host, doctor Las Cortesse, and so for this next part here, Lars Peter, I wanted to get into, you know, the ethics piece of what you what you work with, and so part of what you say, and I heard you say this in one of your episodes as well, is that actions get taken by whether or not they land on the front page of a paper, not whether they actually help people in need. Yeah. I think that is what we could call a perverse incentive structure in many ways in terms of of how we I I like the language of how we shape the humanitarian narrative, how we decide what the problem is. And I think, and I say this, I always I want to clarify that I don't think that the suffering that people are going through is a story. I think it's very real for them. But I think the way we deal with it it's a story. The way we analyze it and think about it, it's a story. And often that story is not accurate or not driven, not driven by evidence, or even by the wants the needs of the people in need. I think it's really important that this gets talked about right so that people are aware of this. And one of the things, of course, that I want to be able to help listens the viewers is to expand their sources of the news and where they get information so so important, rather than relying in just one singular or even two for that matter, and then questioning it, where did this information come from so so important? So then we can then look at this next question what you already talked about before, and that's the ethics of data collection. And you've said before and one of the episodes I it was so interesting, said, there's a deep fear that we humanitarian organizations will gather that are from local populations and the government will use it against them, and thus we actually accidentally do them harm. I can't imagine a worse feeling, a worse outcome. Yeah, that is sort of the worst nightmare, isn't it? And I mean we we we see this, We see in many different ways humanitarian aid being politicized, being being used in different ways of examples of some countries of governments using food distributions to decide where to bomb because they know people come where the food is, for example. I mean it, we just have to recognize that we, even though we're not we're not political in what we do, we are part of a political game in the context we're working. And the scary thing about the information technology as we see today is that it just scales these things to a frightening level. Right, And so so how do you how do you how do you go about this? How do you ethically go about using you know, information technology for these things? And I think I think one of the things we have to talk about is what don't we want to know? M Once if you choose to collect data especially, and I think we are primarily, if not exclusively, here talking about individual personal data. Right. It really wants you to get down to this person in this refugee camp, in this tint, with this family, with this background. Once you begin to identify individuals, that's when it becomes really dangerous. I think the more contextual stuff I think that's out there anyways, I don't I don't think we're doing any harmware. But if you actually a very granular, individual level data and that gets into the wrong hands, I think that is really dangerous. And so maybe we need to think about what we don't want to know, agreed, well, And to that end, then you go and talk about the more sophisticated means of dataquation you use, the more vulnerable you become to just looking at the data and not making sense of it. That's interesting. M Yeah, And I think it's obvious. I mean, you know, we we when I started out, I would send the facts home to my parents every two weeks maybe facts okay, we know what? Err that was okay, last millennium, right, And then we had these big we had these big set phones we would drag around, which which would way it would be the size of a suitcase. And today, I mean, the level of connectedness is scary. Look at what we're doing right now, right, I mean, and and so it it has just accelerated in in a way that creates vulnerabilities. I think, hmm, yeah. And so then we go back to what you started to say before I picked this up on one of your other episodes, you said, know what you need to know? Who's your decision maker? And what what will he do with the data? What's the objectives of the data? Is so important? And it's so obvious, right It's you mentioned a couple of times the caps tagline see the crisis, change the outcome, And what I always tried to tell people, and actually it comes back to purpose, I think is if if you write a clever, huder than twenty page report and nobody has time to read it, you're not changing the outcome. I doubt whether you're even seeing the crisis. If what people need is a map, and this I once we work. We did some work on Syria around eight years ago, and I traveled around the region and we had just published a regional report and portantly regional report. I think it was hard than forty pages actually, and I had it and I said, have you seen this? They said, all, fantastic piece of work, great piece of work. I said, have you read it? Nobody had, but they intended to, but they hadn't. And at the same time we had we had done just a one page map with some boarder crossings and some cashments. It was a really clever piece of work. And they all had that and they said, I remember one guy, I think, I bring this to all the meetings and I put it on the table. So when people talk, right, And so if you if you don't think about who your decision maker is of the situation here she is in, you end up writing for yourself and not for that person, and then you're not changing the outcome. Yes, well, and then say more about this you have you're very clever with how you use words and and put together prises you say makes sense not data? What do you mean by that? It's back to what we just talked about, right, So, so the first rule is know who your decision by are. You're trying to achieve here? What's your purpose? Would your decision maker what does he she need to know? Secondly, makes sense if you're not data now, don't just call it leck data. We are so we're so data, we're so in love with data these days, and we're so spoiled with data. But we've work in situations that are fairly poorly lit. But there's not a lot of data often and so if you collect data that's there's a big cost associated with that. Do you spend a lot of time on that. Wouldn't it be better to to maybe analyze instead of running around with a clipboard in the field? Okay? Absolutely, Yeah, we wanted it an exercise where we spent I don't I don't even want to think about how much money it costs. But it took us three four weeks and we had more than a hundred people involved in this, and we spent We use maybe twenty percent of the data we collected in the final reporter. So eighty percent of all those efforts was just wasted. Yeah, yeah, right, And so makes sense not data. It's not a data collection exercise. It's a sense making exercise to understand crisis. Okay, And then we got to bring it on, bring this point on. This is gonna this is probably going to really bother some people that really like cleanliness. But you said, don't be precisely wrong, be approximately right. Yeah, and that as you say, that ties back to the messages. It's also for me linked to complexity. When you work in situations where the problem you're dealing with is predominantly complex, we know that simple rules for complex settings is it's one way of doing things, and that if you develop an overly granular picture, you have to update that. So if you collect a thousand data points, you have to collect a thousand data points to update. Now, if the situation changes every six hours, you don't have time to do that. And so what's happening is it takes you a couple of days to collect a thousand data points and then you have a beautiful picture. It's just precisely wrong because that's no longer what the world looks like. So you have to do a good enough approach. You have to you have to find that suit spot where you are in tune with how rapidly things are changing and evolving, and and then have the courage to put out what is good enough. You have to put your you have to put your best guests out there and then hope that that's good enough. So a great way to finish because we started with complexity and vastness and that's a great way to finish. So here we are at the end of the show, Lars Peter. You know the show's listen new by Peter by people all over the world. And what we're up to is trying to help create organizations people actually want to come to work give their best. We do business at better as the world. What would I to leave us with? So I think I think as a manager, as a leader of an organization, I think I think it's about integrity and authenticity. I know that's a very abused word, but zero bs. If you want you maybe you may be wrong. As a leader, you may, but you have to believe what you tell the organization, your staff, they and then people pick this up in two seconds flat. If you if you have if you really believe what you're doing, you may be wrong. They'll forgive you for that, especially if you afterwards say, hey, this was right, I actually messed up here. And so for me, it's two things. It's be as authentic as you can bring as much as you can of yourself into a situation, and then secondly fail forward and show people that you're failing and that you're moving forward m also, but we will begin this conversation as Peter, thank you so much for joining us and sharing your beautiful heart in mind with us and helping us hopefully create a better world and serve it better. So thank you so much for being a guest. Thanks for having me on. At least it was it was great. I hope I made sense in spite of the very late hour. I feel my cognitive abilities deteriorating very quickly, so I think I'm to hit the second Yeah, I would say so. If these are failed cognitive abilities, the rest of us are doomed. So listeners, viewers, if you want to learn more about ours, Peter Neison and the work he does, you can start by visiting ACAPS dot org. That's acaps dot org. And thanks again to our partnering sponsor work Proud, which helps companies build a platform where your workforce receives unequal feedback and thanks for their work from people across your company. Last week, you've missed the live show, you can always catch to be recorded podcast We were on the Earth Kenney Iyo Yosi talking about his latest book, Puts Your Purpose to Work, How to find fulfillment in your nine to five and the work he does as a Sweet Spots Scout coach. Next week, we'll be on the air with Swatithiagajaran, who is the author of Bornewilde and the associate producer of the smash documentary My Octopus Teacher, talking about the profound beauty and wholeness connecting with nature affords our health, fulfillment and spiritual journey. See you there. Remember that works at least a third of our lives. So let's work on purpose. We hope you've enjoyed this week's program. 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