Best of: Mercy Triumphs

Intro

Rigmor Tholstrup

Hi listeners. This month's Trumanitarian is taking a short break. We will be replaying some of our favorite episodes from the archive. My name is Rigmor and I'm here with Ila.

Ila Schoop Rutten

Hey there.

Rigmor Tholstrup

This week we have Mercy Triumphs with Steven Webster. And Steve just starts talking about mercy and love. And I have never met Steve before, but I think this shows alone that he's a person with so much empathy and I wouldn't need much further to understand that he must have been a great humanitarian leader and worker. And I just, I just like how he advocates for love driven relationships.

Ila Schoop Rutten

So Rigmor, how many humanitarian workplaces have you been in where your supervisor or colleagues foster love in their professional relationships?

Rigmor Tholstrup

Of course, love can take many forms, but at work, I feel it's something just generally caring about one's colleagues, fostering great relationships and somehow more of an energy rather than necessarily all these diplomatic dances. Um, but that's also connected to intuition and respecting individual autonomy, which implies ambiguity – because Steve also discussed how humanitarian organizations try and control this ambiguity a lot.

Ila Schoop Rutten

So are we advocating for the return of the cowboy humanitarian?

Rigmor Tholstrup

No, but for example, he criticizes training programs that seeks to specify behavior out of fear of what one might otherwise do, which might just have taken over in some instances. For example, that really resonated with some UN mandatory courses I have tried, um... like stuff made as if we were imbeciles.. like "uh, Paul sees Charlie touches Jenny's butt. What should Paul do, A. B. or C?" and then. You get certified. But I mean, that will certainly not make us less prone to harass or abuse in reality. So I think instead of these odd attempts to control, as Steve says, it's, it's rather about good intuition relationships and appropriate education on systemic roots. So, yeah, I just learned so much from Steve because he turns criticism in the episode into inspiration, focusing on spirit, energy and unity, and showing just a better way. What, what do you think, Ila?

Ila Schoop Rutten

I like this episode because it's a break from the problem oriented thinking that seems to be pervasive in all sectors. Steve offers some genuine mantras that resonate with the kind of idealism that attracts us to humanitarianism and are, well, if we're going to take him at his word, have been tried and true throughout his career. This episode to me is offering one possible solution to the constant culture discussions we have on humanitarian, the tension between professionalization and innovation.

Rigmor Tholstrup

Yeah, exactly. And it's, it's an episode you can listen to several times, uh, and just a really good reminder of ideas we can benefit from. So please enjoy it.

Lars Peter Nissen - intro

Throughout my career, I have been privileged to have mentors helping me understand how to do better. Some people would argue that that is because I was greatly in need of mentoring. I choose to believe that I simply was lucky. Among all my mentors, Steven Webster has a special place for me. I worked for years with Steve on training courses, and I could spend five minutes detailing the things Steve has spent his career doing, but that would somehow be missing the point. Instead, what I'd like to do is play a little clip from a voicemail my wife received from a colleague of mine at ACAPS, who met Steve for a couple of minutes, and this shows you the impression Steve makes on people:

*Voiceover* "I met his old friend, but only the man was so sweet. That man was so sweet. He really touched me. I didn't even get his name, but he touched my heart. I will think about him for a few days."

The conversation starts a bit abruptly, but that's my fault. I simply forgot to turn on the recording, so we lost the first 10 minutes and had to redo part of it. And you will hear Steve, of course, teasing me with that in the beginning. As always, if you like the conversation, please share it out on social media, make some noise, recommend the show to colleagues and friends, but most importantly, enjoy the conversation.

Steve Webster, welcome to Trumanitarian.

Yes, yes, thank you, Lars. Peter, you know, technology is our friend, but it so often leaves us on the side.

It's a double-edged sword for sure.

It is indeed.

Among the thousands of disaster managers you have met over your career, who are the best ones? Why are they the best ones?

Well, I would have to say the best ones are the most other-regarding individuals. And the people who are driven by the notion that mercy triumphs because mercy is the human quality which elevates the human condition. And I think if you're motivated by an appreciation of the assets that people have rather than their deficits and if you are able to work in that direction, you will be successful as a professional. You will have good relationships, relationships being the key, I think, to successful program outcomes. And you will always have a goal in mind, which elevates the beneficiary or the client or the, you know, whatever word we use to describe the people that we're working with. And the sense of... Well, I think at the end of the day, it's love directed. Love is a word that gets tossed around and abused in a lot of different ways, but to my mind, love is a driving force that values the individual and the individual's right to a good life.

It’s a beautiful answer. It can also seem like a somehow naive answer when you look at the sort of institutions we work in where love doesn't seem to be top of the agenda.

Well, I have the benefit of being retired now so I don't have to be bothered by the agendas of the people who are climbing over each other. There was a Russian anthropologist named Kropotkin who wrote a book called Mutual Aid at the turn of the century. And he wrote it in opposition to the Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ approach. He was critiquing the notion that people are climbing over each other to advance themselves, which I think is what the institutions look like. But he pointed out that the species which survived most successfully were the ones that practiced mutual aid. And that was an important book to me when I first encountered it. You know, the short-term gains of promotion and increased responsibility, in the long run, become rather meaningless. The relationships that are based on trust and come back to value time and time and time and time again. I noticed in my life that the relationships that I built with other professionals where they were sincere and authentic, they benefited. When I got to Iraq, the person who was in charge of the telephones was someone with whom I had built a relationship a long time ago. It paid off to have a relationship. If I had been abusive to the person or if I had pushed myself forward over them, I don't think I would have received the same sort of support. The tenser the situation got, the more support I got. So, I think the relationship that's love-driven was critical to my safety, let alone my production.

What do you think we can do to foster more love? To foster more of these relationships that that you describe that are so functional? What can we do as practitioners?

Yeah, I wish there was an easy answer to that, and I don't think there is. I think, to my mind, modeling is the most, you know, one of the most successful forms of leadership. You know, if you can model the sort of behaviors that you are looking for, then you can encourage that in individuals that are working for you. If you can establish promotion and retention systems which value the ability to make relationships, then that will promote itself. If you are only able to value the acquisition of resources or the acquisition of power or territory, then I don't think that you can be– I don't think you're going to establish organizations that are driven by this point of view. But let me caution this by saying that I'm not sure institutions as vehicles have the capacity to be driven like this. I think it happens with individuals within institutions, but I think institutions mostly disappoint because their survival needs become almost ego-maniacal, more so than the individuals. Because once the institution establishes itself, its major purpose is to reproduce and colonize and that's not necessarily the case for the individuals, but it seems to be the case for the organizations.

Trumanitarian Transcript Template.docx 3/9

Yeah, I think when I think of what you have taught me, the thing that always stands out is opening every training course with a slide of a toolbox saying under construction warning, high tolerance for ambiguity ahead, right?

And I guess the sort of institutions we have don't deal too well with ambiguity.

No, that's in fact something that, if possible, is to be gotten rid of because ambiguity allows for too much self-control and self-innovation. I mean organizations want – that's why the training programs specify certain behaviors because they're afraid of the behaviors that may come about if they don't specify certain behaviors. And I mean it it’s true that you that if you don't specify, you have the capacity for great quality and for dismal perspectives or dismal outcomes as well. I can't remember whether we had talked about this in the previous discussion, but I had talked to these international scholars at the University of Wisconsin and there had been a diplomat who had spoken the week before or two weeks before and she had painted a very negative picture of the humanitarian environment, particularly one that was driven by grant making and by outcome, achievements and so on and so forth. And the students were depressed after her presentation because there didn't seem to be any there, there, in terms of really affirming that their goals were altruistic, their motivations were altruistic. They were students to be faced with this dark atmosphere of the reality of the inner organizational environment. And several of them stayed and talked after my conversation because they wanted to know where my optimism came from. And I said, well, it's because my objectives are to have relationships with people, not with institutions. The institutions I've worked with have always disappointed me. But the people that I've worked with do not. Not that there aren't people who have disappointed me, but I mean out of in every place I go into, I find people who have qualities which are valuable, build trust and build relationships and are long-term satisfying and productive. I'm not being very articulate here, but I think it's a synergy. It’s a tiresome word, but there is an energy that comes from unity. When people act as one, or when they are working together, that energy is always victorious.

Yeah, I agree with that. I think once you see a high performing team that really spins you, you can almost hear it hum.

Yeah. When you only experience that in life, if you're lucky, you experience that half a dozen times over your work life. But when you experience it, you know that that's what we should be seeking.

Yeah. And so, I totally get that we have institutions that are basically bureaucracies that are trying to stamp out any ambiguity that work in highly ambiguous settings, so they don't work. It becomes very clunky and then we have these individuals trying to make their way and survive in this environment, most of them highly committed, very smart people. But, in almost soul crushing organizations, right? Now the million-dollar question, Steve, is can you create an institutional environment that's more conducive than what we have?

I think you can.

So how?

I think you can do it by setting a set of values which you adhere to and walk the talk about what the organization stands for. I was very impressed with the ACAPS values that I saw on the wall when I came in before I met anybody. I saw the values and they were unique. The words were not unique. I've seen all the words before, but I haven't seen them put together. I mean, they recognized the need for excellence. They recognize the need for self-control. They recognize the need for individual achievement. They recognize that the powers of diversity. They were anti-institutional in the sense that they valued individual achievement, but they also recognized that people here were working as a collective. So, I don't know the people who work at ACAPS. I can't tell whether they are a happy family of unitary achievers, but I can say that an organization that's driven by a set of values that are sincere and authentic, and which are modeled by senior management and perpetuated throughout the organization provides a system of trustworthy predictability, which allows people to risk. Because if they are certain that their risk taking will not lead them down a wrong path, then they're willing to achieve excellence at the expense of failure. But they recognize that failure is a part of achieving excellence.

Yeah. Psychological safety is the key determinant in whether the team is performing or not. I think there's a lot of truth in that. Now, we may or may not live up to those values. I mean on a good day we might get close, right? On a bad day, definitely not. But where have you seen an organization where you thought, yeah, this is how things should work?

Well, the very first disaster that I ever worked on was as the recovery coordinator for a place that had been destroyed by tornadoes. To have an F5 tornado with 250 mile per hour winds that acted like a vacuum cleaner in this town and the team that of the people that were that were in charge of it included the town clerk, the president of the council, the head of the Mennonite Disaster Committee and myself, and an attorney. We had a seamless vision of what we were going to rebuild, and it was– people knew ahead of time what it was that you needed. I mean, there was anticipation, and it had evaluation, it had celebration, it had failure. But it had, even in failure, there was a celebration because the risks had been taken. I think it respected peoples’ shortcomings and allowed them to be. It was continuously reinforcing of what people's needs were and the outcomes were outstanding. The recovery process was a model of recovery.

I also think– my daughter runs an organization, and I'd like to think that her orientation towards management was somehow driven in her family, but she has a team that works like this. And I think it's because she values them as individuals. She gives them the space to do the work that they need to do. She's clear about what the objectives are. She doesn't expect them to perform in areas that they are not interested or confident in. And she supports them. I mean, a good leader says to the employee: How can I help you to do your job better? He or she doesn't say here is how I want you to do your job. So, my job looks better. It's a corny word, servant leadership. But if you are lucky enough to work in an organization that's driven by servant leaders, then you are working in an organization where your achievement and satisfaction and happiness is the principal objective of the supervisor.

To take the conversation in a different direction, we've talked a lot about decolonizing. I guess people like us old white men, you're significantly older than I am, of course, Steve. But I know we’ve both ticked those boxes. When you started out, that was 70-80% of the people you would find in a training course or in an organization.

Yeah. And I think about the people who were the leaders in the disaster field, they were all old white guys who held up a finger to see which way the snow– the wind was blowing and made a decision.

And how far have we gotten in terms of changing that and what has changed?

Well, there has certainly been an emphasis to have things be more evidence based rather than relying on the individuals, the experience of the individual, to call the shots. There’s been much greater emphasis on evidence-based decision making, so decision making has been removed from the gurus and is more decentralized in the organization. There's probably more line flow, work control at those at the boundaries, which I think is –especially in the inner organizational environment that we have now, which is so complex with so many organizations, if you don't have boundary management, you'll never get anything done. So I think there's a lot more decisions made at the boundaries and that that involves then a lot of lot more people. We have much more distributed leadership models going on and then we have investment in just one individual who calls all the shots. And I think actually when you can run across an organization where one person is in charge of everything, that person is usually held up to ridicule and is usually not liked by their employees because you can't be that person without making enemies. So certainly, there is much greater diversity. Now whether this has achieved superior outcomes, I can't say. I mean at the end of the day in our business– the interventions of the exogenous forces are only supplemental to the endogenous supports because the neighbors helping neighbors, they have to live with the people after the disaster goes away and to the extent that those relationships are strong and productive, they already have solved a lot of the problems before the Internet interveners get in. I mean, I think again of this first disaster, and I don't mean this to be critical of the Red Cross in any sense, but the disaster hit and the Church ladies from the Lutheran churches put up a feeding kitchen. The Red Cross came in a week after the disaster, they took over the kitchen and ran it for two to five weeks, I don't recall how long. Then they pulled out and the Lutheran ladies took it back over again and ran it. And when we had to move out of the town garage because winter was coming and we went to the Mason Hall and the women said, well, we're not going to serve meals like we did before, and then one woman said, well, we should have coffee for the for people when they're going to work, and then somebody else said, well, yeah, if we're going to have coffee, we probably could have a donut, but we're not going to serve meals and somebody else said, well, we could have a little soup for people and all of a sudden they were back and they had to reestablish their own oriented, the whole thing that they had promised they weren't going to do. I mean, it was beautiful, beautiful thing.

So, I think we can all see the downside to, let's call them the cowboys, right? That larger-than-life character who goes out smells the wind and then just saves everybody. At the same time, being that empowered in a situation that is that chaotic has its benefits. That and some people were able to able to really move mountains in situations like that so, wasn't there an upside to also having that holistic approach, in a sense, that they had?

I think you're right, and with this caveat, the people who became the cowboys became addicted to the emergency environment as a place to work. And once they became addicted, then their decisions were being driven by their addiction more than their – They were still vested in their experience and justifying their actions based on their experience, but their addiction was what was actually driving their decision making. And the need to continue to satisfy that addiction caused excesses in areas that didn't need to have excesses in them and provision of services that were unnecessary and so forth. So, I think that the attempts to codify the activities of the cowboys, so to speak, were laudable, because people were trying to deconstruct what it was. In those days, we didn't have wild assessments. I mean, the person who was in charge of the disaster had said, I think this is what the disaster is, and this is what the magnitude of it is, and this is the services that we need. Now, in the first place, in. there weren't very many providers, so it was a lot easier to work with a much fewer set of providers. It was a closer tight-knit network. But now, there are so many interveners in any disaster situation that trying to coordinate all of that is like herding cats. So there has to be standard operating procedures which are the mandates of the organizations, and which circumscribe the behaviors of the individual. So your capacity to be free to innovate is not there anymore. This has resulted then in a, along with the evidence-based practice and the need for measurement, has caused a lot of effort to be invested in detailing the skills and competencies which are necessary. So, I mean, everything is competency-based. I mean, things are not value-driven so much anymore as they are competency-based driven. And I was just at a meeting at lunchtime, and they had turned the training program, which they were training people to be in, to do disaster management work, and they had 27 different training programs and 27 different competencies, which they had experienced, which they wanted people to be able to know how to do.

Well, you know, that caused a big bell to go off in my mind because I thought we have come full circle in the training program from Taylorism and scientific management, which everybody, you know, hated, you know, which became frowned upon in the 60s because we had the Mayo School and we had the Hawthorne Effect and we had, and in that period of time, we recognized that individuals given power shined and produced things and we valued our investments of training and such were to, it capacitates the individual to be responsive and innovative and leadership as individuals. We've come full circle around now and that's now out.

and we are reestablishing a more technology-driven scientific management, but still the same thing. This is if you practice these few behaviors or this collection of behaviors, you'll have this type of outcome, and it will be measured. And that's just Taylorism at a higher level and with more computers and technology, but it still looks a lot like Taylorism to me. It would be very unattractive to me to work in that environment where I had to have 27 competencies that I was judged on. I mean, I wanted to work... I mean, autonomy and diversity were my career goals, and I would not have achieved that under the circumstances.

Yeah, I had a boss who used to say they took humans out of the human resource department. Now it's just the resource department. So where does this leave us, Steve? I think the biggest message I hear from you is the importance of these individuals who are purpose driven, value driven, driven by love, and the relationship that these people can enter into with other people– that is really where some of the best skilled disaster managers come from that. That is, I think, where we started our conversation.

I think that I want to be hopeful enough to suppose that this exists in situ. That on the ground, in the disaster, at the field level, despite what goes on at headquarters and in the decision-making meetings and in the big, you know, meetings with the resident coordinator and the ministries and such, where all the posturing is taking place, that actually at the field level people are still trusting each other and making things work even though that there are a lot of institutional barriers to making it work. So, when I meet individual people who are working in the field and I say, what are you liking? They're saying, oh, the people I work with are what drives me. I love the people I work with. We were a team. We sacrificed together. We suffered together, but we had a similar vision. We shared that vision with each other, and we experienced a level of joy that, Now, that's what you seek in a working environment. And if that's there, it's impossible to have that as a team experience and not have that wash through the people that you're working with. Because the outcomes that come from teams that are having that much trust going on are just naturally going to value the assets of the people that they are working with and providing services to them that they need rather than the services that they're intended to give. If I have a platform that I stand on, it's that, and I learned it in the disability field because my son, my oldest child had developmental disabilities, we need to devise systems that support people as individuals rather than trying to slot people into the systems that have been created because we need to see what works for people, what their assets are, what they're good at, what works for them if they're a disaster survivor. We need to look at their assets not their deficits and figure out how to put those things together and build a supportive service around them. It works for countries, it works for teams, it works for individuals. When we go in with a program and say, here's what we offer, we have this, well, people will take what we offer them because they will do something with it, they'll throw it away or they'll sell it or they'll do something with it. But if we go and we say, how can we build, let's take a look at what you've got and build that with, then you're gonna have interventions. I'm sorry to take this down the long road, but I worked in the Tonne River Delta in Kenya, and the people lived in houses. They were on the ground, and they kept their livestock in the center of the community. And it had been a drought area for a long time. Well, under climate change, they now were getting flooding. And the flooding flooded, you know, all the refuse of the cows went right into the huts. Well, I was there with a group that was providing plastic sheeting and jerry cans and things. And it was so obvious that jerry cans and plastic sheeting were a waste of time. And I said to the village chief, I said, would you be willing to stay in a messy situation for a little while if we could put your huts on stilts? And the chief said, certainly I would do that. I couldn't get the organization to change its orientation to shift away from what it was doing, so all it did was perpetuate the situation that was already there. If I had been... If I'd had more energy, time, assets, power, I guess, I could have changed the way the intervention went. But to just say, these are the services we provide, take them or leave them, that's makes assessment, to be in your case, in your situation, a waste of time. You don't need the assessment. You just go and take what you're going to give them in the first place and say, here's what we've got, use it or lose it, like it or take the highway. But if we can individualize these things, we'll be much more successful in promoting long-term resiliency.

I can't think of a better place to end this conversation, Steve. Thank you for coming on humanitarian and thank you for all the things you have done over the years. For me, for the whole disaster management community.

It's been a pleasure to work with you Lars Peter. I have been away from the field for several years now, and it's a remarkably different place than where I worked, but it's nice to see the people I've met with this week have all still got the same bug, and they're driven in the same way, and that's very hope-providing.