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Accountable in One Direction

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  Rot and Renewal. Twenty years in this sector, and a question nobody at the table wanted. The table was the first thing I noticed. One slab of wood, beautifully made, longer than my office. The chairs were hydraulic, with a lever under the seat so you could raise or lower yourself, and I remember thinking I would like one of those for my desk. Then I thought the table had probably cost more than I earn in a year. Then I decided to stop thinking about the table. This was a sector coordination meeting on livelihoods and social stability. Thirty or so project coordinators, sector leads, a few technical advisers. Everyone spoke English. Not because English was anyone's first language, but because it was the only way to be certain that no international colleague present was excluded from the conversation. I have sat in dozens of these meetings over the years. I have never once heard the reverse consideration raised. When my turn came, I said something I thought was ordinary. I said tha...
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Reform Promises Nothing

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  Rot and Renewal, Week 6. Two faith-based institutions, twenty years apart. One decided. One did not. The ledgers I joined the finance department of a regional church network a few weeks after the "July war"  ended in 2006. I was twenty-five. My job was to report on a humanitarian program that was rebuilding water and sanitation systems in the south and getting farmers through a season that had been destroyed along with everything else. It was not the biggest thing I had worked on. As a junior auditor I had carried client portfolios worth many times it. But those were other people's books. I read them from the outside, wrote my report, and left. This was the first time I was sitting inside the institution the numbers belonged to, and I was glad to be there.  It took me about a month with the ledgers to understand that the institution carrying it was dying. The problem was arithmetic, and it was not a secret from anyone who could read a balance sheet. The cost of running ...
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Digital Was Never the Problem

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  Why aging organizations fail at technology, and why it is almost never the technology Fifth in a weekly series on how institutions fail and how they come back. Twenty-five years ago I helped install a working system inside a factory that died anyway. Nine years ago I ran a training with no strategic purpose whatsoever, and it turned out to be the thing that carried an organization through a digitization it never asked for. The difference between those two stories has nothing to do with software. The question There were diapers on the desk. Four or five brands, cut open, laid out across the table so the layers could be compared. Somebody in that room had been doing real product analysis, the unglamorous kind, with a blade and a ruler. I was there because the invoicing had just been automated. A software firm I had brought in a few weeks earlier had installed a stock and sales system, and for the first time in the history of that company the sales invoices came out of a mach...
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The Room Stopped Looking

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  A parable and a confession Fourth in the Rot and Renewal series. What follows is a parable, narrated by an old lioness. The mechanics of it are not invented. The tenure lengths, the expulsions, the cubs, the year of nothing: all of it comes from what researchers have documented in the field. Only the voice is mine. Afterwards I will tell you why I wrote it, and where I appear in it. The third takeover - the parable I am old now, and I am still here. That is not a boast. The lionesses are always still here. We are born into this pride, we die in it, and in between we watch the males arrive and leave. I have lived through three takeovers. I want to tell you about the third, because it was the one we could have prevented. When I was young, the arrangement was so ordinary that nobody thought to describe it. We hunted. We held the ground. We raised what was born. The male walked the border and met whatever came from outside it. That was his work. It was not a small thing. It wa...
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