Survival Is Not Renewal

 

Rot and Renewal, week eight. Two institutions that came back, and the difference between the two ways it happened.

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The road south

On the night of 29 November 2010 I drove into the south of Lebanon for the first time in my life, following a location someone had sent me on Google Maps, which most of us had only started using that year. I had been driving for close to two hours and still had half an hour to go. The phone was the only thing that knew where I was going, and the phone was dying.

I stopped at a kiosk in a village whose name I never learned, in an area I had been quietly warned about all my life. I asked if there was somewhere to plug in a charger. A man showed me the socket, then brought me a bottle of water I had not asked for. Ten or so men were sitting in front of a television. I looked up to see what they were watching and it was the Clásico. Barcelona were dismantling Real Madrid at the Camp Nou. It finished five goals to nothing. I stayed for it. I laughed with men I did not know, in a village I had been taught to be careful in, for as long as it took my phone to hold a charge.

I do not know what happened to those men. The arithmetic of the last two years in the south makes it likely that some of them are dead. That is what this country does to a memory. You meet people once and you count them later.

I reached Rmeich near midnight. The hotel was the most elegant building in the area, newly built, dark wood and clean sheets that smelled of spring, rooms so large I did my exercises in one corner of mine, at prices that made no commercial sense. I learned afterwards that a man from the area had built it not to make money but to make jobs. Everyone had already eaten. I greeted the team and went up.

The seminar started the next morning. Fifteen people, all of them new hires, coordinators and psychosocial workers and animators from the south and the Bekaa. Each of them stood up and presented the work they were leading. Then I did my part, which was a refresher on financial standards and a walk through every document they would have to fill correctly before I would release a payment.

I remember looking at that room and thinking that we had come a long way.

Twenty two months earlier, the organisation that employed those fifteen people did not exist in any functioning sense.

What was actually decided

I have written before about the Middle East Council of Churches, MECC, and about the years when it came apart. In early 2009 there was no horizon. I was its financial manager, holding a mandate given to me by a patriarch from one church family and a bishop from another, and I was far too young for it. The responsibilities were not technical. They were political, they were psychological, and most days they came down to holding on to what was left of the staff. Besides me, fewer than five people were still working there.

I want to be accurate about my own role, because this series is not an autobiography of rescue. I did not save that institution and nobody could have. I have said to friends that Jesus himself could have been appointed general secretary in those years and still failed. My job was the money, and I volunteered to hold up whatever was left of the departments.

The Inter-Church Network for Development and Relief was one of the things left. ICNDR had been the implementation arm, the part of MECC that moved millions of dollars and did the actual work. It had been built and driven by a director with real influence across the region. She left the seat, and some years later she died of cancer. What remained after her was a name, a mandate, and nothing running through it.

The associate general secretary appointed for the region by one of the church families arrived with an idea rather than a rescue plan. He wanted to revive ICNDR, not because it was the most urgent thing in the building, but because it was the most credible thing in the building. Church donors had stopped trusting MECC. They had not stopped trusting the work. Rebuild one arm that functions, prove it grant by grant, and let the trust come back through that door while MECC's own problems were dealt with separately.

It began with a request to a Swedish church donor for support to build a new strategy for ICNDR. They gave us fifteen thousand dollars.

The first test was not the strategy. The first test was the fifteen thousand dollars. No salaries were being paid at all, mine included, and had not been for months. I was one of the two signatures required to move any money out, the second being the treasurer or the general secretary. Nothing left that account without me. I did not spend a cent of the grant on salaries. That is the moment the trust started coming back, and I want to be precise about why. A donor does not measure your integrity from your audit report. They measure it from what you do with a small grant while you are desperate and holding the pen.

The strategy that came out of it had one structural decision at its centre: ICNDR would operate with full autonomy until MECC's own problems were resolved. Not independence, autonomy. A separate office was rented in the north. Two small grants arrived, given as tests rather than as programmes. We delivered on both.

Then came the German agency that funds areas where catastrophe has happened, Diakonie Katastrophenhilfe, and a large psychosocial support programme, and hiring, and teams across the south and the Bekaa. The associate general secretary ran the programme. I ran the money and the operations until we hired an accountant and an assistant, after which I only ran the money.

There is one more fact from that period, and I include it as evidence rather than as a credential. At one point I was thirteen months unpaid. I was earning elsewhere through consultancies and being reimbursed through ICNDR projects, so I set the order of payment and put the remaining staff ahead of myself. I was paid eventually. The relevant point is not what I did. The relevant point is what it tells you about the structure: for the first years, that renewal ran on two men covering out of their own time and their own pockets what the institution could not. Three years in, that should no longer have been necessary. When an organisation still needs two particular people to go unpaid in order to keep moving, it has not been rebuilt. It has been carried. I know how that sentence reads coming from me. I will come back to it.

One last thing about those years, because it is the part people get wrong when they hear a renewal story. Nobody resisted us. Not one department, not one office. Everyone was so desperate for a change, for hope, for any intervention at all, that they simply let us be.

That was not persuasion. The institution was too weak to defend itself against a rescue. Weakness is a window, and windows close.

Where an institution actually is

There is a body of work on organisational lifecycles, most usefully Adizes and Greiner, and it is taught badly almost everywhere. Courtship, infancy, the go-go years, adolescence, prime, then the long slide through aristocracy and bureaucracy. Boards nod at the chart, locate themselves somewhere flattering on it, and move to the next agenda item.

Two things in that literature are worth the leadership's attention, and they are rarely the two things that get quoted.

The first is that aging has almost nothing to do with years. What ages an organisation is the ratio between its flexibility and its control. Young organisations are flexible and badly controlled. Old ones are well controlled and cannot move. An organisation can be old at six years and young at sixty, and the only honest test is this: the last time something genuinely new arrived at our door, did we adapt to it or did we file it?

The second is that decline is a stage, not a terminus. There is an exit from it. Yet I have read a great many organisational budgets in this country and I have never seen a line for the turnaround stage. There are growth lines, maintenance lines, occasionally an emergency line. There is no renewal line, because lifecycle is taught as prediction, here is where you are and here is what comes next, when its only real use is as a decision point.

That is the frame. Now the distinction that matters more than the frame, because three very different things get called survival.

Continuation. The body is intact and nothing has changed. Most institutions that describe themselves as survivors are here. The test is one question: name one thing you do differently because of what you went through. If nothing comes, you did not survive anything. You outlasted it.

Renewal inside the body. The same institution, keeping its identity and its people, rebuilding its mandate, structure or funding model. This is the slowest and rarest of the three. ICNDR is the case I watched from the inside.

Renewal outside the body. The capability walks out of a dying institution and rebuilds itself in a new form. This one is faster, it is more common than the sector admits, and it leaves a question that nobody at the top ever asks.

The warehouse

In 2001 or 2002 I was twenty one years old, holding twelve client portfolios at a small audit firm. Through a well known retailer on my portfolio I was introduced to two men who had started something.

Their office was a warehouse in Achrafieh, one of the densest and most expensive districts in Beirut. Ground floor, no more than two hundred square metres. Old Spanish floor tiles in calm colours under a layer of dirt that nobody was paid to care about, because it was a warehouse and not an office and nobody was pretending otherwise. Tables stacked with papers and testers, cans of food, the leftovers of people who were more or less living there. Posters and drawings on the walls. Two small vans at the door. Everyone in jeans and t-shirts, arguing all day, amicably, playfully, always some challenge running between them.

They had no showroom. Their entire model was selling to shops across the country.

What I learned over the following months was that the owner was the son of a family business in a mountain town above Beirut, an importer and distributor that had supplied shops all over Lebanon and had been, for a long time, very successful. By the time the new firm started, the parent business was at the end of its cycle. I never knew why it failed.

The second man had stood in that showroom as a salesman. A third brother appears in the legal papers. I never met him.

So look at what actually crossed from the old body into the new one. The import relationships. The standing with suppliers. The map of which shop in which town sells what and pays when. The family's name inside the trade. And two men.

What stayed behind was the premises, the showroom model, and whatever was killing it.

This is the part boards never see coming. When capability leaves a dying institution, it leaves through people. Directors watch the building, the licences and the balance sheet. The asset that walked out of that mountain town was a man who knew every retailer in the country by name, and nowhere in that family's accounts was his departure recorded as a loss.

I built their accounting and stock system with a partnering software engineering firm, and I did their year end. Their revenues were climbing at a rate I checked twice before I believed it.

I should be honest about what I felt in that warehouse. I was twenty one, I had a large circle of friends, and I did not need another band to belong to. What I wanted was the sensation of being part of that one. I never asked to join, not even when I left the audit firm. It was an idea that crossed my mind and I let it cross, because that was the period of my life when I experienced my own path as a current I was in rather than a series of decisions I was making. I am careful writing that sentence. I am forty five and I still recognise the feeling.

I drive through that mountain town most mornings now. My son's school is there. The family business is not struggling, it is gone, and it is gone completely. Ask anyone under thirty in that town and the name means nothing to them. The only thing that outlived it was a business it could not contain, run out of a dirty warehouse in Achrafieh by two of its own people.

I do not know what became of the new firm. I know exactly what became of the old one.

What the two have in common

Five conditions show up in both cases. They are not a methodology. They are what was actually true.

One. The new thing is built beside the failing part, never inside it. ICNDR got autonomy from MECC's problems before it got a single programme. The importer got a warehouse across the city from the showroom. Renewal placed inside the failing structure inherits its cost base, its habits and its enemies on day one.

Two. It starts with something small enough to fail. Fifteen thousand dollars and a strategy. One rented floor and two vans. A renewal that opens with a large grant or a large loan is not a renewal, it is a bet, and the institution will spend the money before it has changed anything.

Three. Somebody guards the money against the institution's own hunger. A dying organisation will eat whatever you put in front of it, and everything it eats costs it the next thing. Both times, that job happened to be mine, and the hard part of it was never the donor. The hard part was refusing money to people who needed it, including myself.

Four. Capability travels in people, so a renewal plan is a list of names. Both of these were two or three people. If you cannot name the individuals who will carry the new thing, you do not have a renewal. You have a document.

Five. Proof comes before scale. Two small grants, delivered, before the large programme was ever discussed. Nobody funds a turnaround on a narrative. They fund it on a completed small thing.

And then the condition neither of us built, which is the reason I am writing this piece instead of telling it as a success.

Both renewals depended on protection at the top, and neither was insulated against the top changing. In MECC's case, the general secretary who had opened the space left the post. The post changed hands. The new holder read a functioning, funded, semi-autonomous arm as a threat rather than an asset, and behaved accordingly.

I could tell you what I thought of the man. It would not help you, and it would be the wrong lesson. The point runs the other way. We had built something in which one person's character was decisive, and nothing worth building should turn on one person's character. That is not his failure. That is our design.

I left. For years I told myself I was pushed, which is partly true. The more honest sentence is that I had already judged him and would not learn to work with someone I had judged, and that I did not leave alone. ICNDR continued afterwards. It did not continue at the same level.

An institution can be renewed and then quietly un-renewed, and the people who built it are usually already gone by the time anyone notices.

The part I got wrong

I wrote in an earlier piece that reforms survive when the forcing function comes from outside the institution. That is exactly what this case proves, and it proves it in both directions at once.

The donors were outside. That is why ICNDR outlived my departure and the change at the top. The patron was inside. That is why the thing faded once he was replaced. We built the money side correctly and the governance side naively, and at the time I would have told you with total confidence that we had built both.

One more thing belongs on the page. When I left, I had given up on MECC. I was convinced it was finished, and that the only question left was when.

I went and looked this week. MECC published an annual report for 2023, out of the same headquarters in Beirut, with offices in Damascus and Amman. The name we fought for is not in it. The humanitarian arm carries a different name now, and in that single year it spent more than five million dollars on programmes across Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, the overwhelming majority of it inside Syria.

So the institution did not end when I decided it would end. It did not need me to be the one who saved it. And the arm we rebuilt outlived the name we rebuilt it under, which is either the strongest evidence in this article or the most humbling, and I have not decided which.

Both of those are useful facts for a man who has spent twenty years believing that institutions run on his own energy. 

So here is the question I would put to any organisation in this country that tells you it survived the collapse. Not what did you lose, and not how did you hold on. Ask them what they do differently now, and ask them to name the decision and the date.

An institution that survives has acted upon. An institution that renews has decided something. Most of the ones telling you they survived cannot name the decision.