Trust Archives - From Aid to Maturity

A Tale of Two Teams – The Good versus The Bad and The Ugly

10/05/2017 by sissel Leave a Comment

This is a story about two very different work teams I have been part of.

One of the teams was a UN team; the other was an emergency preparedness project team in Sweden. I leave it to you to guess which team was which one.

The Bad and The Ugly Team

This team was not actually a team. Its members worked side by side. The flow of information and number of interactions were kept to a minimum.

Some of the team members did not miss an opportunity to belittle other team members. It could be about rank, experience or anything else they could come up with. Many spent a lot of time and energy on dreading the next toxic email, or spiteful comment; and subsequently, strategies for how to handle them. [Read more…]

Sunk Cost Bias. What Is That?

24/04/2017 by sissel Leave a Comment

Burn money. Credit: http://taxrebate.org.uk/

Sunk cost bias is one the concepts presented in the World Development Report 2015: Mind, Society and Behaviour. Since I assume many of you do not have the time or the energy to read that report, I will try to give you an apprehensible explanation; and some reasons for why you should know.

In an aid context, sunk cost is when you persist with a project, despite its obvious flaws or absence of results. You, your office or your organization have invested so much money and effort into it that is hard to admit your failures. And the more you have invested, and the more you have lost, the more likely you are to head on; despite knowing that the project is beyond rescue.

Waste Aversion

Why do we humans do such a thing? Looking at it from the outside it seems rather stupid, to say the least. Especially if we claim ourselves to be well educated and “rational”? [Read more…]

‘If I had a Little Money’: Why Money is Not the Biggest Challenge to International Aid.

29/03/2017 by sissel Leave a Comment

ABBA – Money, money, money (pcutler, Flickr)

Ahead of last Year´s World Humanitarian Summit, Kristalina Georgieva wrote an article on IRIN about the biggest challenge to humanitarian aid not being money, but the lack of cooperation.

She was a member of the High-Level Panel on Humanitarian Financing. As a result of research made by the panel she described the aid community as : ‘An overcrowded market place… [where] turf wars duplicate effort and saps precious energy.’

I cannot agree with her more. Furthermore, this does not only hold truth for humanitarian aid but also development aid. The problems with non-cooperation within these two artificially separated communities are much the same. [Read more…]

5 Essential Features of Maturity

10/03/2017 by sissel Leave a Comment

Anne Frank (1929 -1945) – a role model of maturity

This blog is called ‘From Aid to Maturity.’ Hence, in this post I will talk to you about the importance of maturity. And why the human race, and the aid community in particular, needs to evolve from its present teenager stage into a more grown-up one. Teenagers are often self-centred and unable to see the wider effects of their behaviour.

A mature person understands that they are responsible for their own lives; and are aware of how their behaviour and actions affect other people.

Sadly, I have experienced a large number of international aid people acting highly immature. This is a business where mature behaviour should be the norm, considering the severity of the causes we work on.

Agencies and individuals acting out of self-interest, refusing to cooperate or share information, are all signs of a profound lack of maturity. Even worse are the deliberate attempts to sabotage and hurt others for some short-sighted gains. We need to grow up. [Read more…]

Why I Started This Blog

11/12/2016 by sissel Leave a Comment

This blog is my attempt to give you what I would have needed when I felt most disheartened. Both by the environment I was working in, but also by the aid community in general.

Many aid-workers do a tremendous job in difficult circumstances. The problem is that there are too many around who do not live up to the standards the organizations and the agencies have set for themselves. And sadly, that includes a large number of people in leading positions. [Read more…]