"Are you actually comfortable with change, or are you just familiar with running change processes?"
Kim Kucinskas comes back from three conferences in two weeks, the UNGA side events in New York, the WINGS Forum in Montreal and the InterAction annual conference in Washington, with a notebook full of the same words: trust, solidarity, collaboration, humility. One line from the WINGS opening stuck with her: act, as a verb, has two meanings. You can take action, or you can be an actor in a performance. Kim Kucinskas, Thomas Jepson-Lay and Ali Al Mokdad work through what those words are doing, and whether the sector is walking the talk or performing a part it thinks it is supposed to play.
Ali Al Mokdad hears the same talking points recycled in Brussels, watches them lose their meaning in translation, and asks whether an NGO class has grown up that lives in the abstract while everything real happens outside it. Thomas Jepson-Lay asks whether this season will look like a pivot in hindsight, and brings a pole and a group of people holding it, attuned to one person's breathing, to show how collaboration works and how small things become scale. For him, the leaders thriving now are the ones stepping out of familiar discomforts into unknown ones. Kim Kucinskas argues that collaboration is a discipline rather than a sentiment, that there is no risk-free choice at a crucible moment, and that the hopeful shift is towards relational and moral language.
It closes where these conversations tend to land: on leadership, with moral purpose at the centre of it.
Honest thinking, shared without scripts and without talking points.
Chapters:
(00:00) Cold open
(00:32) Kim's conference season
(01:44) Same words in every room?
(06:05) What do the words mean in practice?
(09:22) Is anything different this year?
(14:48) Is the language changing?
(17:23) Has the sector built its own class?
(21:48) Who was missing from the room?
(25:14) Is collaboration a skill?
(27:52) Comfortable with change, or familiar with it?
(33:09) How do you act when no choice is risk-free?
(34:47) Who is struggling on the other side?
(36:27) Why does the pole go up?
(43:40) How does small become scale?
(46:40) Can money and moral purpose share a table?
(50:15) Where do we leave it?