The Sector Debrief

E8: Rethinking Risk Management in the Humanitarian and Development Sector

In this episode, Kim Kucinskas, Thomas Jepson-Lay, and Ali Al Mokdad are joined by Sabrina M. Segal, Director of The Risk Collaborative, who has spent years working on how organisations in the humanitarian and development sector actually think about risk. Her argument: risk is not compliance. It is the effect of uncertainty on objectives, and most of the sector has been doing it backwards, starting from a list of everything that might go wrong instead of from what the work is trying to achieve. The conversation moves between the practical and the structural, and Sabrina does not stop at the critique. She offers the tools. Start from the objective, then treat risk as a two-sided coin of threats and opportunities, because a sector that only looks at the downside loses half its creativity. Do the analysis upstream while the objective is still being designed, so the numbers can defend a budget when a funder reaches for the red pen. Run a three plus three strategy instead of a five year plan nobody can escape two years in. Replace endless prediction with organisational fragility work, her phrase is "don't predict, prepare", because over-reliance on one big funder sat on every risk register for years and the registers saved no one. And use the three P framework, Project, Partner, Patron, which reframes a women's organisation in Sudan judged high risk for lacking an insurance market that does not exist, and plots funders on a line from command and control to trust to see how far they will actually bend. Ali Al Mokdad reflects on how risk gets branded to win attention from headquarters, and why what a process leaves out often says more than what it includes. Kim Kucinskas builds on this with the idea of risk as a crack of opportunity, a language people in power actually listen to. Thomas Jepson-Lay presses on competing objectives and the fear of failure, and what happens when protecting the organisation quietly replaces protecting its purpose. It lands on what Ali calls the generational fight: clearing out the inherited compliance, outdated governance, and habits that drain the sector's energy, so the people who come next can spend theirs on the things that actually matter, climate, hunger, health, rather than the machinery around them. Honest thinking, shared without scripts and without talking points.

E7: Donations, Collaboration, and AI in the Room

"This is not just a funding problem. It is a social contract problem." A mother and two children spend their Sunday knocking on doors, collecting donations for an NGO. Ali's brain goes straight to overhead costs and financial flows. Then he stops. What he is actually watching is people practicing values, not talking about them. Showing their children what solidarity looks like. Asking strangers to be part of something bigger than themselves. The social contract, in its simplest form. That moment sets the tone for the whole conversation. From there, Ali Al Mokdad, Kim Kucinskas, and Thomas Jepson-Lay move through two of the sector's most overused and under-examined ideas. Collaboration, which gets declared as a value but rarely built as a discipline. When organisations face complex problems, they cannot afford simple tools. Collaboration in the humanitarian and development sector requires a specific skill set, intentional leadership, and structures that most organisations have never built. And artificial intelligence, which is generating requirements on one side and generating compliance on the other, while the humans in between are still the ones holding it together. Artificial intelligence agents can process, produce, and automate. But they do not coordinate with each other, they do not question whether what they are building is real, and they do not replace the human judgment that makes any of it meaningful. Three practitioners. No script. Thinking out loud about the sector they work in, what is breaking down, and what might actually be worth building next.

E6: The Sector Is Changing. How Do You Make Sense Of It?

“This is not just a funding problem. It's a social contract problem." Kim Kucinskas came back from a month on the road and needed to think out loud. This episode is that conversation.By using Kim’s experiences at a curated gathering of bridge builders and network weavers in Buenos Aires, and the Skoll World Forum in Oxford as real examples, Ali Al Mokdad, Kim Kucinskas, and Thomas Jepson-Lay work through what it means to make sense of a sector in transition, what is civil society actually for, and why aren't people experiencing it as a public good anymore?They talk about the difference between assimilating information and actually shifting your frame. About why staff in aid organisations are grieving the loss of an idea, not just the loss of colleagues or funding. About identity: who global south leaders are being told they are versus who they are choosing to become. And about the Three Horizons model: why the future will not be one new dominant system, and why that is actually the good news.

E5: Who Are You in the Room, Identity vs Positionality, and Leadership in Times of Disruption

What does it mean to truly know who you are — and how you show up — in the spaces you occupy?In Episode 5 of The Sector Debrief, Kim Kucinskas, Thomas Jepson-Lay, and Ali Al Mokdad are joined by Aisha Tambajang, a humanitarian and development leader who has navigated identity, race, positionality, and belonging across The Gambia, Denmark, and the UK.The conversation moves between the deeply personal and the structurally urgent. Aisha Tambajang unpacks the difference between identity and positionality — what you carry versus where you stand in relation to power — and shares what it felt like to be seen as a Black woman in Denmark when she saw herself as Danish, and what it meant to return to The Gambia and occupy an entirely different position in the same system. Thomas Jepson-Lay reflects on ancestral guilt, the discomfort of transition, and what it means to leave the formal humanitarian system while still holding humanity as a core value. Kim Kucinskas builds on this with a sharp observation — that leaders who have never had to think about how they show up are now experiencing that discomfort for the first time, and it is jarring.Ali Al Mokdad brings reflections from Dubai, where leaders are responding to institutional shock not by rushing to survive, but by investing in values-based leadership and the kind of moral clarity the sector rarely prioritizes. Contrasted with Geneva, where too many conversations, he observes, are still starting from guidelines written for a world that no longer exists. As Ali Al Mokdad put it — "I feel like I spent my time at HQ level explaining HQ to the field, and the field to HQ." A tension that defines the sector, and one that this episode does not shy away from.Thomas Jepson-Lay captures the sharpest contrast of the episode in one line. There is a rush to fix. And there is a curiosity to solve. They are not the same thing. And which one you default to says everything about where you are standing, and who you think you are in the room.Honest thinking, shared without scripts, without talking points, and with reflections.Aisha Tambajang profile:https://www.linkedin.com/in/aisha-tambajang-81129b1b0/

E4: The CEO Perspective, Urgent Patience, and Why Idealism Is Not Naivety

In this episode, Kim Kucinskas, Thomas Jepson-Lay, and Ali Al Mokdad are joined bySofia Sprechmann Sineiro, a humanitarian leader who spent three decades inside the sector, from volunteering to becoming Secretary General of CARE International. One of the leading voices for locally led development and one of the leaders of the Pledge for Change, her journey took her across the globe, leading through some of the most challenging moments the sector has faced. The conversation moves between the personal and the systemic. Sofia reflects on the tightrope she walked for thirty years, learning to speak the language of the system in order to survive inside it, while never losing sight of what she originally came to change. Kim Kucinskas and Thomas Jepson-Lay build on this, exploring pragmatic optimism, authenticity under pressure, and what it actually means to live your values when survival is on the line. Ali Al Mokdad shares a deeply personal story of crisis, isolation, and the technique he developed to hold himself together when the organisation he worked for did not. The conversation also travels into what locally led truly means, beyond the label, and the different models already proving it works, while also reflecting on a recent article written by Thomas Jepson-Lay that sparked thoughts on values under pressure, and the courage and curiosity required to lead in times of crisis. Honest thinking, shared without scripts, without talking points, and without pretending the sector is fine. Links: Sofia Sprechmann Sineiro Profile [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sof%C3%ADa_Sprechmann_Sineiro] Sofia Linkedin [https://www.linkedin.com/in/sofia-sprechmann-sineiro-72794019/] The article by Thomas , The Receptive Mind: How Knowledge Encounters Shape Us [https://thomasjepsonlay.substack.com/p/the-receptive-mind-how-knowledge?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_content=embedded-post&triedRedirect=true]