Heather_Landon-Notes

Public Administration from underneath the desk: Managing to deliver in UN ‘Hot Zones’ Thank you very much John, for that very warm introduction.

Good afternoon everyone.

Some of you perhaps wonder how it is that I came to be here. The reach of the UN is long, but it doesn’t stretch quite as far as Victoria, and while surprising, the Stanley Cup riots in Vancouver didn’t really warrant UN intervention.

In November 2008, I was sitting in Brindisi, Italy where the UN has a logistics base, working on a new training programme that I was developing for UN administrators, called SMART, when, quite out of the blue I got an email from someone I didn’t know.

So I asked John Langford who was sitting across from me and who I had coerced into helping me, if he knew someone named Joy Illington. He said yes and that she used to be a quiet behind the scenes mover and shaker in the provincial government as well as the Ombudsperson for UVic. So I said well, Joy wants me to be a speaker at a convention 3 years from now and was she kidding? I’m challenged to figure out where in the world I might be a week from now let alone in 3 years…and he said, “Yup, that girl’s a planner…better do it”. So, here I am and I have had 3 years to think about what to say to you and to top it off, I have the challenging ‘after lunch’ spot so I thought that I better be at the very least entertaining…

So, where to begin? I decided NOT to tell you about my first mission as an International Red Cross delegate to the former Soviet Union where I discovered on my first day in the office that Russian was the working language and my boss was a 7-foot tall Russian whose first words to me were as he towered over me pointing to a chair, were: “You. Sit. Talk”; or how I almost got arrested for solicitation for prostitution as I hung around the best hotel in Kiev waiting to hear someone speak English so that I could hopefully hire the person as a translator… or when I moved to Gaza with the UN and I had a face-to-face confrontation with an Israeli armored tank in my little red Volkswagen, which led me to wonder… “What’s the correct protocol to address a tank? Do you go up and knock on the door? Is there a door? What if there is no one home? What if someone IS home?” And I definitely decided NOT to speak to you about the time I ended up making cockroach soup in the Democratic Republic of Congo…I didn’t think that cockroach soup was an appropriate after lunch topic.

So, what stories to tell? The title refers to managing from underneath the desk, so let me tell you about the first time I found myself checking out the floor tiles.

When the Second Intifada began in the Middle East, I had been working for almost 2 years in Gaza for UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which is the only UN organisation created specifically for a single group of people, the Palestinian Refugees. There was no warning of the bombing of course, it just began and I dived under my desk instinctively. In time, we stopped doing that and we were

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instructed to troop down to the first floor where those who were in charge of our safety had determined this was the best place for us to be. I had raised the question of having 3 stories of concrete above us and what equipment could be used to dig us out since Gaza wasn’t exactly a building construction mecca, but since the UN senior management hadn’t had the benefit of all my Red Cross Disaster Management courses, these queries proved to be very unpopular, so I stopped asking and initially just found clever ways to stay on the top floor and avoid going downstairs….

Do you know that bombs whistle? You can’t hear the F16 planes because they fly too high. But I learned that a bomb makes a high-pitched whistling sound as it drops, so you end up hearing them before feeling them and shouting things like “Incoming” as you dive underneath furniture.

Eventually what happened? Well, two things…

First, I got lonely…sitting on the top floor all by myself and I remember thinking…why die alone?

And then secondly, I had a bit of an “Aha” moment and realized that this wasn’t my story. It is my story now as I tell it, but it wasn’t then as it was happening.

It was a story that belonged to the Palestinian staff…and I was just an extra character in the plot and none of this was really about me.

So…I went downstairs. And what do you do when you have no story to tell?

You listen. So, in that cramped space I listened to all the stories swirling around me…about mothers separated from their children and fathers wondering out loud which part of the city had been hit and what they would find when they went back to their homes…if they indeed had homes to go back to…

The day I went downstairs I became I a better leader because I learned how to listen. How to really listen.

This particular phase of the Palestinian conflict went on for a further three years and during that time, the landscape of the city changed dramatically, and as a result the people changed as well. Once we were bombed day and night for 23 days and our activities began to centre on forecasting whether or not we would be bombed that day or that night. Sometimes the IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces, would notify the UN of a planned bombing and sometimes not. It was a bizarre existence.

Unfortunately, I lived two blocks away from President Arafat’s compound which one might say was a “place of interest” for the Israelis. I lived on the sixth floor of a nine story apartment building and one Friday, which was a day of rest in Gaza, I was napping in the afternoon after another rather long and sleepless night of bombing and I suddenly heard a huge roaring noise that I had never heard before.

Angry, I stormed into the kitchen and tore open the balcony door only to find an Israeli helicopter gun ship hovering outside my apartment, aiming at Arafat’s compound. These helicopters are open on the side and there were soldiers kittedout sort of hanging out the side. One of them caught the motion of the door opening

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and made ready. Then he saw me, standing there in my pajamas and he put his finger to his lips for me to be quiet.

I thought: “Well alright then” and shut the door and went and sat down in the corner of the only interior wall I had in the apartment and put my fingers in my ears.

And much of President Arafat’s compound was no more…

I made the transition from UNRWA to peacekeeping hoping it would be a bit quieter. Peacekeeping is big business. Eight billion dollars worth of big business and it’s complicated. As we speak today there are 14 peacekeeping missions around the world and as we look at what is happening in a number of countries, there is a probability of more peacekeeping missions to come.

I’m going to show you a short film of approximately ten minutes, which moves from the origin of peacekeeping to present-day. The earlier portion was made for the UN 50th anniversary and I’ve added in our current reality. The photographs are all UN photos, professional and personal, pictures of the places where we work around the world, which are as beautiful as they are tragic. 8 Minutes to here.

Film 10-11 min.

My own introduction to peacekeeping was rather dramatic. I joined MONUC, the peacekeeping mission in the Congo in 2004 and while I was in Kinshasa being briefed, riots began springing up throughout the country. The initial reasoning for the riots was political and had nothing to do with the UN, but the UN is generally always a target. It is viewed by many local people as being full of rich, privileged; colonialists who drive big white vehicles.

The riots were particularly bad in Kinshasa, a city of approximately 10 million people, where, at that time, it was estimated that over a 1 ½ million people literally lived on the streets. Imagine that and compare it to the size of some of our Canadian towns and cities. Some of these people are spoilers…people of no particular political leaning who will do anything to earn money to survive. So often they are paid just to rabble-rouse.

We had been locked down for a few days as some of our vehicles were burnt in the streets and our compounds were attacked and then one morning we received an all clear so we went to work. I went with a colleague of mine to his compound which was small in UN standards, about half the size of this city block that we are on, and as we drove up, we saw two truck-loads of our soldiers driving away...and I thought this seems odd. So, we checked and they had received orders to redeploy to another part of the city where we were having problems and we were left with 8 soldiers…two on each corner and a supervisor. So think about that for a moment: Two soldiers on each corner of Douglas St. and two soldiers on each corner of Government St. We had just poured the coffee when the first rock was thrown over the compound wall. These were big rocks about the size of watermelons and we wondered how they could manage to lift and throw them over an 8 ft wall…The rocks continued and the noise and temper of the crowd grew and they started to try to

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force the solid metal gates of the compound. So we took one of our buses and backed it right up to the gate to reinforce it. The National staff in the compound sort of melted away and it ended up that there were 8 internationals left, my colleague and me plus 6 visitors…consultants and a couple of people from NY…and our 8 soldiers.

When the crowd started to burn our security buildings just outside the compound, we decided we needed a plan. My colleague hit the phones to call the main HQ building in the centre of town and see if we could get some assistance and I took the visitors and we combed through all the offices to see what food and water we had because it looked like we were going to be there for a while. So we gathered this all together in one room and then I led a discussion on what we should do if in fact we couldn’t get out and the crowd over ran the place. The ideas ranged from locking ourselves into one room or just waiting quietly. Being a bit claustrophobic, I didn’t like the idea of being locked in a room, you will recall the Gaza situation about being in the basement, thinking also that if they fired the security huts they could easily fire a locked room, so we agreed to just sit and wait for them if and when they over ran the compound.

It turned out that all the UN compounds were under attack in the city so there was no chance of further assistance. About five hours into this siege, with the sounds of the crowd rising and falling, we heard a new sound…a sort of hammering and banging. The crowd had taken the cement parking stanchions and was using them as battering rams to break a hole in one of the concrete walls of the compound.

And then we heard shots. We rushed to the window and there I saw one of the bravest things I have ever seen. At the corner of the compound, the crowd had indeed broken through the wall and made a hole large enough to drive a small Fiat through and were starting to step through the rubble into the compound. One of our UN soldiers was standing up firing over the heads of the crowd and the other was in a crouch position aimed and ready to fire into the crowd. Two men armed with two guns standing down a crowd of about 200 or so angry people armed with sticks and shovels and rocks.

As the one soldier fired, a soldier from each of the other three corners came to assist. So now we had five soldiers standing down the crowd. With guns pointed at the crowd they started to walk towards them forcing them back through the hole in the wall and then the soldiers stepped through the hole and we lost sight of them.

And it became quiet…

My colleague and I decided that this was probably the best intervention point we were going to get, so we phoned HQ and said if they didn’t come now and get us we were moving out anyway and just as we were organizing the visitors into the cars, UN Security showed up and escorted us out. We saw that the soldiers had established about a half a block cordon area and the crowd had gradually dispersed.

Now I try to phone my husband everyday no matter where I am in the world and that day was no exception and I had my usual conversation with him. “How was

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your day? Fine” “How was yours? Fine, we had a bit of trouble at the office today, but it turned out fine”.

Story telling is also about timing and some stories need to be told in their own time and that wasn’t it. Now is okay, because he has company since he is in the audience with you and hearing this story for the first time and that makes me braver.

The UN killed people that day, at one of our UN compounds where the crowd did indeed gain access and the soldiers couldn’t contain them. We killed some nationals of the country we had been sent to help.

The work we do is often dangerous and is often difficult and is it often contradictory, so we use stories to explain not only how to cope with the danger and the stress, but also how to work and manage to accomplish what is expected despite the myriad of UN rules and regulations and mind-numbing UN bureaucracy that exists.

I mentioned before that peacekeeping is big business.

Slides 8 + 1 Overview slide Peacekeeping is divided into 4 pillars.

Administration = Mission Support This is what I do: CAS Functions And these are our three largest missions.

UNMIS MONUSCO (formerly MONUC) UNAMID SMART Training: In 2005-2006, we began receiving audit reports that indicated, administratively our staff lacked training and one of the main challenges was that we were taking specialists and expecting them to automatically become administrators and managers.

• • •

To transition specialists into generalists; To capture and transition tacit knowledge into explicit or pragmatic knowledge; To capture and transition the anecdotal into doctrine.

We particularly wanted: • To facilitate non-linear learning; And,

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•

To transition from single-loop learning (doing things right) to double-loop learning (doing the right thing) to eventually triple-loop learning (innovation).

We needed: • To encourage staff to think strategically through critical analysis and • To translate intuitive judgment and tacit knowledge into pragmatic skills.

UN SMART Learning Methodology And so inside this new training programme SMART we wove in the concept of storytelling based on a blended learning methodology.

Storytelling was imbedded in two ways: First, we gave people an opportunity to role play different administrative positions in a UN mission in a mythical country called SMARTland. We called it a Day in the Life of a Mission and they had to work their way through different scenarios.

Mentor slide Secondly, we invited a group of former senior staff members in peacekeeping and other UN programmes and senior people from business and academia to act as Mentors to the participants. These Mentors were each responsible for 8 participants.

Their role was to share their own experiences, their stories, with the participants and guide and coach them in their learning.

Story-telling is the oldest form of teaching. It passes on the wisdom gained by the elders and feeds the culture. It helps explain who we are personally and organizationally and how we got to where we are. Most importantly, it articulates the tacit knowledge that we all have and it shares information. It’s a powerful way to explain problems and discover solutions. It helps us to move into the triple loop learning of innovation where we take foundation of old knowledge and build new floors with new information to create new solutions for new problems.

And whose ears don’t perk up at the thought of hearing a story?

DOG SLIDE As international civil servants, our peacekeeping parables and what we call ‘war-stories’ were perfect vehicles to teach our staff how to navigate through the UN rules and bureaucracy and get things done within the UN regulatory framework. They also helped us transcend nationalities and cross cultures and academic levels to ensure a common understanding.

And common understandings lead to solutions.

COW SLIDE

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In Sudan in 2006, an UNMIS vehicle that was driven by a Military Contingent member as part of a convoy, hit and killed a local woman who it turned out supported a large family.

After the accident, the victim’s family visited the local UN peacekeeping office.

They demanded blood compensation according to their local laws…a payment for the life of the victim. Following the visit, the Mission received a letter from the family demanding 120 cows or $45,000. Really expensive cows…

Now according to UN rules, this case should have been referred to the UN’s local insurer immediately after the accident. But instead, the SRSG, who is the Secretary-General’s representative in the country and the head of the UN peacekeeping mission, met with the victim’s family in the presence of the local leader and assured the family of the UN’s commitment to resolve the issue fairly.

In turn, the local leader assured the SRSG that he would help to negotiate fair compensation terms with the family which would have to be paid within one month of the agreement.

But, the local leader also told the SRSG that failure to pay the money this timeframe, gives the victim’s family the right to kill a member of the other tribe, which in this case actually means a member of the UN. Suddenly the case had taken a completely different turn. The local leader advised the SRSG to settle the matter quickly.

The local leader then met with the family privately and he informed the Mission that he had negotiated the value of the 120 cows from $45,000 down to $31,500.

So, I’m working in New York at the time when this fax comes in and drifts down the chain to my boss who comes and hands it to me and says: “Can you look into this? UNMIS wants to buy some cows. Sort this out.”

“Sort this out, or get this sorted” are extremely important phrases in peacekeeping UN-speak. Its short form for: Find a solution to this problem to make it go away and don’t come back until it’s over.

As this was an insurance case, the Mission had assumed that the UN global insurer would pay up.

However, the local insurer was only willing to pay the amount of compensation usually paid in such cases which was $9,000. In Sudan, the life of an individual had been assessed at $9,000.

Since the Mission had negotiated its own settlement of $31,500 outside of the amount that the local insurer was willing to pay, the UN’s global insurer said they wouldn’t pay up.

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What did this mean? This meant that the Mission had to obtain the approval of the UN Controller for an ex-gratia payment, a sum in excess of what the UN would recover from its insurers…which really meant I had to go to the Controller and explain why we needed to buy some cows and could he please write a cheque for $31,500.

Now, the UN Controller at the time was a bit of a scary person and for a few fleeting moments I thought of just going over to New Jersey, buying some local cows and shoving them on a barge with a few bales of grass and shipping them off…anything rather than facing the Controller, but the clock was ticking as the tribal leader had given the SRSG a deadline of a month and the Mission was starting to receive veiled threats of violence against UN staff.

In fact, a week after the accident, in the same town where the accident had taken place, an international staff member was shot in the leg while driving a UN Mission vehicle. It was thought that perhaps the shots were fired by one of the victim’s children as revenge for her death, but this was never proven.

Now once a problem reaches UN headquarters in New York, a cacophony of people become involved: Lawyers, HR, compensation and finance people, the list goes on and I brought all these players together to get agreement that the payment would be made. We had very little time.

But then, another problem arose. Who should we actually pay? Who were the family beneficiaries? In an extended family this is not so easy. How far down or up the family tree do you go?

In the end, the family members were identified and the settlement was finalised. The family’s criminal case against the soldier driving the vehicle was dropped, the threats against UN staff stopped and the story of the cows as blood compensation came to a close, but the concept of blood money continues to be an ongoing challenge.

Intentionally, we teach, coach and mentor our staff through stories simply because sometimes it is the only way to illustrate the complexity of a situation and we use these stories as metaphors to enable understanding of the work that we do and the lives that we lead. It is our way of creating a legacy and ‘paying it forward’ to the up and coming group of civilian peacekeepers. Unintentionally some of these stories just spill out of us as a way of communicating our hopes and our dreams, our fears and our concerns.

I love stories. In fact, I think in stories. Whenever I’m going through something difficult, I think about what kind of story I will tell afterwards and this not only gives me incentive to get through the difficult time, but also to take the initiative to try and influence the kind of ending that I want to have.

When I left UNMIS in Sudan in March of this year to go back to Congo because MONUSCO needed some assistance in sorting things out (there’s that key phrase I told you about earlier), after 4 ½ years in UNMIS, I felt that I really couldn’t put all the things I was thinking about into words, so I made a very short 3 minute

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video as my good-bye speech. I deliberately made it only 3 minutes because for me, the time passed in a flash as it often seems to in peacekeeping because of the intensity of the work and the many things that we do. The film has hidden messages and jokes that only UNMIS people would understand but there is some inherent significance in it for this audience and a particular point that I would like to make with some of you.

Goodbye UNMIS clip 3 min Peacekeeping is really about people. The people we serve and the people we work with. It’s never about the task, no matter how politically daunting or logistically challenging, we usually find a way to sort it out. It’s always about the people. Everything we do is about people. Everything YOU do is about people.

There is approximately 5,700 international civilian staff in the 14 active peacekeeping missions around the world. Of those 5,700, about 25% are women and of that 25% perhaps 6 or 7% are in the senior levels. There are maybe 4 or 5 D1 (Director-level) women in peacekeeping administration in the field around the world and you are looking at one of them.

See where I’m going with this? So I address this to my female colleagues in the audience, I need some help, so I ask you to think seriously about a career in peacekeeping. To all of you, the UN is opening its doors wider to external candidates and even though we receive approximately 500,000 applications a year, people outside the UN now stand a greater chance of being selected than they did before because we no longer given current UN staff priority to be considered for posts.

Story telling requires not only story tellers, but story listeners and I would like to thank you for listening to my stories. When you leave here and go back to your regular routine, you will tell stories about the conference and about me and the others here. And in those stories you will be sharing your learning within your circle of influence, people that you can teach, coach and mentor.

So, I leave you with this: Once upon a time there was a manager and the manager told stories…and stories were told of that manager… What stories will you tell and how will you listen?

What stories will be told of you…and what will be your legacy…?

Thank you and best of luck with the rest of your conference.

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