What You Built Without Knowing It

The Seven Pillars - Issue 10

Hi everyone and welcome to the tenth issue of The Seven Pillars.

Over the past year, I have done somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 job applications, interviews, and exploratory conversations across a range of sectors and roles. That number still surprises me when I write it out loud.

I developed a strategy over that time that felt sensible: translate everything I’ve done for the role I’m applying for. In other words, for every application I would tailor the language of my humanitarian career and render it in terms that the hiring manager would find credible. "Beneficiary impact" became "client success,” for example. It seemed like an essential practice to get hired and I got reasonably good at the process.

What I didn't anticipate was what that process would do to me over time.

After enough iterations of carefully adapting my objective experiences to suit the expectations of someone I didn’t know, I started to internalize the premise I had been working from. That premise was that my humanitarian career was a square peg requiring reshaping before it would fit anywhere worth fitting. If you spend long enough carving something into a different shape, you start to think of the original as the problem.

I began to devalue my own experience, gradually, the way a landscape erodes. My non-profit background started to feel like a pale alternative to real private sector credentials; something to be apologized for rather than understood on its own terms.

I suspect some of you know exactly what I'm describing.

This newsletter is not a guide to translating your NGO experience for audiences you’re trying to impress. It's an attempt to show that once you start taking an inventory of what humanitarian and development work has actually built in you. When you walk into the next interview, by all means adapt your language for the room; that’s just good communication. But walk in knowing what you're actually carrying.

I'm still in the middle of this myself, and I have no idea whether holding your head up changes the hiring statistics. But it keeps me positive and in the game on my own terms, and right now that feels like enough.

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You’ve built some sophisticated professional competencies through practice and necessity, usually without anyone labeling them as such. When we describe them to the outside world, we either reach for internal jargon that means nothing outside the sector, or we flatten them into generalities so broad that their actual depth disappears. “Strong stakeholder management skills” does not begin to describe what you did.

Most humanitarian and development professionals have learned to treat theories of change as a donor compliance requirement; something that lives in Annex 3 and is forgotten once the project begins. But even though it is often dismissed, don’t misread the value of what you were actually doing in creating these things. A theory of change is really a causal argument about how the world works. It requires you to identify assumptions embedded in your intervention, make them explicit, and specify in advance what would have to be true for your theory to be wrong. This is a level of analytical rigor that most strategic planning processes never reach. Consultants charge substantial daily rates to build exactly this kind of causal reasoning. You have been doing it on autopilot for years. And not only do you have the experience building those models, the thinking behind them is now often second nature. This is unique.

Consider what a competent food security program manager holds in mind all at the same time: seasonal agricultural cycles, local market dynamics, gender norms governing household income, government policy and its implementation gaps, the political economy of local power structures. Not to mention the technical best practices or donor compliance measures.

Designing an intervention that works coherently across all of those dimensions is a genuine feat of systems reasoning, performed routinely by people who would often describe themselves simply as “program managers.”

Humanitarian work trains you to treat your initial read of a situation as a hypothesis requiring verification, and to design processes that surface what communities actually know or want. That means consulting stakeholders at multiple levels, cross-referencing what you hear from different sources, and remaining genuinely open to conclusions that contradict your assumptions. In practice, we’ve come to rely on things like focus group discussions, literature reviews, or co-creation workshops so much that they’ve become banal. Yet, the reflexive need to cross-check data across multiple sources and consolidate information is a rare trait.

It’s what we often call “triangulation”: the discipline of not trusting any single source of information, and of building a methodology that can surface the truth. Doing it produces professionals who are unusually hard to mislead because they have spent years in environments where double checking is standard.

Humanitarian work requires making resource allocation decisions knowing that your information is incomplete, the situation is changing faster than your reporting cycle, and the cost of being wrong is measured in human welfare. The psychological infrastructure required to function well in that environment, to remain analytically rigorous without becoming paralyzed, is built through experience in humanitarian organizations.

In doing this work, we’ve been wrong in ways that mattered. This has helped us develop a calibrated confidence (we’ve grown some callouses on our egos, so to speak). This is genuinely more useful than uncalibrated confidence, because it knows its own limits.

Skills can be trained. Character is formed, and the people who have these traits most fully developed are almost always the last ones to claim them.

Humanitarian professionals have worked in direct, sustained proximity to the consequences of their decisions. When a program design is flawed or a well-intentioned intervention produces effects nobody anticipated, the feedback arrives in human terms and directly. This instills a quality of seriousness about getting things right that is difficult to manufacture through any other means. You have usually met the people your work affects, and carried some of those conversations in ways that continue to shape how you work years later.

The kind of professional ego that thrives in competitive environments, assertive and oriented toward individual credit, tends to get sanded down by humanitarian work. The problems are too large for individual heroics to be meaningful, and the local partners who do the most essential work receive the least recognition. The international staff who reckon honestly with that imbalance tend to emerge with a different relationship to their own visibility: genuinely collaborative rather than performatively so. I think we’re much more comfortable sharing credit and oriented toward making the team effective rather than making themselves prominent within it.

Humanitarian work makes failure harder to avoid. Real-time monitoring, evaluation processes, and the fact of working in communities where you can observe what your program is actually doing creates more friction between a professional and their own errors than most environments generate. Think of how much different your experience is than, say a software salesperson, a management consultant, or a marketing specialist. The professionals who engage with failure repeatedly develop the ability to hold failure analytically rather than emotionally, to say clearly what happened and what they would do differently, without defensiveness. The only other place I experienced this kind of performance analysis was in the military with its “after action reviews.” This quality can only be built by having failed in ways that have mattered and been required to look at it directly.

Corporate culture has a strong bias toward resolution: meetings end with action items and problems are things to be solved and moved past. Humanitarian professionals have spent years working on conditions that resist quick resolution; poverty, displacement, and conflict. Things that are so complex and complicated that there is no way to judge how effective your individual actions are. These “big, hairy problems,” as they’re sometimes called, get partially addressed with the understanding that the underlying dynamics will continue operating long after the program ends. Working seriously within this reality produces a cognitive patience that is genuinely unusual: the ability to remain analytically engaged over long time horizons and to distinguish between the problems that need a decision and the ones that need more understanding first.

This sector has spent a long time apologizing for itself: for its inefficiencies, its overhead ratios, its failure to operate with what looks like private sector discipline. Some of that criticism has been fair. This has only gotten worse in the past year.

I think we, as humanitarian and development professionals, perpetuate this apologetic attitude.

The traits described above require honest engagement with difficult experiences rather than simply accumulating years of service; they are not universal. But for the people who have done this work seriously and been close enough to consequence to be changed by it, the inventory is real.

By all means, keep translating when the room requires it. But know what you're translating from. And walk in like you do.

Which of these skills or character traits do you find hardest to articulate when talking about yourself professionally, and why do you think that is?

Hit reply and tell me the story.

See you next week,

Anthony Pusatory
Founder, The Seven Pillars