Survival mode is the wrong instinct.

In July 2025 I closed a two-day workshop in Geneva on the digital future of humanitarian supply chains. DG ECHO had convened it, with the World Economic Forum and the International Rescue Committee, and HELP Logistics was there as strategic advisor. Two days earlier I had opened it by admitting that I was old enough to remember the Atari, and that in 2025 I could no longer introduce myself without help from ChatGPT. The room had produced what it was asked to produce, a set of shared commitments across data, systems, governance and funding. My job was to sum up. Instead I said the thing I had been holding back for two days.

Every organization I speak to in this sector, UN, NGO, government, private partner, is operating in survival mode. Costs are rising. Funding is tightening. The gap between need and capacity is widening. None of that was news to anyone in the room. What I wanted to name was what organizations do under that pressure, because I have watched it in three industries and it is the same every time. The instinct is to preserve what we know. To make cautious adjustments. To build around the problem with more tools, more systems, more internal capability, so that whatever happens next, at least it happens on equipment we own.

I do not think that is the path back to resilience. I think it is how good organizations become expensive ones.

The alternative starts with a question most leadership teams avoid because the answer costs something. What is our core business. For a humanitarian organization it is making sure people receive the assistance they need, whether that is health, food, water, protection or shelter. So I asked the room directly. Does that core business include operating logistics networks at global scale? Does it include developing and maintaining enterprise-grade software? I said I believed the answer was no, and I still do.

That is not a comment on how well the sector does either of those things. Some of it does them very well. It is a comment on whether it should have to. Every system an organization builds for itself is a system it must now staff, secure, upgrade and defend in a budget meeting, forever, against people who could do it better, faster and cheaper because it is the only thing they do. Some agencies have already moved logistics toward shared global models run by specialist providers. Digital systems are the same decision one step later, and the sector is still building them agency by agency, often with parallel grants from different donors, for tools that do not talk to each other.

I want to be careful about what I am and am not arguing. I am not arguing that humanitarian organizations should hand their operations to whoever bids lowest. The principles that govern this work, neutrality, impartiality, humanity, are not negotiable, and speed and cost are not always the right measures. I am arguing that being honest about what you are best at, and letting others do the rest, is a leadership decision, and that under pressure it is exactly the decision that gets deferred. It is easier to defend a system you already run than to explain why you stopped running it.

I have watched this from more than one side. I spent my first five years as an engineer at Ricardo, a consultancy that existed because carmakers had decided that some engineering was better bought than built. General Motors, Ferrari and Rolls-Royce did not lack engineers. They had worked out which capabilities were theirs to hold and which were not. Later I ran a 24/7 IT operations team for a telecoms company in Zurich, and lived the other side of it, the internal function that has to justify its own existence every year. The question is the same in every industry. Only the vocabulary changes.

Yuval Noah Harari puts the general case plainly in Nexus. "Technology just gives us power. It doesn't tell us what to do with this power. The same technology can be used to create a totalitarian state or a vibrant democracy. The difference is the human institutions." The tools in this field are not the constraint. What we decide about them is, and deciding is the part organizations in survival mode postpone.

I ended in Geneva with Kodak, and I will end with it here, because the story is usually told wrong. Kodak did not fail for lack of innovation. It invented digital photography, in its own laboratories, in the 1970s. What it could not do was let go of the business it believed it was in, and so it kept the film factories and lost the company. It had the tools and not the will to change.

We do not need another crisis to force our hand. The diagnosis is done, in Geneva and in every similar room I have sat in since. What remains is the decision, and a decision that costs nothing is not one.

The full argument runs through Pathways and Power: who decides, whose name is on it, and what holds that in place.