The executive head had flown in the night before, straight from briefing member states on the budget. The retreat had been planned for months; the budget news was newer than that. About twenty minutes in, they put their notes down and said something I’ve been chewing on ever since. Everyone asks what we’ll cut, they said. Almost nobody asks what the cuts will do. Our job is to make sure member states decide with their eyes open.
The room went quiet. Not an awkward quiet. More like a dozen people simultaneously noticing they’d been having the wrong conversation for months.
I’ve facilitated a lot of leadership retreats this past year, in UN agencies, research institutes, NGOs, foundations. Nearly all of them are absorbing some kind of funding shock. And the response looks the same almost everywhere: a target arrives from above, spreadsheets open, and the team starts fitting. How do we fit what we do into what we now have? Circles into squares. Serious, exhausting work. And, I’ve come to think, badly incomplete.
Rarely does anyone ask what the organisation will no longer be able to do, and for whom. Or which capacity, once gone, can’t be rebuilt within a decade. Or the question underneath all of that: what is this institution actually for, in the world that comes after this period?
The easy answer for why those questions go missing is that leaders lack courage. I don’t buy it. Secretariats answer to member states and boards. A leader who spells out the damage of every option can be accused of lobbying for their own budget. And you can’t consult staff on scenarios that aren’t decisions yet; premature openness breeds rumour just as reliably as silence does. These constraints are real. I watch people wrestle with them every month.
I also watch what the hesitation costs, and the cost splits in two.
The first part is unavoidable. Uncertainty shrinks the horizon. Ask a team that’s waiting to hear about their own posts for a five-year view and you’ll get a polite version of the only question actually in the room. That’s what contraction does to people, and no process fixes it.
The second part bothers me more. When people conclude that the future is being decided somewhere else, through a process they can’t see and were never invited into, they stop believing their thinking counts. Why do strategy if strategy happens to you? My former professor at Columbia, Joel Brockner, spent his career on this and put the finding in his book title: the process matters. People accept unfavourable outcomes at surprisingly high rates when the process was fair and their voice was real. When it wasn’t, they hold the outcome and the way it arrived against the institution. Twice the bill. At the UN, where the 2026 budget cut roughly a fifth of posts, staff representatives have said publicly that detailed proposals never reached them for consultation. I can’t adjudicate the competing accounts from where I sit. What I do see, in the rooms I work in, is the second bill being paid.
That’s why the retreat moment stuck. The executive head refused the compliance frame without refusing anyone’s authority. The decision stays with member states. Our job is to make its cost legible before they take it. A different job from absorbing a target, and versions of it exist at more levels than people assume.
A leadership team can attach a plain decision paper to every option that goes upward. What stops and for whom. What can’t be rebuilt, and on what timescale. No advocacy, just consequences, so the people who own the choice also own what it does.
A manager inside the structure can do the honest sorting: separating what’s already decided from where input still counts, and saying out loud what nobody knows yet. Consultation only where it’s genuine. Brockner’s evidence says that kind of candour buys more trust than comfortable vagueness ever has.
And any team can protect one conversation from the fitting exercise. One session, one question on the table: what must we still be able to do in 2031? Not because anyone knows what 2031 looks like. Nobody does, me included. But a team that has stopped asking has already taken the passenger seat. This period will end. When, and on whose terms, no one can say. Institutions that spend it only shrinking will arrive at the other end smaller. The ones that use it to work out what they exist for will arrive ready.
The quiet in that room did break, by the way. What followed was one of the better strategy conversations I’ve heard in a long while. It started with one leader widening the question from what do we cut to what will they be choosing.
