Lessons in Building Capacity and Leadership in Post Conflict Environments

Andy Thompson speaks with John Collicutt, an experienced leadership, crisis management and security consultant, trainer, author and public speaker with specific, long-standing experience in austere, conflict and post conflict environments in the Middle East and Africa.

How have you developed a career in leadership and crisis management training?

I was a British Army officer for 21 years and left the Army in 2006. I worked in the UK public sector, in economic development, for a couple of years. I then decided, from my experience in the public sector, that leadership skills were in high demand so became involved in leadership development, capacity building and training. Through that, I went back out into former conflict affected countries – places like Iraq around the Basra region, and into Northern Iraq, as a member of the UK Stabilisation Unit – into Afghanistan, into Sierra Leone, and most recently into Libya.

My focus has been about getting leaders to perform better. In some cases, it is about getting leaders to start to perform, and in other cases it is about improving what they do and improving the capacity around them. Due to the nature of those environments, a large chunk of that has been framed around how you make that environment safe so that you can operate.

How would you characterize your training?

The training is consultancy-based. It differs in delivery for each client, but the basic structure is broken down into four general sectors. The first is an overview of “what you understand about leadership”. The second is thinking about the vision. Leaders have got to “take” people somewhere – that is what leading is about: getting them to understand their vision. The third is about how they engage with people, how they interact, how they create empathy, how they get people to buy in and follow. The fourth is about delivery. How do you measure what you are doing? Relatively easy on an oilfield, where you are pumping barrels of oil per day, but in lots of other different organizations, and even in different parts of an organisation, you need different ways of measuring how successful you are – or are not.

I worked for a few years in southern Iraq, on the second biggest oilfield in the world, the Rumaila oilfield, where we were delivering quite a lot of planned training to about 500 Iraqi leaders. The oil fields in Iraq needed to set themselves up so they could move up to international standards and they needed to lift the local Iraqi leaders up to a standard where they could work at the international level. We would try to unpick their understanding of leadership.

People from many of these environments have not necessarily had the role models that we think are the right ones. They have been very autocratic. The oldest people always have the answer. Everyone defers to them and gets on with it. We had to unpack that so that the people would start to work better on the oilfields.

Much of that is about getting an understanding of what is important to those people. I mention that because when we did all our assessments, we found out that in those countries, typically, people are worried about their families and the security of their families and putting your head above the parapet can be a challenging and sometimes dangerous thing.

How does the austere nature of the environment impact on the training you deliver?

Taking Sierra Leone as an example: I did not deliver the formal training in the same way as Iraq. In Sierra Leone, I was the mentor to the Head of National Security – his official title was National Security Coordinator. Sierra Leone is a wonderful country, but very poor, and so everything that we tried to do, or tried to help him with, was on the basis of little to no resources, and how can you therefore make things work in a country where everything is essentially basic?

What trends have you witnessed in training delivery in the environments you describe?

Interestingly, Covid is obviously a worldwide problem – but for countries that are coming out of conflict (countries that are living in a very austere environment) it’s one of just a number of significant challenges. It may not be the number one challenge that it is in the United Kingdom.

I’ve just been operating in Libya and working with a number of Government of National Accord authorities and, whilst they are aware of Covid, they are more aware that they haven’t done anything for ten years: that they have got no infrastructure to perform; that have no track record of performance; they have no people with capacity to perform. So, yes, Covid is a challenge, but it is challenge Number 14. Challenge Number 1 is to get people to start to buy into what they can possibly do, and how safe they feel about doing it.

If you have been in a country where nobody has delivered major projects for ten to eleven years, it takes a lot of courage to be the first person to put your head up and say, “I can deliver something, I can make it happen”, and there are a lot of detractors.

If you think about places like Libya and Iraq, they have had very powerful leaders in the form of Gaddafi and Hussein, who have been the ones who have been able to do the thinking in the country. Nobody else has been permitted to do it. Everybody else has therefore got into a habit of not necessarily being the person to put their foot forward to make suggestions, because that has been of a risk to them. So, when we talk about risks and getting people to understand the threat environment that they operate in, a large amount of it is the threat to their position and their ability to sustain their family in their family groups. In places like Sierra Leone, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, families, and tribes still have a very important call on you. They are your first responsibility and that your nation may only be your third or fourth responsibility.

How do you approach the issue of “professional standards” in your training niche?

Whenever you do this type of work, the first thing is that people must buy into you as a character that they trust and believe in. It would not matter if I came with all the Chartered Management Institute qualifications or a business school behind me if I just could not create empathy with the people that I am working with. If I could not understand the pain or the challenges that they are having.

So, in those types of environments, you have got to have credibility as an individual and you have got to be able to create that quite quickly. That is not necessarily always about selling your hard skills or qualifications, that is about selling you as an individual – someone who can relate and that they are happy to sit down and work with.

Stanley McChrystal used to push a person that he worked with, who wrote a book called Three Cups of Tea which asked the question why anybody would share anything of value with you and start to buy into you unless they have had at least three cups of tea with you. That is probably out by a factor of 10, but what you must do is be prepared to invest time and effort into it. There are many consultants who will, unfortunately, do their work and disappear and do not necessarily have to live with the results of it. That is the nature of consultancy. If that is what you convey – that you are happy with that mindset – then it comes over in your delivery and that can be off-putting. So, you must show that you are genuine and that you are looking to work and make a difference. Only then I found that people start to enquire about how I can take this onto a formal form of recognition, which is when I have fallen back on the Charter Management Institute, for example. That is when some of their offerings come into play.

How has your leadership training delivery evolved in the context of the cultural differences of the places you have operated?

This medium [remote networking] is the biggest change in the last couple of years in that everything previously used to be face to face. Now we have the opportunity to do it at a distance. I find, in the countries that I have worked in, that face to face is still paramount. Sitting down and working through with your primary point of contact, spending time with them to understand what it is they want. Yet, if I go into Sierra Leone with the same framework as I used in Iraq and said, “that’s what we’re going to do”, then I am simply trying to force something down people’s throats.

So, sitting there, face to face we tend to tell people what we can do. Actually, what we need to be doing with the people, these places, is understanding what their problems are and what their pain is. We need to be a bit more of the GP (General Practitioner). We need to listen to them and to be prepared to diagnose it. The four-step model I talked about applying in Iraq would not have worked in Sierra Leone because they were all focused on resilience and ways of stepping forward resilience. I may have packaged some of that into those same groups, but actually I had to address it all in a different way.

What do you find challenging about providing this sort of training in such environments?

Firstly, as a consultant, I can be employed by HM Government or by an Oil company to work, as I mentioned, with the Iraqi oil leaders. In that case, it’s really easy for the IOC (International Oil Company) to think that they’re perfect in their approach. They say “work with the local leaders, make them better and then they’ll fit in”. Well, actually, you have to be prepared to challenge both levels because we found that we needed to go back to BP and say “we’re doing these changes to bring on people, changing them culturally so they will fit into this fast-moving international environment – but you need to change the way that you’re talking to and approaching them because you are very much “pump oil, pump oil, pump oil” –  task focused – and that’s not where their motivation lies, because they find that, in some ways, threatening”. If you can address the way that you think and approach them. For example, you could say “it will make a real difference to your families, to your communities, if we can pump more oil this is going to bring you better stability; this is going to bring you better infrastructure”. Then they may have found a better way forward. One of the challenges is that often, when people say, “I need you to work with this group of leaders or this person is a leader”, you also have to work with the people with which they come into contact.

Secondly, when I arrived in Sierra Leone, it was at the height of the Ebola outbreak. Ebola is a horrific way to die and it is transmitted through bodily fluids: sweat can come through tear ducts, sneezing, that sort of thing. Rather like a “cold” COVID here in the UK, we were told not to shake hands. After a couple of weeks, I was invited to lunch with the Head of National Security, the National Security Coordinator, to sit down with him and three of his directors. This happened probably three days a week from then on. Lunch was a shared bowl of food, which you are taking with a spoon and just keep serving you out of the single plate. The big challenge was everything I have been told about Ebola protection meant I would upset my client and I would not be able to bridge and build the relationship that I wanted with him and his directors. So, the challenge is that you need to be prepared to challenge the ways in which you operate, if you choose to operate in those countries. I have chosen to operate in those countries because I found that doing leadership development and capacity building in the United Kingdom was largely an umbrella protection operation for companies. They were not really interested. Whereas I found in countries that are coming out of conflict, there are people who genuinely want to improve.

What frustrates you about the training environment you operate in?

I think that the people I have worked with – a large number of them – have been back in the United Kingdom or in European countries and have not necessarily visited the countries that they are trying to support or help and deliver their projects. Therefore, they have a very black and white view of what should be delivered and therefore what they should be resourced.

They get you on the ground and after a couple weeks, you might come back and say, “OK, but I think we also need to do the D, E and F, not just A, B and C”. The response can be “Well, our programme is all about ABC” and that is where their focus is, and they do not want you to do anymore. That then compromises your ability to do A, B and C, because you cannot get into wider things. I was sent to Sierra Leone to help with the National Security Coordinator and the Office of National Security to improve its ability to deliver resilience to crisis response operations. That was my remit, and I was told not to get involved in everything else – but everything else was 90 percent of his day job, and if I didn’t get involved in everything else, then I would never have got office time and never have got credibility. I needed to go beyond those barriers and boundaries to be able to get the airtime I needed to get in to do the main tasks that I wanted.

So, with all the best will in the world, and best intentions, we can sometimes be ham fisted in doing what we need. I am reminded of an occasion that happened in the Balkans. I was operating in Bosnia and we had one particular charity who offered supplies to give to Christian children. You just think, “Wow, this is a country that is being torn apart through ethnic cleansing and ethnic identities. I cannot go into any camp and say, “all the Christians over there and all the Muslims over there!”” That charity, completely well-meaning, was just going to screw it up! I have seen a number of examples of that. In Afghanistan, for example, USAID was gifted water pumps in the district I was in, to be given out to farmers in that district. Water flowed north to south. We were safer in the north. So, we gave that to the farmers in the north. They pumped water out the canals and irrigation system. In the south, people became aggressive, and everyone said, “well, it’s the Taliban”, but on reflection, actually, no, we have pumped the canals dry. They have got no water. Our good solution in the north has been the catalyst for further disturbance in the south. We have to think about things in a much broader context, and be prepared to stop some of the well-meaning, well intended things and think about second order consequences.

What operational differences between market sectors would you highlight?

If I were to highlight anything in particular it would be to “strict” security practitioners: the notion that you also need to think about how you enable other people to do their business, as well as secure it! Many security practitioners try to talk you into doing nothing because everything is risky and too difficult. We have got to find a path between that. If we do not do that, nothing will move forward.

Oil and Gas is a ruthlessly competitive market. In some ways, they absolutely need to take risks by getting people into places so they can start their operations. But they need to be quite black and white regarding when they should close down or curtail operations. I think they generally do a rather good job.

Conversely, I find that some NGOs can get themselves into the state where they have talked themselves into getting into a country and then not moving beyond the hotel that they are in. If they are going to get themselves into a country in the first place, then they need to have the risk appetite and the ideas about how to stay safe, to allow them to at least leave the front door.

When in Libya, at the end of 2020, I would talk to, or hear about, organizations who wanted to work in Libya but were doing that from Luxembourg or Tunis or from Rome or from Berlin. You think, well, actually, you can come here, you just need to take some precautions. There are plenty of other countries I would be more reluctant about travelling to than Libya.

Where have seen the effect of your training have the biggest results?

I was very fortunate that during work we did in southern Iraq and with the Rumaila Operating Organisation – and I’d like to think we had a part to play – they managed to boost their oil output significantly to the benefit of all in that area. So, I think that was a great success.

I was most proud of my time in Sierra Leone. The Office of National Security should have always been the organisation which ran the Ebola response operation from a strategic national level, and it had failed completely, and it failed to the extent that it even denied Ebola was a problem, whilst the international community was spending a billion dollars trying to sort it out for them. When I went out there, the National Security Coordinator would not even step into the National Ebola Response Centre, NERC, because he was criticized and given a hard time by everybody. When I left, he was still being criticized by a lot of people, but at least he was active in the Ebola response. At least he stepped up and we got him through the door, and we got his organisation to get involved in it. They still have a long way to go. I think that is the type of development that would have needed another 18 months to two years to really embed fully, but I was proud of that as a success.

On the flip side, have you had an approach not work in the way intended?

We were operating in a country where we had put an awful lot of effort into trying to put together a support programme and, when it came to the final decision point, we managed to mess up our delivery to the senior ministerial-level leaders. We lost all the development and good opportunities we created and effectively got booted out! That was based on us being ham fisted and a bit arrogant in the way we were going to approach a final meeting just. I am always aware that when you are operating in some of these countries, we can run the risk of sounding colonial and sounding like we know best – and what goes well in the United Kingdom – what works well to organisations in London or Liverpool – does not necessarily work well anywhere else in the world.

What advice would you give to potential clients looking to buy your consulting?

We talk about ground truth. I always think it can sound arrogant saying “you don’t know what it’s like on the ground, you don’t understand the situation”, but often I think we find ourselves in the position where we make some very broad assumptions about the way we want bits of work to go and we’re not prepared to listen to evidence or advice which is counter to the way that we want to take up projects and programmes forward.

So, if I were talking to a company that was looking to use me, I would say you have to be prepared for the fact that I am going to say some uncomfortable things, if you want me to work in that environment. It may be that you have got it right and you are moving in the right direction but, in those environments, the right direction tends to change every two months anyhow, and the people in power can very quickly change what they want to have delivered and what they think is important. You need to have very clear lines of communication back with whoever you’re working with. You need to be able to have some very honest discussions to say, actually, if you want to take this forward, you might want to think about doing ABCDE and F, or there is a cost to doing these things and the cost is X and that brings with it risk at the following levels. So, if you are going to employ consultants in any of these areas, you have to employ them with the understanding that you are going to continue to give them access to you, to talk to you and discuss the problems. If these were easy problems, these countries would not be in the mess they are in. These are highly complex, highly messed up places.

It can take months to unravel a problem, to work out that you can be there for eight months and only in the seventh month realise that somebody has been trying to pass you a message from day one and you have just been too blind to it. You need to change direction. You need to adjust what you are doing. If you do not have that way of talking back to whoever is employing you to do that task, then you are going to keep going down rabbit holes.

It is often a figurative minefield. When you arrive in a new place, they are looking at you, they are working out if they trust you, whether they are even going to bother to spend any time with you. You are trying to work out what it is that they all want and what makes a difference and how you can do it and all the things that will affect it positively and adversely.

As you say, these are highly complex and challenging places, and it is easy to make mistakes. What can you point to as a learning experience born from a mistake?

We worked with the Iraqi oil leaders and we were delivering one of our modules in a hotel in Istanbul. On the last day, we were all having lunch together – probably about 20 people in the room. We discussed that there has been a big debate in the UK about whether we had done the right thing by going into Iraq, and helping in Iraq, and what was their view. To a person they said: “you’ve done the right thing, all our lives aren’t great now, but we have more freedom”.

Then they all started to unwrap their personal stories. It had probably taken us a couple of weeks to build up to the trust where they could do so, but I found that with everyone – and some of them were more harrowing than others – everyone had a story which put you on your back feet, which made you think “I’ve personally underestimated the scale of some of the personal challenges that you all face”.

That is just something that you need to be aware of. Again, you have to keep unwrapping different onion rings to find out and to try to work out what it is that is going to make the biggest impact where you are choosing to work. I think by doing that, you then start to appreciate what you are doing is also a privilege: you are getting a view on a whole community that, in the case of those Iraqis, again, if you watch the news, you tend to think they are gruff, hard people, all prepared to kill you. Whenever I walked into a classroom, they would all have their gruff, hard face on. I found that within five minutes they were very funny, prepared to laugh at anything, had a very childish sense of humour and were great people to work with.

On every course we did, we could guarantee the end of the first introductory phase, we would have somebody towards the end of the first week ask a question along the lines of “do I always have to follow what the oldest person tells me to do?” You realise then that you are starting to unpack in their minds some of the cultural constraints and the sort of role model constraints that they have had, and the way they have been brought up. I would also say that in those environments, when they have brought ladies onto the courses, that they have been the standout students. You talk about people wanting to learn? – my goodness, do they want to learn! Do they want to make a difference!

What qualities do you admire in training providers you have been engaged with?

I have not come across many other training organizations because I’ve tended to be a single consultant or been the sole provider onto an oil field or into an organisation, so I cannot comment on training organizations, per se. What impresses me about individuals that I meet is that those who have the patience to try to understand tend to be those who have longevity in those fields.

I have often discussed with friends how we can be hugely patient working with our clients, yet we can be quite impatient with our own support services, who should know better and should be able to pay on time or should be able to make sure that our flights are sorted, or our mobile phones work. Those who are successful can put all that to one side and still give a huge amount of patience and personal focus, even within a group of 50 people. Recently I delivered some leadership presentations in Libya to a group of 50 people, but over each of the breaks I would be working with individuals to try to resolve their individual issues. I probably only dealt with 12 people during the whole time because each one is a 15-minute, 20-minute conversation, but it’s having the patience to do that, which is what makes those organizations successful.

The ability to entertain is another key attribute that makes people stand out. I realise that if you are teaching “Health and Safety in Confined Spaces”, for example, then being entertaining is probably not the easiest thing, but in Leadership Development and in Capacity Building, you have to make it sound like there is a better promised land, that there is a higher place to go to, and you have to be prepared to lift people and motivate them. One of the challenges is you have got to get them to start to believe that they can take a step forward.

You write a blog, www.streetsafethinking.com and have an associated book. What was the catalyst for this and the intention behind it?

I have two sons, one of whom is trying to be an actor in London, and he used to attend a weekly acting class by London Bridge. Had his acting class been a day later in the week, he would have been on London Bridge when the terrorist attack occurred. I had a chat with him afterwards and found myself thinking that I spend a lot of time working in environments where I am aware of my own safety and security and things that I want to do myself, and I’m perhaps not passing on some of the some of the basic or general lessons and skills that you should have, around where you are.

It did not have to be from terrorism, it can be because somebody likes your mobile phone. Somebody sees you as a target to take your money from you or to assault you. So, Street Safe Thinking is all about trying to pass on some of those ideas and skills in a way which makes sense to people in the United Kingdom – in relatively safe countries like our own – but ideas that they could start to habitualise and it will help them over time: the idea is to help people to take more responsibility for themselves and build their own good safety habits for life.

John can be contacted via email at john@streetsafethinking.com 

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