This paper might provoke you. It might affirm what you’ve whispered in hallways, raised on field visits, or challenged in meetings. You might love it, resist it, forward it—or dismiss it entirely… That’s the point.
It’s written to stir—to name what we often navigate in silence. Because real change doesn’t start with comfort. And urgency can’t survive routine.
The humanitarian and development sector is shifting beneath us. Budgets are shrinking. Credibility is cracking. Operations are closing. The needs are growing. And HQs—once seen as strategic engines—are now viewed as slow, costly, and disconnected from the people and places they were meant to serve.
In this landscape, bureaucracy—whether at country, regional, HQ, or donor level—isn’t just inefficiency. It’s a betrayal of the urgency we owe to those we serve.
Let’s begin with what many know all too well: the “Capital C” Cut.
A “capital C” Cut is bold. It’s when organizations go all-in—closing country operations, dismantling entire units, shutting down offices, terminating large numbers of staff, or fully localizing as the primary delivery modality. It’s sweeping. It’s disruptive. And often, it’s necessary. In many cases, it delivers results—fast, and financially sound ones. But not every challenge demands a “Capital C.” Not every shift needs to be dramatic and large scale.
Sometimes, what’s needed is something quieter—more deliberate, more precise.
That’s where the “small c” cut comes in.
While I, like many others, continue to call for reimagining the aid system—this paper isn’t about that. It’s about small wins: moves that make HQ leaner, sharper, and lighter—without losing mission.
“Small c” is the term I use for quiet, strategic reductions that unlock real change over time. Not flashy. Often invisible. But powerful. It doesn’t break the system—it tunes it.
Small cuts with the scope of targeted adjustments—small changes in cost, behavior, or process that quietly reshape how an organization works.
It’s about knowing where to cut—so something better can grow.
So let’s start.
The World Doesn’t Need Another Flight Booking—It Needs a Smarter Travel Culture
There was a time when flying across continents to attend a meeting or a workshop felt like impact. But that era is over. The sector can no longer afford to treat air travel as a default. The cost isn’t just financial—it’s strategic drift. Staff fly in and out of contexts they don’t live in, spending more on flights, hotels, per diems, local transportation, and visa processing than some field offices have for entire programs. Add to that the cost of time—days spent in transit, in jet-lagged meetings, and admin work away from the actual work.
Onboarding and training sessions held at HQ or regional hubs bring staff across borders for a week of PowerPoints they could’ve accessed online. Global workshops, technical reviews, annual meetings—each one pulling in dozens, sometimes hundreds, of people from around the world, with budgets that quietly rival emergency responses.
This isn’t about banning travel—it’s about asking better questions. Does the trip add value no one else locally can deliver? Could this workshop be run regionally, or virtually? Can this onboarding be recorded and reused instead of flying someone in for the same presentation over and over again?
A “small c” cut here means making travel the exception, not the rule—fly only when the impact is clear, the purpose is local, and no smarter alternative exists.
You Don’t Need More Tech—You Need Less That Works
It’s almost ironic. Many INGOs preach efficiency and value-for-money, yet their internal tech stacks often tell another story. Multiple project management tools, overlapping online platforms, and legacy systems continue to siphon budget—even when no one’s really using them. Licenses for systems like Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, Asana, Box, Tableau, and SurveyMonkey quietly renew each year, often bundled with new features no one asked for, and rarely challenged.
The result? A digital infrastructure built for HQ convenience, not operational necessity—especially not in conflict zones where half the tools are banned, or in remote areas where internet is a rumor and electricity comes in shifts.
The problem isn’t digital transformation—it’s digital bloat.
Before signing off on yet another license, run a usage audit. What’s being used, by whom, how often, and to what end? If the answer is “barely” or “only in HQ,” it’s time to let it go. Consider moving to open-source tools where possible. Even better: ask the people closest to the work what tech would actually make their lives easier. Then listen—and respond. Technology should remove friction, not create new layers of it.
Here’s a “small c” move that matters: pick up the phone. Call your providers. Ask to renegotiate. They’ve seen the news—they know the funding landscape is shifting, and many are open to revisiting pricing, scaling down packages, or offering leaner bundles. But they won’t offer unless you ask.
The Meeting Is the Problem—Not the People in It
Let’s be honest: NASA put people on the moon with fewer meetings than some INGOs hold just to finalize a policy draft that will probably end up forgotten on SharePoint. Somewhere, a document is still in “final version_7.3_draft_FINAL_v2” limbo.
There’s no shortage of smart, mission-driven professionals in INGOs. HQs are packed with brilliant minds—people who could probably design a satellite program if given the chance. And yet, their days vanish into a fog of recurring calls, meetings, working groups, task force, reference group, consultation loops, steering groups, and “alignment” sessions. The issue isn’t commitment—it’s structure. We’ve designed a culture where meetings are mistaken for momentum, where filling calendars is seen as doing the work, rather than making decisions that move it forward.
Time is a resource. And right now, INGOs are overspending.
“Small c“ is simple. If a working group hasn’t delivered anything in months—close it. If a task force exists only to tee up work for the next task force, disband it. Introduce a quarterly “stop doing” review and be unapologetically clear: if a meeting doesn’t produce direction, decisions, or insight, it probably shouldn’t exist.
Fewer calls. Fewer decks. More clarity. That’s the small c shift that unlocks actual progress.
Bring the Sun—Let the Zombie Projects Die with Dignity
Every organization has them: the once-promising initiatives that no one quite believes in anymore, but no one is willing to shut down. These are the zombie projects—still alive on paper, still consuming time and budget, but long past their relevance. They show up in annual workplans and KPIs, get mentioned in steering committees, and are occasionally updated just enough to appear active. But everyone knows the truth: they’re kept alive out of habit, not strategy.
The cost isn’t just financial. It’s cognitive overload, institutional drag, and credibility loss. Full-time staff are sometimes assigned to maintain the illusion of momentum—updating toolkits no one uses, drafting reports no one reads, presenting slide decks to groups that no longer steer. These projects become rituals—sustained not for impact, but for continuity.
Here’s a small c that clears the air: bring the sun. Shine a light on what’s outdated, irrelevant, or just quietly decaying. Institutionalize a sunset review every few months. Ask the hard questions: What haven’t we used, improved, or referenced lately? What’s running simply because no one stopped it? Which platforms or initiatives haven’t scaled—and don’t need to?
Ending a project doesn’t mean failure. But keeping it alive without purpose? That might.
Let it go. Quietly. With dignity. Then redirect that budget, staff time, and attention to something that’s alive and worth growing.
Share the Load—Especially Where You Already Co-Exist
I always feel inspired when I visit representation offices in Geneva and Brussels, tour regional hubs in Amman and Dubai, or speak with colleagues working out of Nairobi, Dakar, Bangkok, and New York. But each time, I also feel a quiet tension—between admiration and concern. Because beneath the layers of overhead, logistics, and administrative machinery, I know there’s real impact happening. I’ve seen it. I believe in it.
And yet, I can’t help but wonder: why does representation come with such a heavy price tag? Why do so many INGOs—often working on overlapping mandates, in the same neighborhoods, sometimes in the same building—each maintain their own office space, fleet, security setup, and accommodation network?
It’s not about cutting corners. It’s about caring enough to make the system work smarter—for all of us. Here’s a “small c” that matters: less pride, more pragmatism.
Share the load. Consolidate where you can. Keep your legal presence, of course—but do you really need a standalone fleet? A dedicated IT unit? Your own office complex, meeting rooms, and accommodation block? Joint offices. Shared services. Pooled logistics. Co-hosted facilities.
These aren’t just budget solutions—they’re solidarity in practice. Less duplication. More collaboration.
Put ego aside and do what makes sense. The kind that frees up capacity not just to save, but to serve.
Before You Close an Office, Ask If You Can Merge One
In hard times, the instinct is often to cut—shut down country programs, close regional offices, pack up and leave. I’ve been there. I’ve done it. And I know firsthand how difficult those decisions can be. When you’re staring at budget shortfalls, declining donor commitments, and rising operational costs, shutting down can feel like the only option. The numbers push you toward the exit. But what if we looked beyond the numbers?
What if instead of closing, we merged?
This is one of my favorite designs—a small c cut that opens the door to a Capital F: Future. Joint country programs aren’t radical. They’ve been piloted, tested, and proven. They come in many forms and modalities: shared facilities, pooled vehicles, joint back offices, merged security protocols. Organizations retain their identity, but reduce duplication and build resilience by operating side by side.
Merge with another INGO’s operations or program footprint. Cut overhead. Strengthen coordination. Improve reach. It’s not just cost-efficient—it’s often more impactful.
Before you shut it all down, ask the better question: Is there another INGO we can merge with—partially, temporarily, strategically? Mergers aren’t just for corporations. In this sector, they’re a survival strategy. And sometimes, they’re the smartest path to doing more—with less.
Consultants Are Not Unicorns—You Probably Already Have One
Every time a new initiative is announced, someone sends out a request for a consultant. Another consultancy. Another chunk of budget. And to be fair, sometimes that makes sense. There are moments when external expertise is essential—especially for time-bound technical work, sensitive reviews, or when in-house capacity truly doesn’t exist.
But too often, INGOs reach for consultants by default—not by necessity. The truth is, many of these capabilities already exist within the organization. INGOs are full of underused expertise—technical staff, advisors, senior leaders—people who’ve led similar work in another role, another country, another organization.
We just forget to look around before we look outside.
Here’s a small c: instead of contracting out, reach across. Second a staff member for a few months. Tap into a colleague from a peer organization. Create short-term exchanges that bring practical knowledge, lived experience, and institutional memory—without the consultancy markup or the drag of procurement cycles.
And here’s a smaller small c cut: sometimes the answer isn’t in a contract. It’s in a conversation. Ask around. Reach out to someone in your network. Chances are, someone’s done it already—and would be glad to help.
Let AI Do the Boring Stuff First
Let’s not overcomplicate it. Translation, report formatting, agenda, MoM, ToR, templates, basic analysis—these things eat up hours of staff time and budget.
AI isn’t going to write your next strategy—but it can clear the noise so you have time to think, to lead, and to focus on what truly moves the mission forward.
It can help draft reports, translate documents, summarize long meetings, and reduce the editing workload for your grants and program teams.
You don’t need a massive AI strategy. You don’t need a full digital transformation plan. And you definitely don’t need a new task force reporting to a reference group coordinating several working groups to figure it out. Just start small.
Introduce the tools already out there—ChatGPT, Claude, or whatever’s accessible—and teach your teams how to use them. Show report writers how to draft faster. Help comms staff streamline edits. Support program teams in summarizing and translating with less friction. Even modest time savings—5%—can free up thousands of hours across a year.
You don’t need to launch a whole new platform. You just need to orient, empower, and give people permission to experiment. Start where the need is clear, and the payoff will follow.
Stop Reporting for Reporting’s Sake
Reporting is a beast. Teams spend days—sometimes weeks—compiling weekly, monthly, quarterly updates, internal updates, internal progress memos. But who’s reading them? And more importantly: who’s using them to make decisions?
If the internal report isn’t prompting a decision, it’s just decoration.
Most reports are produced to satisfy perceived expectations, not to drive action. The “small c” cut? Rebuild reporting around decision points. If no one acts on the data, stop collecting it. Shift from 20-page PDFs to live dashboards. Move from “what did we do” to “what do we need to know next?” Reporting should be a tool for learning, not a ritual for compliance.
Shrink the Review Loop
How many eyes does one document need? In most INGOs: too many. Proposals pass through technical units, compliance teams, donor specialists, regional leads, and HQ reviewers—again and again. Each one tweaks a paragraph, adds a comment, revises a heading. By the time it’s submitted, no one owns it—and everyone’s exhausted.
The issue isn’t the tools or the process—it’s the culture. I used to love RASCI charts, stakeholder maps, and communication matrices. I still do, in principle. When used well, they bring clarity to chaos—defining who’s Responsible, Accountable, Supporting, Consulted, and Informed. In fast-moving, multi-stakeholder environments, that kind of clarity is gold.
But let’s be honest: some INGOs have turned RASCI into bureaucracy theater. Instead of clarifying ownership, it’s become a way to involve everyone in everything. Every task is flooded with people who are “reviewing” “consulted,” “supporting,” or “informed”—but no one is truly accountable.
Too many INGOs exhaust their people in bureaucracy theater, where ownership is blurred, trust is missing, and exhausted teams mistake collaboration for consensus.
Here’s a small c that matters: don’t just map roles—commit to them. Limit reviewers. Trust owners. And stop treating collaboration like crowdsourcing.
The fix isn’t removing quality—it’s designing trust into the workflow. Create clear editorial ownership. Empower regional or HQ reviewers. Cut it down to one review round—not three. And above all: decide who gets the final say—and move on.
Because the goal isn’t a perfectly harmonized document. It’s a strong one that gets submitted—on time, with purpose.
Stop Designing for the Exception
Policies are often built around what went wrong once. Or at least, that seems to be the practice.
Someone misused a travel advance—now everyone needs six levels of approval. A country submitted a flawed report—so now there’s a mandatory checklist for all. Someone entered the wrong number—and suddenly we have a dashboard, a compliance layer, and a double round of control reviews.
I’m joking… but you know exactly what I mean.
How many rules exist today because someone made a mistake somewhere—and now hundreds of people have to follow a process to prevent it? All under the banners of “risk management,” “compliance,” or “internal controls”—which, in reality, are often just assumptions that everyone else will repeat the same mistake.
This “design for the exception” mindset creates layers of rules, reviews, and red tape. It slows work down, chips away at trust, and drains organizational agility.
But the cost of preventing every possible error is often far higher than the error itself.
Here’s the better way—the small c: design for the 90% that goes right. Trust your systems. Trust your people. Handle exceptions as exactly that—exceptions.
Not Everything Needs a Policy—And Definitely Not Dozens of Pages SOP
In the humanitarian sector, we’ve turned policies, guidelines, SOPs, and manuals into a cottage industry. There’s a policy for doing something, a procedure for how to implement it, a guideline on how to use the procedure, and a manual on how to train people on the guideline. There’s even a template for writing policies—written by a task force that decided the font, color, paragraphs and terms.
The logic is familiar: if something isn’t working, document it. If something went wrong, tighten the rules. If something new is being introduced, launch it with a handbook. Over time, this accumulation becomes a form of institutional clutter—pages and pages of formal documents that very few read, fewer understand, and almost none apply consistently. And of course, since HQ documents rarely speak to local contexts, country offices create their own versions. Then regions create “bridges” between the two. And suddenly, the original intent is buried under several versions of the same rule.
What starts as an effort to create clarity ends up creating confusion—and cost. Because all of this requires time: to write, review, translate, disseminate, roll out, train, and eventually update again. Staff spend more time navigating documents than making decisions. And often, the people closest to the work are the ones least empowered to adapt what’s written.
Governance isn’t how much you write down. It’s how well your systems align with trust, context, and clarity. Less text. More intention.
The small c? Start with principles, not paperwork. Ask: what is the outcome we want, and what is the minimal guidance needed to support good judgment in getting there? Instead of writing a policy, try a one-pager. Instead of an SOP, test a checklist. Instead of sending many slides, host a 15-minute walk-through.
You’re Not a Publishing House—So Stop Acting Like One
There’s a temptation in HQ culture to constantly produce—announcements, newsletters, intranet articles, long internal memos, statements, monthly bulletins. Each one polished, edited, translated, formatted, and launched like it’s being submitted to a publishing award. But the truth is, most people don’t read them. Or if they do, they skim—half-engaged, juggling five other things, while scrolling through endless comms that all start to sound the same.
The cost behind this content machine is enormous. Staff spend hours drafting, reviewing, approving, formatting, uploading, tracking engagement. And much of it is pushed out simply because it’s “update season”—not because it serves a meaningful purpose.
I’ll admit it—I’m one of those people who actually reads everything. So when HQ shares an update, I dive in. But some of these are so long, I need coffee, a snack, a charger, and a nap just to make it to the end.
Here’s a small c with immediate payoff: stop writing internal communication like you’re running a media outlet. Kill the newsletter. Skip the memo. Ditch the 2,000-word update no one asked for. Instead, embed micro-updates in existing rhythms: a two-minute voice note from a director, a short video dropped into a team channel, or a live update in an all-staff call.
Use what’s already there—meetings, chats, check-ins—and let communication breathe inside natural routines. You’re not a publishing house. You’re an INGO. And if the goal is clarity and connection, then simplicity isn’t just acceptable—it’s smart. Less production. More conversation.
Sometimes You Have to Let People Go—Because We’re Not a Family
This one is hard—but necessary.
Every organization has moments where it must make difficult choices. Sometimes, those choices involve people. Staff who are no longer delivering. Roles that no longer add value. Positions that were created for a past context but no longer align with current needs. In a sector built around care and empathy, these conversations are often avoided, delayed, or softened to the point of dysfunction. But the reality remains: sometimes, cutting costs means letting people go.
INGOs often tell themselves they’re “like a family.” But we’re not. We are mission-driven institutions with public accountability, limited resources, and a mandate to serve.
Families don’t restructure. Families don’t sunset roles. Families don’t face donor audits or quarterly budget reviews. Families don’t contract you to deliver a job. Organizations do—and they must. When we avoid performance conversations, or keep redundant roles to “be nice,” we’re not protecting people—we’re protecting a system that slowly corrodes everyone else’s ability to do meaningful work.
Letting someone go isn’t failure—it’s responsibility. It’s the hard part of leadership: making choices that protect the mission, not just the comfort of the system.
It’s knowing when the structure no longer fits the mission. It’s being honest about what’s needed and courageous enough to act—ethically, fairly, and with dignity. The cost of avoiding this? Burnout for those picking up the slack. Lost momentum. Frustration that festers in silence.
The small c here is cultural. Normalize accountability. Provide support, yes—but also set standards.
Don’t confuse kindness with avoidance. Our duty is to the mission, to the people we serve not to the comfort of the system. When the time comes to make hard calls, do it clearly, respectfully, and without shame. Because the work we’re here to do—the people we’re here to serve—deserve nothing less than our full capacity.
Conclusion: Cut What No Longer Serves, Keep What Moves Us Forward
Whether it’s a small c cut—a travel line here, meeting here, a newsletter there—or a Capital C Cut—restructuring roles, sunsetting legacy platforms, or letting go of outdated staffing models—every act of reduction carries the same question: Are we cutting to survive, or are we cutting to evolve?
In both cases, the answer must begin at the heart of HQs.
If HQ is not enabling speed, clarity, relevance, and connection, then it is not simply inefficient—it is political obstruction dressed in institutional language. And what obstructs the mission should not be protected for the sake of legacy or structure. It should be redesigned—with intent, with courage, and with the people it has failed in mind.
I’ve worked in headquarters. I’ve sat in those rooms. I’ve met the passionate, principled, razor-sharp professionals who came in with bold ideas and a deep commitment to mission. But I’ve also watched the system trim their vision down to something manageable. I’ve seen creativity slowly buried under committee processes. I’ve seen talent redirected toward internal optics. I’ve seen passion give way to quiet frustration. These are not failures of individuals. These are failures of design.
“Small c” cut is not about chaos or rebellion. It’s about precise redesign—removing what no longer serves, simplifying what has become bloated, and shifting power back to purpose. It’s about culture as much as structure—about naming what we protect, and why.
Because at the end of the day, the communities we serve don’t benefit from how many policies we wrote, how many consultants we hired, or how many town halls we hosted. They benefit from an organization that’s alive, focused, and brave enough to ask: What are we really here to do—and what’s getting in the way?
And they need us to get out of our own way.
Now is the time to stop defending the system—and start designing the one we actually need.
Ali Al Mokdad
