Thriving and Surviving in the UN System

20 Years of Service – 20 Lessons Learned

The end of 2025 marked a personal milestone: twenty years as a UN staff member. It also marked a decision: to leave, and to write honestly about what I had learned.

The twenty lessons that follow grew out of the work I am most proud of: co-founding two pioneering programmes on Digital Sustainability and Environmental Peacebuilding, contributing to over 20 UN publications and books, building capacity in more than 30 countries, raising over $75 million for work on the ground and building new ecosystems of actors, including the Coalition for Digital Environmental Sustainability (CODES) as well as the Environmental Peacebuilding Association (EnPAx). These lessons are also, in equal measure, why I eventually chose to move on.

In my experience, the qualities that enable impact inside large institutions, including agency, creativity, a willingness to act before the system is ready, are often the same ones that, over time, institutions find hardest to accommodate.

This piece was ready in January. It is reaching you six months later, at the UN’s request. Draw your own conclusions (spoiler alert: the honesty of my account was not embraced).

As I reflect on my time within the UN, I feel deeply grateful for the opportunities I have had and for the influence and impact of that work. There is no need to repeat the details in this piece; they are well documented on my website, and a visual overview of key highlights can be found here. What feels more valuable to share is what I actually learned along the way: the patterns, trade-offs, and realities of working inside complex international systems. The very things that do not often make it into the official record. Many of them are, in fact, the antithesis of what large bureaucracies reward, precisely because they require disruption, creativity and risk-taking to work.

At their core, many of them are about the tension between old power and new: between institutions that remain hierarchical, centralized and closed, and a world that increasingly runs on networks, participation and shared agency. They are also an honest reckoning with what large institutions find genuinely hard: complexity, uncertainty and the exercise of personal judgement. That is what makes them uncomfortable to name.

These lessons also start from a simple reality: everyone in the system is human. Leaders, managers and colleagues all carry strengths, blind spots, fears, incentives and personal pressures. Very few people are purely good or bad actors: most sit somewhere along a wide spectrum. Learning how to work constructively with imperfect people, including yourself, is as important as understanding formal rules, mandates or structures.

These reflections are offered for colleagues already in the system and for those preparing to enter it. They are not abstract principles, but practical observations drawn from years of experience about power, incentives, relationships, timing, and resilience. They aim to be honest about constraints, but grounded in the belief that meaningful change is still possible.

There are twenty lessons in total, one for each year of service. Together, they form a kind of navigational checklist. Use them to sharpen your impact, protect your integrity, and sustain yourself over time. Ignore them at your own peril.

This is a long piece. That is deliberate. Complex systems deserve more than slogans, and twenty years of practice cannot be reduced to three bullets. You do not need to read it in one sitting. Dip in, skim, jump around, and return later. Treat it as a field guide, not a soundbite. Some lessons will resonate immediately; others will only make sense in hindsight. They have emerged from a mix of success and failure. Many may seem obvious, and all of them apply far beyond the UN system. They are precisely the truths that deserve to be restated and kept front and centre in our daily work, helping us thrive and survive.

So let’s begin.

Pillar I: Navigating the human element

1. Managers and teams can make or break you.
   The right manager and team multiply your impact; the wrong fit quietly undermines your agency, reach, and results. Seek managers who genuinely believe in your talent and avoid those who do not. Trust your instincts. You will know the difference. Be especially cautious of leaders driven by insecurity or ego; their need for control will limit both your growth and your effectiveness. Never underestimate how decisive managerial backing is for real impact. Ideas rarely succeed on merit alone; someone senior must be willing to protect your space when it matters. Manage up for survival, and manage down for impact. One helps you stay in the system; the other determines whether your work in it actually matters. When possible, choose your manager and team as carefully as you choose your mission, and if the fit is not right, adjust early.

2. Be ruthless at prioritizing your time, attention and life energy.
   Your energy and time are finite. Spend them where influence and impact are possible. The international system excels at generating meetings, processes, and events that feel important but often lead nowhere. Do not confuse activity with progress. If possible, before committing to a process or action, ask whether there is a real pathway to influence or change. Avoid decisions driven by fear of missing out (FOMO); that is how time disappears without impact. Learn to distinguish signal from noise and have the discipline to cut the rest. Distinguish between tasks that require your full effort and those where the minimum adequate will do.

3. Institutions are inherently tribal. Loyalty often shapes access and protection.
   Formal hierarchies never tell the full story. Influence flows through informal networks, affinity groups, shared histories, and personal loyalties. People tend to protect those closest to them first, whether by department, mandate, profession, or shared career lineage. Information travels along these social pathways as much as through official reporting lines. To understand how decisions are really made, map the tribes as carefully as you map the organizational chart. Every institution has formal power and informal power, and they rarely belong to the same people. Effective navigation requires understanding who exercises each and how influence is actually wielded.

4. You may love your work but the organization cannot love you back.
   You may care deeply about the mission, but institutions are not built to care about individuals. Careers end, priorities shift, and structures forget. No one is irreplaceable. What endures are your reputation and the relationships you build along the way. Your value will also shift over time. What makes you essential today may be irrelevant tomorrow. Stay self-aware, adapt your contribution, and never confuse your role with your identity. The institution may not be able to love you back, but people will. Real community is built person to person, and it can sustain you.

Pillar II: Decoding system mechanics

5. There are no neutral solutions, only trade-offs.
   Behind every decision or project lies a web of interests, incentives, alliances and institutional positions. Every intervention creates winners and losers and often activates fear and resistance long before it generates support. Understanding who stands to gain, who stands to lose and what different actors are trying to protect is not optional. It is the work. In complex systems, progress rarely comes from consensus. It comes from negotiating a workable balance between competing interests and perceptions. For every project or policy, you should be able to explain the trade-offs it creates, not only the benefits it promises. If you cannot identify who bears the cost of change, you do not yet understand the system you are trying to influence.

6. Follow the money and understand the story your funder needs to tell.
   Budgets reveal real priorities. What gets funded gets done. But funding is never neutral: every donor operates under its own pressures, mandates, incentives, and political constraints. To secure and sustain resources, you must understand what success looks like for the funder, not only for your project. Effective financing is not about persuasion; it is about alignment. Help your donor solve their problem while advancing your mission. When your objectives reinforce their mandate, funding becomes durable rather than transactional. In the UN, ideals may inspire action, but funding sustains it, and narrative legitimises it. If you do not understand how money flows through a system and the incentives it creates, you do not yet understand the system.

7. Incentives, not ideals, shape actions.
   Incentives are the hidden architecture of progress. People follow the rewards they can see. If incentives reward caution, you get bureaucracy; if they reward initiative and innovation, you get change. Misaligned incentives quietly kill more ideas than active resistance, because they make inaction the rational choice.

   In many large institutions, senior leaders are rewarded less for vision and experimentation than for procedural compliance and minimizing financial, political, and legal risk. Even well-intentioned people therefore default to caution. It is tempting to blame individuals, but their caution usually reflects what the system rewards, not who they are. However, incentives are not fixed. When risk-taking is protected, learning is valued, and failure is not punished, institutions can change far faster than anyone expects. Change accelerates not when ideals improve, but when incentives finally align with them.

8. Governing collective action remains the hardest problem to solve.
   The hardest part of collective action is not agreement on goals, but the design of governance structures that allow actors with unequal power, divergent interests, and misaligned incentives to work together with real accountability. Most initiatives fail not because the idea was wrong, but because the governance was too weak to withstand pressure. Shared governance is especially vulnerable to leadership transitions. New leaders reset priorities, dissolve alliances, and reinterpret mandates through their own lens. Unless roles, decision rights, and accountability mechanisms are clearly anchored, progress unravels quickly. Invest in governance early. Design structures that can survive personalities, politics, and turnover. When governance is done well, it does more than prevent failure; it creates the conditions for trust, ambition, and collective courage.

Pillar III: Mastering execution

9. Creative hacks and informal agreements work, until they don’t.
   Shortcuts, side deals, and workaround solutions can accelerate progress in rigid systems. They are often necessary in the early stages, especially when formal processes lag behind reality. But when pressure increases, including political scrutiny, leadership change, crisis, or scale, these informal arrangements tend to collapse. Use hacks to explore and experiment, but do not confuse speed with durability. Lasting impact requires ideas to be embedded in clear structures, roles, and processes. Innovation needs experimentation, but endurance demands structure.

10. Governments define the UN’s limits, staff have agency and define its impact.
    Member States are rarely aligned on what they want from the UN. When national interests overlap, political space opens and progress becomes possible. When major powers diverge, paralysis sets in, mandates stall, funding freezes, and momentum evaporates. Governments provide mandates and resources, and they set the outer boundaries of ambition. But within those constraints, it is the integrity, persistence, judgment, and agency of staff and consultants that determine what actually changes. The system constrains individuals, but it does not eliminate agency. Work within the mandate, but never underestimate how much impact depends on how you show up, what you protect, and what you choose to push forward.

11. If it is not radically collaborative and focused on solving real problems, it will not last.
    No project succeeds in isolation. Real scale and lasting impact come only through co-creation with partners, stakeholders, and most importantly, the people who live the problem you are trying to solve. Never start with the technology or the toolkit; start with the need, the context, and the capacity of those who must carry the work forward. The goal is not to be the hero. It is to empower national experts, institutions, and communities to lead and act. Sustainable change happens when local actors own the problem, shape the solution, and build the confidence to move without you. Your role is often to work in the background: convening, translating, enabling, and then stepping aside. Collaboration is not just how impact scales; it is how legitimacy, trust, and shared ownership are built. Success is not that you delivered something; it is that others no longer need you. Without this transfer of agency, even technically sound solutions struggle to endure.

12. Good ideas are abundant, but execution requires stakeholder ownership, sustainable business models, enabling infrastructure, and change management. The real challenge is turning vision into a delivery pathway that can survive complexity, uncertainty and institutional friction. This requires clear ownership by the actors who must carry the change, a business model that can sustain the work beyond pilots and short term funding, and enabling infrastructure across four dimensions: digital, physical, institutional and financial. In institutional settings, scaling also requires political and executive sponsorship to protect the work as it moves from experimentation into implementation and wider adoption. Without backing from senior leadership, even technically sound initiatives struggle to survive leadership change, budget pressure and competing priorities. In practice, execution is rarely only about building something new. It is about displacing existing ways of working, incentives and market structures. Lasting impact comes when new solutions scale, attract sustained demand and investment, and ultimately displace existing models rather than simply coexist beside them. All transformation is change management. There are no exceptions.

Pillar IV: Addressing uncertainty and complexity

13. Measure what matters and learn from feedback loops.
    If you cannot observe how a complex system responds to an intervention, you cannot know whether you are making progress. Most organizations measure what is easy, not what is meaningful. Complex systems behave non-linearly and operate under deep uncertainty. Cause and effect are delayed, outcomes emerge unevenly, unintended consequences are common, and emergent risks are real. In many cases, the most important results only become visible well after a project or funding cycle has ended. Design metrics that help you see patterns, signals and direction of travel, not only short term outputs. Measurement is not about proving success or satisfying reporting requirements. It is about learning fast enough to adapt under uncertainty and constant change. Without feedback loops, strategy becomes guesswork. But metrics alone are never sufficient. Professional judgement is essential to interpret weak signals, anticipate and mitigate emergent risks, and decide whether current trajectories are likely to lead to meaningful outcomes.

14. Hope for the best, plan contingencies for the worst.
    Even with a strong plan, always run the worst-case scenario. Ask what could fail politically, operationally, financially and reputationally as well as who would be exposed if it does. Mitigate what you can early, while you still have room to manoeuvre. Document key decisions, risks, assumptions and approvals as you go. Paper trails are not paranoia. They are protection when pressure rises, leadership changes, or narratives shift. In complex institutions, accountability is often reconstructed after the fact and usually under stress. Make decision rights and accountability lines explicit from the start. Ambiguity is where blame hides and trust erodes. A small investment in foresight, clarity and disciplined documentation can save you and your partners when memories become selective and priorities suddenly change.

15. Crisis creates openings for change in both directions.
    Disruption and crisis unlock possibilities that institutional stability resists. But they cut both ways. The same shock that advances your agenda can just as easily dismantle it. Crises accelerate decision-making, collapse bureaucratic barriers, and redirect attention toward what suddenly feels urgent and existential. Much of my most impactful work emerged in moments of crisis. When you are positioned with a clear narrative, trusted relationships, and a ready-to-implement plan, a crisis can move your work forward faster than years of advocacy. But when you are unprepared, others will define the moment and your priorities will be side-lined. Crises do not create strategy. They reveal who already had one.

16. Not every institution is ready for transformation.
    Institutions carry their history with them: mandates, funding patterns, cultures, workflows, and power relationships create path dependencies that shape what is possible. Once a trajectory is set, the cost of shifting it can exceed what the system is willing or able to absorb. Forcing transformation before readiness breeds resistance, fatigue, and quiet sabotage. Patience, in this context, is not passivity; it is strategy. Wisdom lies in knowing when to wait, when to push, and when to step aside. Strategic discipline also means knowing when to stop investing in an initiative whose political or institutional conditions will not change. Play the long game: good ideas survive leadership transitions, outlast resistance, and eventually find their moment. Change unfolds at the speed of acceptance and only when the existing path can bend without breaking.

Pillar V: Wielding influence

17. Know when to seek principled forgiveness rather than permission.
    Progress often comes from those willing to act before the bureaucracy is fully ready. This is not about cutting corners or breaking rules for convenience. It is about moving responsibly when delay would cause harm, missed opportunity or loss of momentum. The key is intention. Act with integrity, remain aligned with the mission, and be prepared to explain your reasoning clearly and transparently. This approach only works when motivation is service, not ego. Many of my most meaningful initiatives began quietly, by building evidence, alliances and proof of concept under the radar until conditions were right. But informal momentum is not enough. For work to endure, it must eventually be legitimised through senior political and executive sponsorship. Individual initiative may open the door. Alignment, timing and executive backing determine whether change survives.

18. Judge words by the actions that follow.
    In institutions built on statements, actions are the only real currency. Everyone knows how to perform alignment rhetorically; it costs nothing. Organizations often communicate values externally that represent their aspirations, but those same values do not always fully shape internal incentives, behaviours, or decision-making. What matters is what people actually prioritize when decisions get hard and resources become constrained. Many leaders must hold multiple competing truths at once: mandate and reality, ambition and risk, ideals and constraints. Navigating these tensions requires judgment, and often politics. Integrity is revealed not by what leaders say they believe, but by the trade-offs they are willing to make and the actions they choose to take. Watch behaviour over time. Patterns reveal incentives, loyalties, and integrity far more clearly than language ever will. Trust is built or lost in the gap between words and actions.

19. Narrative often trumps reality, unless you build ways for reality to talk back.
    In diplomacy, perception is power. Narrative coherence often outweighs evidence, because narrative shapes mandate, legitimacy, and momentum. Stories determine how problems are framed, which options are seen as legitimate, and where political energy flows. For any intervention, a clear and compelling narrative is not optional; it is part of the work. The danger begins when a narrative hardens into orthodoxy: insulated from evidence, field experience, or inconvenient feedback. At that point, defending the story becomes more important than responding to reality. Spin replaces learning. The difference between a living narrative and a false one lies in feedback. Truthful narratives are adaptive: they are tested against data, challenged by partners, and corrected by those closest to the ground. Listen to implementers, national counterparts, and communities, especially when what they say complicates the story. Treat dissent, pushback and friction as signal, not noise. Use narrative deliberately, but hold it lightly. Let evidence, results, and stakeholder experience continuously rewrite the story. A narrative that cannot be challenged is no longer strategy; it is self-deception.

20. Doom and gloom narratives are losing power; agency-based narratives enable action.
    Alarm and crisis framing have been essential for raising awareness, but they are reaching diminishing returns. Constant doom narratives increasingly produce anxiety, paralysis, and decision avoidance, especially inside institutions already under strain. When everything is framed as catastrophic, the rational response becomes risk minimization rather than action. Effective change now requires narratives that pair urgency with individual agency. People need to see not only what is broken, but where they can act, what is possible within constraints, and how progress can be made step by step. Hope, in this sense, is not optimism; it is a design choice that restores agency and decision-making capacity. The task is not to downplay risks, but to frame pathways forward that are credible, actionable, and motivating. Institutions move when people believe their actions matter. Without that belief, even the best evidence and mandates stall.

Conclusion

After twenty years, one truth stands out: institutions evolve slowly, but individuals and small coalitions still shape what becomes possible. Every meaningful shift I have witnessed began with a small group of people who refused to wait for permission.

The multilateral system is imperfect by design, but it is not static. It responds, unevenly but genuinely, to those who understand its constraints and still act with courage, care, and conviction. For those willing to stay grounded, learn the system, and invest in others, the work can remain deeply meaningful. Progress rarely looks dramatic from the inside. Over time, however, it accumulates one relationship, one decision, one principled action at a time.

At the same time, the fact that this piece required institutional approval and six months of delay before reaching you is, in its own way, the clearest illustration of the tension these lessons describe. Institutions that cannot openly embrace these lessons may find they are also the ones least equipped for the transition from old to new power and for navigating complex systems.

I will never know with certainty whether my approach was part of the problem or part of the solution. It worked well, until it didn’t. What drove this decision, in the end, was a simpler question: where can I have the most impact now? The answer, for me, points outside. I am therefore moving into a new chapter to work faster, engage more directly with those driving change, and focus on what I most enjoy: helping ideas become reality.

I will continue working on digital sustainability and AI through an my independent consultancy, supporting the countries, organisations and teams trying to do this well. My focus remains the same: turning ambition into systems and solutions that actually work. If these lessons resonate, you know where to find me.

David E. Jensen

David E. Jensen is the former Global Coordinator for Digital Transformation at the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), where he spent 20 years working on the intersection of technology, environment, security, and international governance. He is also the cofounder of the Coalition for Digital Environmental Sustainability (CODES) and the Environmental Peacebuilding Association (EnPAx). He can be reached directly through his website (www.davidedjensen.com) or on Linkedin.