"Transition is when you have a plan and you're going about that plan and something shifts. Sometimes those transitions can be intentional and well-planned. And sometimes those transitions happen without any warning."‍

She is speaking to us from Rwanda. Tahirih is in Cape Town, a cold front coming in off the sea. Alice is leaving for Haiti next week, then back to Rwanda, then hopefully a long stretch of staying put.

"For Haiti, operating in precarious conditions is just part of our norm. We have weather issues, hurricanes, earthquakes, outbreaks of disease, socio-political troubles, foreign intervention, transnational crime. It's always been precarious. So I don't know what it means not to be in transition."

A pause.

"But today we're talking about something more global. And that's what feels new."

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Who she is and where she works

Alice Nkunzimana is the founder and CEO of Papyrus International, a management and development firm she started in Haiti nearly twenty years ago. Today Papyrus operates across Haiti and parts of Africa, working in fund management, development project management, and what Alice calls institutional accompaniment: accompanying organisations to strengthen their own institutions, rather than doing it for them. It is majority woman-owned, headquartered in Haiti and Kenya, and it has spent two decades building in places others consider too difficult, too unstable, or too far from the decision-making centres of the world.

She has spent nearly two decades building an organisation inside conditions most others would treat as exceptional: volatile funding, contested legitimacy, fragile infrastructure. Not as a temporary disruption to manage through, but as the operating environment itself. That experience, it turns out, has been teaching her something about the deeper structural shifts now visible everywhere.

The decision-making world

About twenty minutes in, Alice uses a phrase that stops the conversation.

"The decision-making world."

We ask her what she means.

"Decisions about what is mined, who gets to sell it, where it is transformed, where the value added is made. Decisions about what Africa or Haiti needs, what donors want to give. And those decisions are being made by people who have never lived what they are deciding about."

She is not polemical when she says this. There is no rhetoric. It reads more like a field observation from someone who has spent nearly two decades navigating the gap between what is decided and what is lived.

She describes how large foundations convene local actors after priorities have already been shaped. How funding decisions cascade from regulatory frameworks in donor countries that have nothing to do with the realities of the communities receiving them. How the language of consultation keeps expanding while the structure of decision-making stays the same.

"Consultation is not possible when the person demanding it is not one of them."

Then:

"I think that happens also to small communities in the United States. In Holland. In South Africa. It can happen on a micro or a macro level."

This is the first signal of something that becomes clearer across the conversation: Alice is not describing a problem of geography. She is describing a structural condition. The disconnect between where decisions are made and where their consequences land is not specific to development. It is a feature of how most large systems are built. And those systems, she suggests, are beginning to lose coherence. Not because people decided they should, but because the conditions that made them functional are eroding.

"You'll see in Africa that negotiations around mining are changing. It used to be ten percent of proceeds going to the country. Now people are brokering twenty-five, thirty percent. The wave is coming whether or not people build dams."

She finds this genuinely exciting. "I feel like this is a great time to be alive." Then she shifts. Not to a different subject exactly, but to a different scale.

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Turning it upside down

Three years ago, as the organisation was growing rapidly, she became worried. Quality was slipping. Decisions were stacking up at the top. The coherence that had built the company over fifteen years was under pressure from its own success.

Her response was not to tighten control. It was to redistribute it.

Papyrus reorganised its governance around what Alice calls the Entrepreneurial Operating System. Strategic and operational leadership were separated. A leadership team of five took shared ownership of the organisation's direction. Decision-making moved into a weekly collective process. Quarterly priorities, financial realities, and strategic goals became visible to everyone in the company.

"It used to be me. I was the CEO and I had the C-suite working under me and I made the decisions. What this did was shift that into a group of five. And from there, every person in our company has a rock. All of the rocks are helping build the goal towards the BHAG."

(BHAG: Big Hairy Audacious Goal, a long-horizon ambition that anchors everything else.)

She laughs a little. "I was not happy, at first."

The discomfort was real. She had built the company. She knew it in ways no one else did. Handing over operational authority to someone who, as she put it, "doesn't know anything about the other pillars" was genuinely difficult.

But over time something changed. The organisation became more aligned. Because leadership was no longer trying to carry everything alone.

"People can log on and see where I'm at. Am I doing the things I said I would do? What are my numbers? Am I doing my job? And I can look at anybody else."

Transparency, in this account, is not a value added on top of the organisation. It is structural. It is built into the rhythm.

When the boat was sinking

Then USAID collapsed.

The funding that had sustained a significant portion of Papyrus's programmes was gone, almost overnight. Sixty people might need to be let go. Nobody knew. Nobody could know, for months.

What Alice describes next is one of the most striking things in the conversation.

‍"We organised a town hall. We explained to everybody that this might be happening. And what do they think? What are some of their solutions? What should we do?"

She stays with that sentence for a moment.

"We actually asked the people who ultimately ended up getting fired how they wanted to get fired."

She is aware of how blunt it sounds. But the underlying move was not cynical. It was a refusal to treat people as objects of a decision someone else was making about them. Staff proposed furloughs rather than immediate dismissals. They negotiated around pensions and healthcare. They came up with a strategy that leadership then brought back to donors, with concrete numbers and specific requests shaped directly by the people most affected.

At the same time, the shareholders faced their own decision. Papyrus had spent nineteen years retaining reserves. Never taking more than thirty percent in dividends. There was a strategic investment fund, set aside for something significant. Alice used it to pay people.

"We're going to burn that down to zero, and then close."

Her shareholders, understandably, were not all immediately on board. She is the majority shareholder. She held the position. But she knew she needed to show them something more than conviction.

"You can't just say this is a decision. You have to show them the vision. What do we put in place. What are people's thoughts. What are the cuts we're all taking to our salaries."

The EOS system made that possible. Because everything was already visible. The pipeline. The projections. The quarterly decisions. The shared sacrifices. None of it had to be assembled from scratch under pressure. It was already there, in a form everyone could read.

"I have never seen my team more aligned, and taking more ownership, than I have now."

Trust needs structure, not looseness

One of the things that stays with us after the conversation is this: Papyrus did not become more participatory by becoming less structured. It became more participatory by becoming more disciplined. That distinction matters. Many organisations facing transition either retreat into rigid control, or dissolve into vague collaboration. Both responses feel like safety. Neither builds the capacity to carry real uncertainty.

What Papyrus appears to have built is harder than either. A structure rigorous enough to hold complexity, transparent enough to distribute ownership, and coherent enough that when the crisis came, nobody had to scramble to invent a process. The process was already running. Alice puts it plainly at one point:

"Regardless of what platform people choose, there has to be some way for people to understand what leadership is trying to do so that they can get on board and everybody's rowing in the same direction."

Not ideology. Not charisma. Shared direction, made visible, over time. And then:

"Leadership is that you actually really like people, you're actually really clear on your vision, and you actually really enjoy getting there with others."

No language of disruption. No heroic individual. Only clarity, people, and shared movement.

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The spoon

Late in the conversation, Alice mentions her education. She studied fine art. Specialised in metalwork. Her thesis, she says with a slight smile, was on spoons. For years, she says, people questioned whether she was qualified to lead. Whether an artist belonged in rooms of strategy and finance. Whether someone without an MBA could build a multinational organisation. She has made peace with the irony.

"I don't know where we would be trying to eat soup without a spoon, to be honest."

But underneath the joke is something the whole conversation has been circling. The formal credentials of leadership, technical expertise, institutional belonging, the language of "qualifications" that gatekeeps rooms, none of this is what held Papyrus together when the money disappeared.

What held it together was relational coherence. Shared sacrifice. Transparency. The capacity to sit with uncertainty and not let fear narrow the field of what was possible. Not certainty. Not expertise in the conventional sense.

"I know how to squeeze all the brain cells out of my team, and I know how to respect them and give them space."

That is the sentence she chooses to describe her leadership.

"The more you look around and see these stodgy, old-minded processes," Alice says, "it actually makes me happy. Because it means all the others, the ones not in those dominant positions of power that are trying to hold on to everything, have opportunity now while those big guys are distracted."

The same pattern, at every scale

At some point in the conversation, something quietly clicks into place.

The critique Alice levels at the global development system, decisions made far from the realities they affect, consultation that is procedural rather than genuine, power concentrated in places insulated from consequence, is the same diagnosis she made about her own organisation three years ago. And the response she chose then, redistributing authority, building transparency into the structure, bringing people into decisions rather than informing them of outcomes, mirrors what she believes the wider world now needs to find its way toward.

This is not a coincidence. It is the same pattern at a different scale.

Papyrus did not transform itself because Alice read about distributed leadership. It transformed because the old model stopped working. Growth created fragility. Centralised decision-making became a bottleneck. The organisation needed more intelligence than one person, or one team, could carry. The transition was forced by reality, and the response was to reorganise around a different relationship to power.

What is now happening globally follows the same logic. Supply chains that stretched too far are shortening. Institutions that decided from a distance are losing legitimacy. Communities that were spoken for are beginning to speak. The pressure is not ideological. It is structural. The old model is simply no longer adequate to the complexity it is trying to govern.

What Papyrus built over the last three years, a governance model grounded in shared ownership, distributed intelligence, and trust as operational practice, is not just a response to one organisation's growing pains. It is, in miniature, a preparation for the kind of world that is taking shape. And in that sense, the work Alice has been doing inside her organisation is not separate from the global transition she reads in the news each morning.

It is a rehearsal for it.

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A question to sit with:

In your organisation, who is closest to the consequences of the decisions being made? And are they in the room?

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