Alice Nkunzimana is the founder and CEO of Papyrus International, an organisation that began in Haiti nearly two decades ago and now operates across Haiti and parts of Africa. Working across development implementation, institutional accompaniment, and fund management, Papyrus operates in contexts where instability is not exceptional, but continuous. 

When the boat was sinking

At one point in our conversation, Alice Nkunzimana describes sitting with the possibility of letting sixty people go.

USAID funding had collapsed. The future was uncertain. Nobody knew whether programmes would survive. The organisation she had spent nineteen years building suddenly found itself facing the kind of decision many institutions quietly prepare for but rarely speak about honestly.

What happened next was not what most organisations would do.

Instead of retreating into executive discussions and confidential planning sessions, Papyrus opened the process.

They organised town halls. Shared financial realities. Forwarded official communications to staff. Discussed scenarios openly. Invited people into the uncertainty itself.

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

She laughs slightly when she says it, aware of the harshness of the sentence. But beneath it sits something much deeper: a refusal to treat people as objects of organisational decision-making.

The team proposed furloughs rather than immediate dismissals. They negotiated around pensions and healthcare. Leadership returned to donors with requests shaped directly by staff concerns. At the same time, shareholders made another difficult choice: instead of protecting reserves, they used the company’s strategic investment fund to continue supporting people.

“We’re going to burn that down to zero, and then close.”

The sentence lands heavily because it was not symbolic. It was operational.

And perhaps this is what made the conversation with Alice feel so important within the context of Leading Through Transitions. So many organisations speak about values, participation, purpose, and trust while conditions remain relatively stable. Far fewer continue to organise themselves that way once pressure intensifies.

What became visible through Papyrus was not idealism detached from reality, but the opposite: the attempt to build an organisational form capable of carrying reality without collapsing into fear.

Transition was never new

Founded in Haiti nineteen years ago, Papyrus emerged from Alice’s frustration with the way Haiti was perceived internationally — either romanticised, pitied, or treated as permanently dependent.

“Haiti is always viewed as in need,” she says, “never viewed as able to contribute or give back.”

Growing up between worlds — raised in Haiti, carrying Canadian citizenship, navigating both local and international environments — she recognised how often decisions affecting communities were being made elsewhere, by people with little lived understanding of the realities they were shaping.

The company began with a deceptively simple ambition: to connect “local and international aspirations.” Over time, Papyrus evolved into a complex organisation operating across Haiti and Africa, managing development programmes, institutional accompaniment, and financial administration in some of the world’s most difficult operating environments.

But listening to Alice, one begins to realise that transition itself is not new for them.

“Haiti is always in transition,” she says matter-of-factly.

Political instability. Natural disasters. Outbreaks of disease. International intervention. Infrastructure breakdown. Organised crime. Funding volatility. Fragile institutions. For Papyrus, uncertainty has never been exceptional. It has been structural. What feels different now, she suggests, is that instability is no longer confined to places historically labelled “fragile.” The wider world itself has entered transition. And many of the systems previously assumed to be stable are beginning to reveal their own fragility.

The problem with decision-makers

Throughout the conversation, Alice returns repeatedly to the idea that old models are losing coherence. Supply chains fail. Donor priorities shift abruptly. Geopolitical alliances fracture. Borders harden. Travel becomes more uncertain. Global institutions lose legitimacy.

Again and again, she returns to the same underlying insight: systems built far from lived reality struggle to perceive what is actually happening on the ground. This applies internationally, but also organisationally.

She speaks critically about the “decision-making world” — the global systems where policies, funding priorities, and development agendas are often shaped far from the communities that must live with their consequences. Consultation, she suggests, often becomes performative.

Big foundations convene local actors after priorities have already been determined. Decisions about what communities need are frequently shaped by institutional structures, political pressures, donor regulations, and external agendas that communities themselves did not create.

“The transition has to go from bottom up, and away from top down,” she says.

But she does not romanticise this either. Local communities also need stronger organisation, clearer coordination, and the ability to articulate their own aspirations. Otherwise, external interests continue filling the vacuum. What emerges is not a simplistic critique of international systems, but a recognition that many existing structures no longer match the realities they are trying to govern. At the same time, she sees new possibilities emerging through the cracks.

“You can be a McKinsey consultant in your living room now.”

There is humour in the statement, but also a serious observation: expertise is decentralising. Access is widening. The monopoly over knowledge and coordination is weakening.

And as dominant systems struggle to maintain control, other regions and communities are beginning to reposition themselves.

“I feel like this is a great time to be alive.”

The statement is striking because it comes not from naïveté, but from someone who has spent years operating inside instability.

‍

Turning leadership upside down

Three years ago, as Papyrus grew rapidly, Alice became increasingly concerned that the organisation would lose coherence. Growth was creating pressure. Complexity was increasing. More decisions flowed upward. She worried about alignment, quality, and fragmentation. Her response was not to centralise authority further. Instead, Papyrus fundamentally reorganised itself.

Using the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), the organisation redistributed leadership into a more collective structure. Strategic and operational leadership were separated. Decision-making moved into a shared leadership team. Organisational priorities became transparent across the company. Most significantly, visibility increased. People could see goals. Financial realities. Strategic priorities. Quarterly objectives. Progress. Failures. The shift was deeply uncomfortable at first.

“I was not happy,”

Alice admits while describing the redistribution of operational authority away from herself. But over time, something changed. The organisation became more aligned precisely because leadership was no longer trying to carry everything alone.

‍

Trust needs structure

One of the more surprising things in the conversation was that Papyrus did not become more participatory by becoming less structured. It became more participatory by becoming more disciplined. The systems matter here. The weekly leadership meetings. The shared accountability structures. The measurable goals. The behavioural frameworks. The strategic rhythms. None of this appears accidental.

Trust, in this case, was not built through looseness. It was built through consistency, visibility, and shared responsibility. This is an important distinction because many organisations facing transition either retreat into rigid control or dissolve into vague collaboration. Papyrus appears to be attempting something more difficult: combining operational rigour with deep participation.

At one point Alice says something that quietly reframes the entire conversation.

“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.”

There is no language of heroic individuals. No charisma. No disruption rhetoric. No grand self-image. Only clarity, people, and shared movement.

‍

The people who studied spoons

Later in the conversation, Alice reflects on years of feeling like an imposter because she did not come from traditional business training. Before founding Papyrus, she studied fine art and specialised in metalwork. Her thesis, she jokes repeatedly, was about spoons. The story becomes unexpectedly symbolic.

For years, people questioned whether she was qualified to lead. Whether she belonged in rooms of strategy, governance, and finance. Whether an artist could build a multinational organisation. But perhaps what the conversation reveals is that many organisations are now confronting a different question entirely: Whether technical expertise alone is enough to navigate transition at all.

Because what repeatedly strengthened Papyrus during the crisis was not expertise in the conventional sense. It was relational coherence. Shared sacrifice. Transparency. Distributed intelligence. Ethical consistency under pressure.

Not certainty. And perhaps that is one of the deeper signals emerging beneath this conversation. The future may belong less to organisations that appear most stable, and more to those capable of remaining coherent while reality itself reorganises around them.