As a preamble, we paraphrase a few relevant challenges that we have heard from international managers working on overseas operations: 

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• External affairs and CSR are pushing for local trust-building, while security and legal are telling us to keep the walls up and our heads down. This advice seems to be based more on functional standpoints than hard intelligence about our situation here. As it is, we don’t have a clear strategy for how the project relates to its host environment.

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• Our formal assessments focus on the big stuff, and we need that for long-term navigation. But it’s the small stuff that tends to bite and it often creeps up on us. For example, yes, the direction of the insurgency matters, but how we feel it is through a paranoid police presence that makes local staff anxious, and justifiably so. We need a way to link these two levels of analysis. 

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• Political risk analysis? We’ve been here for two years and we know more about the place than someone sitting at a desk in New York or London. That said, we still face unexpected problems at the local level and relationships can be a high-stakes juggling act. If there were a way to get a clear picture of where we stood, that would be useful...

 

Country operations, especially in complex or fragile states, can face serious challenges and there is seldom a “business as usual”.

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Although a specific operation or presence might be one small cog in a global portfolio, the interface between the organisation and socio-political environment is close and intense. Not only is the operation embedded within a volatile environment, but it also has direct interaction with socio-political stakeholders who watch and react to the organisation. Misjudgements in managing relationships have tangible repercussions.

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Furthermore, at the operational level it is not just performance at stake. People can be affected by stress, hazards, and direct threats, and mistakes made under pressure and in a context of weak governance can have serious effects on reputation and the social licence. Harm to people or reputation is not confined to the country presence: it can have enduring implications for the organisation’s global reach and credibility.

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An organisation needs to be able to understand how its operation relates to the socio-political environment and milieu, and capable of coordinated adaptation to sustain a safe, reputable and effective presence.

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Harmattan helps clients to become more capable of meeting these imperatives. You can find out more about our country-level services using the buttons at the top of this introduction or just below. ​