Q&A: Per Heggenes on leadership in the shifting humanitarian landscape

CANBERRA — Per Heggenes, CEO at the IKEA Foundation wants the humanitarian sector to think differently about how they engage, operate, and lead. “Instead of sitting at home and designing the solutions, we are designing solutions with the beneficiaries. That is the first and most important part of humanitarian leadership.” --— Per Heggenes, CEO at the IKEA Foundation He also cautioned that the sector needs to respond to the shifting landscape — and looking inward he assessed his own leadership style. Devex caught up with Heggenes at the 2019 Asia Pacific Humanitarian Leadership Conference to discuss this messaging. Here is the interview, edited for length and clarity. What do you see as the leadership qualities needed within the humanitarian sector? In the business world, we spend enormous amounts of time understanding our customers and what the customer’s needs are and what we need to do to be successful for them. In the humanitarian world, that is not as common as in the business world. What I think is important — and what we always do when we do programs — we spend a lot of time in engaging the customers of beneficiaries and co-create the solutions with them. We have an ongoing dialogue about what works and what doesn’t work, so you constantly adapt the interventions. Instead of sitting at home and designing the solutions, we are designing solutions with the beneficiaries. That is the first and most important part of humanitarian leadership. The second part is about the partners you select. As a foundation, we only fund programs. We fund partners and will spend a lot of time looking for partners that we think can provide the best possible for the value we invest. Often, that is not necessarily going with the usual suspects, but being open-minded and willing to talk to smaller organizations that are out-of-the-box thinkers. These organizations that are about to come up with new ideas. And the third element is innovation. In order to build leadership in the humanitarian development [sector], you need to take risks. If you want to always go the safe way, you can do that, but you won’t take the organization forward. As a foundation, we can take risks and partner with the new thinkers. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, it was worth trying. As the IKEA Foundation has a foot in the door of the business and humanitarian sector, how would you change your message on the importance to lead on humanitarian issues for the private sector? First of all, when it comes to engaging business and the private sector, the traditional approach from the humanitarian and development community is to ask for cheques. I think that in the future we will have to involve the business much more in helping them to develop solutions — and doing that in a way that utilizes their knowledge, expertise, their reach, their network, their people, and their supply chain to drive development. If I then talk to businesses about engaging, I would also look at how they engage in two areas I consider the biggest threats the world is facing today — one is climate change, and the other is rising lack of jobs for young people. When you link that to the projected population growth in the world, most of that will occur in sub-Saharan Africa. It is an area of the world that is already struggling with unemployment among young people and lack of opportunities. These challenges will double in the next 30 years. We are also focused on creating jobs, making young people employable, and enabling them to become entrepreneurs. What business can do is use their ability to create supply chain and develop jobs, enabling people to take care of themselves. But they can also, relative to what IKEA does, be very focused on how they build supply chains. IKEA has a very strong code of conduct on how suppliers need to operate, how they need to pay their employees, how they need to care for their employees, how they need to create humane working conditions, how they deal with waste management and energy consumption, and big companies have a huge opportunity to drive development within supply chains. Within the work of the IKEA Foundation, how are you providing leadership in localization, and how is it impacting your policies and planning? Localization goes to the heart of the Centre for Humanitarian Leadership, which was founded with funding from the IKEA Foundation, Deakin University, and Save the Children. The whole idea around that was is supporting disaster-prone areas of the world to be able to help themselves when disaster hits. The traditional way of management is to parachute in an international organization to deal with a disaster after it hits. Since we know where these disasters will hit, it is much more efficient in terms of response time and cost to empower people locally to help themselves. Localization for us is a key focus and strategy to provide better disaster relief and support as it happens — local resources know the language, know the conditions, and know what needs to be done. It is important for us to help make localization happen in creating better preparedness, prevention, and better response capabilities. As we are discussing leadership, what do you think makes you personally a good leader in this space? First and foremost, I am a pretty good listener and I spend time trying to understand not only what the issue is by going to the field, talking to people, and listening to their issues. I am also good at hiring people who are smarter than me, so in building the organization we have the right expertise and best possible experience to hire the right partners. And I am open to working with new partners and listening to them — large or startups — to drive innovation in the foundation. Being able to do that hopefully makes me a good leader. In addition, I have adopted a very strong set of values that underpin everything IKEA does — values established by the founder and has been made part of the DNA of the organization. Since I get to spend millions and millions of profits from IKEA every year, it’s only fair that I try to adopt the same values and work in the same way. Aside from IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad, who are the leaders that inspire you and your work? There are leaders in business and there are leaders in other parts of society that I consider truly inspirational. Nelson Mandela was inspirational to me because, in spite of being incarcerated for many years, he came back and said let’s look forward instead of back and do what is right for the people — and not individuals. In the business side, there is one person who has inspired me more than anyone else — and that is Paul Polman with his work at Unilever. Paul was able to take a highly visible public company and help them embrace values around environment and humanitarian principles. The excuse from businesses is often that their shareholders want values in the short term. But business can always do more, do better, and be leaders. From IKEA’s perspective, thinking about environment, supply chains and social impact has been part of the business model for a long time. And it has been financially successful.