What AI Policy Is Borrowing From Humanitarian Work with Anna Aden

0:09Tristan Lim: Hey, it's Tristan again. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm a co-host on The Pod and previously I was the Chief of Staff at Comso, a series B community analytics company. Now I run Beyond Founders, where I offer one-on-one coaching to first-time and veteran Chiefs of Staff. I'm currently based between Southeast Asia and Berlin, and I bring on chief of staff from all across Asia and Europe onto the podcast. My guest for today is Anna Aydin, chief of staff to the managing director for Asia Pacific at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, or TBI, as it's known. TBI is a political advisory firm that works closely with heads of state and senior political leaders across 40 countries around the world.

0:47Tristan Lim: Anna's career started about as far from a corporate chief of staff role as you can get. She began in the humanitarian sector, working in refugee camps and managing over$100 million in aid programs across some of the most complex crises in the world. From there, she went to Oxford for her MBA at the SAID Business School, and then moved into the government advisory work across the Asia-Pacific region. In this episode, we'll be talking about what the chief of staff job actually looks like inside a global policy institute, and how to decide what matters when every priority is politically sensitive.

1:19Tristan Lim: Anna will then share with us why she calls the chief of staff role, bridge and systems integrator. We'll be talking about what she's integrating for whom and how that changes when HQ is on the other side of the world. We'll then be getting into AI policy, discussing how the humanitarian sector spent decades on how to serve the collective good and how tech companies are now the ones building the cart rails for humanity. Lastly, we'll be talking, of course, about the role of the chief of staff in the age of AI and discussing whether there's a future for this role or will we be eaten up like many of the operations roles.

1:52Tristan Lim: Anna also shares a bit about her values and alignment around knowing when it's time to move on. Also, how to trust herself when the path maybe isn't so clear yet. And of course, we'll be talking about what it's like to achieve herself in the Asia-Pacific region and also being far from HQ. In this case, TBI's HQ being in the UK and the unique challenges that comes from having a HQ far away from where we're at. Anna is sharp, values-driven, and refreshingly honest about the difficult parts of this role. I think you're going to get a lot from this one. Enjoy. Hey Anna, welcome to the podcast.

2:24Anna Aden: Thank you. It's great to be here.

2:25Tristan Lim: Really excited to be here with you recording this one live in the same place.

2:30Anna Aden: It is a pleasure, yeah.

2:32Tristan Lim: How are things going with you?

2:33Anna Aden: It's been great. I've had a lot of travel recently, but happy to be back in Singapore. And And it's serendipitous that this is lined up. And I've had a few other things in Singapore that I needed to get done this time. So feeling good to tick it all off the list.

2:46Tristan Lim: Nice. So if we start at the beginning, you started your career in humanitarian work, refugee camps, crisis response, massive aid programs. Give us some of your early context to help us better understand who you are today and how you ended up in a chief of staff role.

3:02Anna Aden: It was a wild way to start out. So I started working, actually, even before that in university, I worked at an immigration law firm with refugees and having such a practical thing to do every day where I'm working on someone's right to exist in a place and right to get a job, just those basic necessities. It was a really nice counterbalance to kind of the ivory tower studies that I was doing in parallel. But I was really interested in understanding a lot of the complexities that humans face across the world. So I had my eyes set on development, but working in the United States, kind of far away from a lot of the problems that I was interested in, it didn't really make sense to me that I'd be able to get a good sense of what it is that I actually wanted to do or where it was that I'd be useful.

3:50Anna Aden: So I went over to Southeast Asia and I had grown up in Asia already and lived there for quite a while as well and started working in Myanmar. Humanitarian work was something that I had really glorified. I wanted to work in some of the most challenging places and deal with some of the most challenging issues that I thought people were facing. And being able to work in an industry like that, honestly, I think is a privilege. It helps you understand how the world works and how decisions that are made in different places impact people all the way through the line. So that can be in everyday societies, you and me and people who we see as peers, but then all the way to the farthest corners of the earth.

4:27Anna Aden: I think that that set my career off in a really good trajectory because it's been grounded in impact the whole time. I care a lot about decisions having a positive impact on humanity and being able to have the lens of working kind of at the end line, especially when I was in my earlier twenties, that I think is the time where you should really make those decisions because you don't have the responsibilities and the ties of life. You have a lot more freedom. You're also a lot more willing to work in places without electricity or running water and things like that. But it really sets a foundation of values and it helps you remember what matters to you.

5:03Anna Aden: So for me, I was able to set that quite well early on in my career. So did some work in the humanitarian sector in Myanmar, and then worked over in the Middle East in the Syria response as well. And then I worked designing programs across the world. So I was based out of Hong Kong, but then was developing programs, humanitarian programs across Africa, South America, Southeast Asia. And that's actually where my career pivoted. So in Hong Kong, I arrived there and it's a global city. It's got all the different industries that are there. And I thought that I was working in a global industry. I was working adjacent to governments, to UN officials, and was doing really large scale, multi-million dollar responses, managing hundreds of millions of dollars.

5:48Anna Aden: And I get to Hong Kong and I talk to people from companies that I recognize, from JP Morgan, from other banking industries, from big Fortune 500 companies, and none of them had heard of the work that I did. None of them knew anything about the humanitarian sector or about large-scale programs that were being deployed. Whereas I knew a lot about how the decisions that were made in their industries had cascaded into impacting the lives of people across the world. So it really made me realize the degree to which impact is driven by industries that don't seem like they fall under the impact umbrella and how the decisions of financial sector and industry actually cascade into people's lives more than humanitarian decisions.

6:33Anna Aden: So that ended up giving me the idea that I should go pivot over to business school and then started on the first of my career transitions.

6:41Tristan Lim: So I think you're probably one of the first people on the podcast that has such a varied experience, especially someone coming from the humanitarian sector. Tell us a bit about the process of going from business school and sort of diving right in into working for private companies.

6:55Anna Aden: I've certainly had what some would call a non-linear career, which is very fun, I think, to build a portfolio career like that. But I've actually been pleased to find so many parallels between the work that I did in the humanitarian sector and work that I've gone on to do in the private sector. So for example, I've worked a lot on AI policy and AI safety. And if I go back and think about the humanitarian principles, these are principles that govern the delivery of all humanitarian programs. And there's actually a lot in common in thinking through how to structure AI policy, what sorts of AI safety mitigations are required, and actually even how AI companies position themselves.

7:34Anna Aden: So if you think about OpenAI's mission to ensure that AI benefits all of humanity. You think about anthropics, cloud constitution, they're clearly aware of the impact that their products will have on everyone. And all three of those frameworks actually position themselves as ethical guardrails. So these are designed to ensure that the powerful tools and actions serve the collective good without succumbing to partisanship or commercial interests or political interests. So you've got a group of people in the humanitarian sector that have been thinking at length and deeply about these ideas for decades and structuring aid programs kind of with that in mind.

8:13Anna Aden: And now you've got a completely different subset of people coming from tech backgrounds who are thinking through a lot of these similar questions. So I've been able to draw a lot on these, you know, big macro moral decisions and how to think through those from the humanitarian side and apply those when we're working with governments or talking to private sector companies about what it is that they need to do in terms of AI safety. So just one example there, but there are so many through lines back and forth that I'd find between the two.

8:41Tristan Lim: And what are you seeing now that these worlds are sort of meeting?

8:44Anna Aden: I think that the people who have previously worked on these topics are being increasingly pulled into the tech sphere, which is progress. With the chief of staff role, we talk a lot about bridging internally and that person being the bridge, but that's equally as important across industries. You've seen so many industries just siloed within themselves or their peers, but being able to draw lines back and forth is increasingly important with globalization and with the direction that development is going. So, you know, someone told me the other day that Anthropic has hired all of these PhD philosophers because they've realized that the people who have done thinking about these topics to the highest level are actually people that they need to be consulting with on a daily basis.

9:25Anna Aden: So when you can see those connections coming back and forth across industries, I think that then we all get a little bit closer to the goals that we're trying to achieve.

9:34Tristan Lim: I guess if we zoom out a bit, thinking about the role then, the role of a chief of staff, what do you think is going to happen? What do you think we're moving towards?

9:41Anna Aden: That's the priceless question these days. AI is a powerful tool. We use it every day. I'm sure everyone has been applying it to varying degrees in their lives, both personally and professionally. And it's obviously going to be a global disruptor even more so than it already is at this stage. So everyone's kind of sitting around wondering, what's going to happen to my job? And I think that for the chief of staff role, at least what I've seen of hiring trends, it doesn't seem to be a role that's fading or being displaced by AI. And I think that regardless of whether it's the chief of staff role with that title specifically, or some sort of parallel role that applies the same skill set, you're increasingly going to need to have people who are able to bring that bridging mindset to their work.

10:25Anna Aden: So people who keep a macro picture in mind, but think outside the box can kind of keep all the balls in the air and understand the different interconnectivities and linkages between topics, that curiosity and that way of thinking is going to become increasingly important as we all have access to so much information at our fingertips. So it's not that that's becoming difficult, although there are, of course, some challenging questions about the quality of information that we'll continue to get in the future under AI, which is a different topic. But people who are able to parse that and understand how to find those kernels of truth or of developments that are most relevant to this stakeholder versus that one, that's a skill set that requires a lot of discretion and understanding of that macro picture.

11:13Anna Aden: And the chief of staff role, I think, is very well positioned to train that type of thinking. So people who enjoy that mindset, I think we'll find a number of opportunities for themselves going forward, despite developments in AI.

11:25Tristan Lim: I think this is so, as we're moving faster and faster as a society, and quite literally, humans are getting left behind, there's an even stronger desire to have humans in the loop, especially at the high level, because it gets lonely. Like, you can create agents to run your whole company. Sounds kind of lonely after a while, because part of the reason a lot of people go to work or build things is for the people, you know, that they work with and are building for. So I agree with what you're saying. And I think the chief of software has the chance to grow as this movement grows and grow with it.

11:57Tristan Lim: And there's two things I think are really important in the chief of software. One is being super high agency. The other part is having immense amount of compassion. And maybe the compassion part, like we can't quite do that yet with AI. Agency, I mean, for sure. But maybe the human part is the compassion side. you did your MBA at Oxford in between. What was the intention behind going to do that? And, you know, was it something quite deliberate or were you kind of just trying to figure out what was going to come next for you?

12:24Anna Aden: When I was living in Hong Kong, I met a lot of people who worked in industries that were different from the one that I was in. We would have conversations. They would ask me what I did and I would very proudly tell them. And very few people actually, as I mentioned, recognized what it was that I had done. And once I kind of got over my ego of bristling at them not knowing about the entire humanitarian industry, I started to realize that I wasn't actually working in the big leagues. Despite the fact that aid is a multi-billion dollar industry that works across almost every country in the world, I think the year that I decided to go to Oxford was the year that Elon Musk bought Twitter.

13:02Anna Aden: And that year, the United Nations humanitarian needs overview had come out. And the amount of money that it was going to cost to meet every humanitarian need in the world of every person in every country was less than what Elon paid for Twitter. And that really just put it into context for me. I realized that the industry that I had been working in, while incredible, and I don't mean to take anything away from it, it's amazing work that still needs to be done and is massively underfunded. It made me realize that that wasn't the industry that actually turned the wheels and got the gears in motion of how people's lives were impacted on a day-to-day basis.

13:39Anna Aden: It was business. And that was something that I didn't really understand from my background working in Syria and in Myanmar. Those weren't really industries that I had had exposure to. So I decided to pursue an MBA. I didn't want to get a degree that people would get like a master's in public policy or international relations because I felt like that was very related to the work that I was already doing. So I wanted to go get exposure to things that I didn't know about and learn from people who came from backgrounds that I was unfamiliar with. And it really gave me the opportunity to take a fresh look at how I might situate myself within one of the larger industries that I could bring some of the humanitarian principles and ideals of wanting to make the world a better place, but use different levers to accomplish that.

14:31Tristan Lim: It's a really interesting trajectory to go from, right? Like being boots on the ground, seeing the impact of all the business decisions and all the decisions from the sort of came before. And then now, you know, kind of going backstage and seeing like how, what are these decisions actually made? So as you began to go upstream a bit more, like what did you find?

14:49Anna Aden: I found that the parallels were far greater than I would have imagined previously. Managing a$100 million project in the aid industry is very similar to managing a project in the private sector. Thinking about market entry in the private sector is very similar in thinking about how to enter a new community or a new country in the humanitarian sector. You've got to work with stakeholders all over the place who have differing priorities to yours, which is always the case regardless of what industry you're working in. So I was pleasantly surprised, I'd say, with how the skill set that I had cultivated would lend itself towards working in private industries and in the corporate sector.

15:33Anna Aden: I think I was at a particularly lucky moment that was in 2022 where people really cared a lot. You know, ESG was in its heyday and people actually were very interested in the idea of social responsibility and the common good. So that ideology about how companies can make money but also do good, that was really a growing theme at the time. And I think it was really great to understand from business leaders how those ideas would be something that was in alignment with their growth priorities and didn't necessarily have to be in opposition. You know, I actually think that a lot of the sustainability language obviously has shifted now.

16:12Anna Aden: Now we're in 2026 and people don't talk about ESG in the same way and they don't care about sustainability in the same way. But I think that a lot of sustainability initiatives, when we've spoken to different governments or different stakeholders, they actually still exist. They've just been repackaged. So the idea of localization, like, oh, we should support our local industries. We should get food sustainably and from closer sources. That was a big thing back when we were talking about greening industry. Countries are still doing that. But now it's under the guise of national security. It's about food security, food independence, resource independence.

16:48Anna Aden: So a lot of the initiatives that were being driven at that time are still being pushed now. They've just been rebranded. And I think that that's really interesting because you have to think about what it is that you're actually hoping for, what it is that you're hoping to achieve. And then you think about what stakeholders are involved and how you can align your outcomes to what it is that they care about. And that's exactly what people have done given the shifting winds that have taken place right now. So a lot of the projects are still out there, which I find to be very heartening.

17:17Tristan Lim: It's almost like the mission stays the same, but maybe the way the story is told.

17:21Anna Aden: Exactly. Yeah. You just package it a little differently.

17:24Tristan Lim: I think most people who are listening to the podcast, they're either working at startups or corporates, a few in NGOs. Could you tell us what the role of a chief of staff looks like in a global policy institute like the Tony Blair Institute?

17:38Anna Aden: Absolutely. For me, the role was to maximize the effectiveness of the managing director that I worked with. So I worked under the principal of Asia. So he covered all of Asia. It was basically to help him synthesize and prioritize his time. We were in a period of quite a lot of growth and a lot of different priorities from different people that everyone wanted to accomplish. everyone was growing in different directions. So to really try and get all of that synthesized and moving in unison, I think that's a chief of staff role in a lot of places. You have to understand the differing priorities from department heads, from various C-suites with differing mandates, from external stakeholders, and kind of put it all together and decide where you actually put resourcing and outputs.

18:25Anna Aden: I'd say a chief of staff role, at least in my experience, it's really twofold. On the one hand, you put together systems that are best practices. So you think about how operations will run when they're at their most effective. That's cadences for meetings. That's whose outputs need to go where. Then there's the other part of the role, which is figuring out how to pivot when things change and how to shift operations when things don't go to plan. So you kind of have to have both of those blueprints in your head at all times. You know, what's your best case scenario, how the pieces will fit together and how those dependencies exist and will be impacted if one of those pieces moves.

19:13Anna Aden: So being able to juggle that dynamically and in real time, especially working in an industry that changes so much, such as geopolitics, it's constantly changing, understanding how to pivot quickly and not have each change become a setback, but be able to understand the dependencies that are affected by those changes such that you can continue moving forward. That I think is one of the key pieces that fell onto my plate.

19:44Tristan Lim: It's cool to hear you say that because, you know, with the different chiefs of staff that I've spoken to, there's this constant thing of needing to be present and keep things running today, but also needing to have an eye out for the possibilities of what may happen or may not happen and kind of plan for that. How was that learning process for you to get to a place where you could manage both the present and also planning for the future?

20:09Anna Aden: I was fortunate because I had started in a different role. So when I first joined TBI, I was working under a team that was based out of London, but I was covering Asia. So I was based in Singapore and had built quite strong relationships with the whole regional team, all of the country teams that we have out in Asia, as well as leaders from across different departments in London, in other regions as well. So my understanding of the organization was already in place before I stepped into the chief of staff role. I think that was really helpful because everyone comes with their own priorities. But of course, everyone's priorities are also what the organization and the company's priorities are.

20:55Anna Aden: So you have to be able to kind of fit those together and triage across those. And it just helps if you already have a map of how things work internally. For me, also, an understanding of the region was key. So understanding Southeast Asia, understanding Singapore, and how the different geopolitical relationships were between the countries that we were operating in. And that was, of course, very important as well. And for me, I was lucky. I've lived in China for a long time, have lived in multiple countries across the region. So having the fluency to have the cultural understanding for where our staff and our operations were, as well as relationships with London and having spent time in headquarters, that I think gave me a nice edge because I think a lot of the chief of staff role is about being able to empathize.

21:44Anna Aden: Actually, you have to empathize with where someone else is coming from. So what are their stressors? What are their priorities and what are their needs? And you figure out how you can enable them to meet those needs in ways that are smoothest, balancing everyone else's needs as well. So when you have a clear understanding of that, you can do it more easily. And for me, because I had worked across various functions and I had a better understanding of the different regions, that was very beneficial for me.

22:13Tristan Lim: I think that's a really unique edge, understanding different contexts of people because you have a deep knowledge or cultural understanding of how they grew up, where they're coming from. A lot of our listeners are based in the US. And I know you've spent time in the US and you have connections there. So someone who both has an understanding of the culture in the US, but also here in Southeast Asia and Asia as well. Broadly speaking, how does it compare working here, doing business here, relationships and stuff?

22:44Anna Aden: It's very different, I would say. So having spent about 10 years in the US, but pretty much the rest of it living in Asia, there's a lot that is easy to translate, but there are a lot of deeper pieces that conflict. So the importance of building relationships is one that's often cited across Asia as being uniquely difficult and something that you have to be patient with. So you can't just go straight to business right off the bat. You have to build the relationship over a series of meetings before you can actually get down to the real thick of it. I think that what helps me, and maybe this is just my optimism speaking, but really assuming the best intentions in people that you're meeting.

23:28Anna Aden: Now, I'm not saying that every human is well-intentioned. Obviously, I don't live on a planet like that necessarily. But I think it does help when you come into it, understanding what it is that you want to get out of an engagement with someone and trying to also understand what it is that they want to get out of it. When you're able to do that and connect on a human level, it really helps to facilitate whatever it is that you're doing with another stakeholder. So it's the same in cross-cultural exchanges. It can be harder to understand that. There's a lot more translation that's necessary. definitely rely on local teams for their contextual awareness.

24:07Anna Aden: So if you are lucky enough to be working in a country where you have people from that country or you are from that country, that is a really useful lens. But if you don't, then come in with the humility to understand what it is that you might miss and also be able to just assume the best intentions in the people that you're speaking to and know that there will be hiccups. There might be pieces along the way where it doesn't necessarily move as smoothly together. So for instance, working for a UK based company, I could feel moments where their priorities were at odds with the way that things were functioning in Asia.

24:44Anna Aden: You just need to find a way to align those because they're not going to change, nor should they have to, and neither are you. So as the piece that runs in between, you just need to fit it together the best that you can.

24:56Tristan Lim: What are some things that have worked versus backfired and not worked?

25:01Anna Aden: The benefit of being in the region that HQ isn't is that there is distance across them. Sometimes regions will be better off if they just make decisions within the region and can handle things locally. Now, I'm not saying to go against HQ. Obviously, that's not my suggestion. But a lot of work can be managed within the regions. If you have a managing director, they hold a lot of authority and they're able to make those decisions there. So being able to trust the people that you're working alongside, particularly when they have the regional expertise and defer a lot of the decision-making to the regions, which we were lucky enough to be able to execute, I think that that is important.

25:45Anna Aden: So when you have that kind of decentralized authority as a region to be able to make decisions for your own, particularly when they're regarding matters that are happening locally.

25:56Tristan Lim: So working across APAC, you know, and being based in Singapore, you're often super far away from HQ, which I know is in London. What was that like? How is it, you know, having a team that is global, products that are global would be really interesting for us to kind of dive into, because I know we have lots of chiefs of staff that are listening that also work in fully remote, sometimes companies that are across all the regions.

26:16Anna Aden: People say a chief of staff role is a around the clock role. And when you have to do cross regional work, man, it really is because you have to accommodate different time zones. So from that perspective, I think it's really important to prioritize and ensure that you've got decent boundaries. I would have meeting invites coming in at 11pm, midnight, 1am, and you're just not being able to produce your best self at those hours. So making sure that you have a structured approach to work is very important, obviously, when you're working across time zones. I think it's also important to ensure that you have the relationships with stakeholders in other regions such that they delegate and trust you to cover your region.

27:03Anna Aden: When people want the perspective from APAC, it's usually because they actually want the perspective from APAC and you have the authority to share what you think the priorities should be based on what you're seeing on the ground. So to know that that is your position, that you should be that voice, that you should advocate on behalf of your region and speak based on what you're seeing on the ground and what you're hearing from your colleagues in the region, that really produces a much more dynamic organization. Because if you have a global organization, issues are going to be so different when you're working across Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, North America, Asia, and you're dealing with a lot of the same types of issues, but that have very different applications in each region.

27:47Anna Aden: So knowing that you're coming in as the mouthpiece for one region, it's really on you to advocate based on your region. Now you don't have to solve the global problems. It helps to have an understanding of what everyone else is going through and what works and doesn't work in their region. But it is nice. At least I found it good in that role because I could really focus on APAC. It wasn't up to me to solve the issues that were happening globally or to solve the issues that were coming up in the Middle East, I really needed to look at what was relevant for APAC. It was good to have that lens. I think I was also fortunate because coming from a global development context, APAC is one of the most dynamic regions in the world.

28:30Anna Aden: You've got really advanced economies and then you've got hugely growing economies right next to each other. So being able to have a good relationship with global because you've got products that are rolling out pilots that are coming up and you get to think about which ones will be best applied in the countries within your geography. So being able to advocate for your region as well and understand where global can help you, that's a really important piece too.

28:57Tristan Lim: For you and the role, what did cross-regional collaboration look like? And even as specific as tools, how do you set cadences and objectives and goals together?

29:08Anna Aden: There were some tools in place and there were of course cadences for meetings that we'd have with different teams. I'd say that they varied and it was good to know which types of meetings had which outcomes. So I'll give you an example. Some of our meetings were very much HQ or the global team needed information from APAC. So they had information about global reporting. They needed us to weigh in on priority setting for the strategy inputs, things like that, where they were really trying to extract information from the region. And that's okay. That needs to be done. They need that information and they need the best of that information for APEC to be well reflected within those priorities.

29:49Anna Aden: So going into those meetings, prepared and ready to spend a lot of your time giving them exactly what they need was critical for those meetings. Then there were other meetings where you could consider what it is that you could leverage from HQ to support your work on the ground here. So preparing for those meetings in a slightly different way and understanding that in those, you're able to ask for a lot more rather than just be giving information, but that both of them necessarily needed to take place. So really understanding who the stakeholder was that you were talking to internally and what the outcomes were for that meeting that helps you prepare, you know, who should be on the call, who were the different people who had information that was going to be relevant for those decisions.

30:31Anna Aden: But I think that having that framework of understanding where some calls you're giving and some calls you're getting a little bit more.

30:39Tristan Lim: Yeah. I've spoken to quite a few chiefs of staff and founders and meetings being the bane of everyone's existence. What is the basic amount of FaceTime needed for relationships to work for it not to be transactional as well?

30:53Anna Aden: You know, it varies. I actually don't think that transactional relationships are necessarily a bad thing. You know, sometimes all my colleague needs is inputs in his spreadsheet and that's it. And I just got to get those inputs and send them over. And that's okay. Some calls you would hang up and think, what was the point of that? But if you built a relationship in the process, then maybe you would come out in another way. When you're working for an organization that's growing rapidly, and in the case of TBI, that was certainly the case. I can think of that applying to a lot of people working in startups or in scale-ups, people are trying to build systems as they're working within those systems and understanding when they're fit for purpose and when they aren't is also extremely useful.

31:41Anna Aden: So sometimes you set up a meeting cadence and you realize it's too much and you need to cut it down and that's okay. And sometimes you realize you need more or someone else needs to be in the room, but a lot of that planning needs to be tested and needs to be trialed. And a lot of the time, It also needs to be tweaked along the way. So I think that taking that optimistic lens, if you go into it with the best intentions, you know, most people aren't trying to waste your time. Most people don't want to waste their time either. So if you can try and find ways for those engagements to be fruitful, or if they're not, feel free to try and adjust them.

32:19Anna Aden: I think people are generally pretty open to that, unless I guess you work in a very, very structured place, which certainly was not the case at TBI. But that dynamism does give you room to flex as well.

32:31Tristan Lim: Yeah, it's like breaking the deadlock, like the sort of hardening of like rituals and stuff that maybe don't serve the purpose anymore. It takes someone or some mechanisms in place of like a review, you know, reviewing all the meetings that we have. Do they still make sense to do that? You know, in a role like yours, working across governments, stakeholders, internal teams, all with often competing priorities. how do you actually decide what matters and how you should focus your energy?

32:58Anna Aden: I'd say as a chief of staff, you are cross-cutting most things that are happening within your region. So for me, I'm aware of what's happening across all the different departments, across HQ, in the country teams. So in order for me to figure out how to balance the priorities, I think it's helpful to think in terms of dependencies and to think in terms of overarching priorities and strategic goals. So every company sets strategic goals and everything ties back to those. Sometimes they change by quarter. It's good to be aware of what the priorities are at that time, but everything should then be in service of those strategic goals.

33:41Anna Aden: So when you can map that directly, then it helps you to set your priorities. The piece that I think relies more on a chief of staff, because anyone across any role can think about, you know, how is what I'm doing today serving the overarching strategic goal? And hopefully they do. As a chief of staff, because you kind of have that bird's eye view across all the different departments, it's more on your plate to understand the dependencies, which pieces are load bearing. So if department A doesn't deliver what they're supposed to at the timeline that they've been given, how will that affect departments B, C, and D?

34:18Anna Aden: And what accommodations need to be made in order to adjust that? If a client externally is going to shift their deadline up or is going to expand their request and ask for another piece of work, who are the different teams that need to be involved in that? How does what is on their plate need to be shuffled to balance what other clients have also asked for under the timeframe that has already been agreed? So being able to reallocate the load that sits on each of these teams in a way that is constantly dynamic. I think that's really what sits with the chief of staff and with a leadership team. No one really has that same view of the whole organization.

34:58Anna Aden: Of course, a managing director or principal would, but their efforts are typically reserved for matters that really require their attention. Whereas internal coordination, that's something that sits more with a chief of staff. So when you're able to understand with each department what it is that they have on their plate and how to help them adjust when external demands or priorities have shifted, you can make those tweaks in a way that's much more seamless and allows for that sort of flexibility. Whereas other teams independently don't typically have the oversight to be able to see that in the same way.

35:35Tristan Lim: It's a very fine balancing act, right? Because as you mentioned, things are always changing. And when things change, it means capacities of the different teams also change. And as things grow faster, we also need to ask teams to do more, perhaps. How do you think about when the load is too much, but it kind of needs to get done? And somehow we're asking a lot of everyone.

35:58Anna Aden: There's a study that I learned about when I was working in the humanitarian sector. I think it was a Harvard study. I wish I could cite it. But it looked at the degree of stress and burnout that employees were under in emergency settings. So they were working in war zones under some of the most difficult conditions imaginable. And the rates of burnout were greater for staff that were not working in war zones, but had poor internal leadership and poor internal support than for staff that were working in literal war zones. And that I found just really poignant. So if you have good infrastructure, if you have good colleagues, if you trust the leader that you're working with, you can withstand more stress and you can produce more output than if you don't.

36:49Anna Aden: It doesn't actually matter if you're working in a literal war zone. And now, happily, most of us are not working in literal war zones, but we still have to produce outputs. You still have priorities. You still have to meet your responsibilities. I think that the context and creating a positive context for people to be able to stretch the bounds of their stress is one of the best things that you can do as chief of staff. A lot of people talk about the chief of staff role as influencing without authority. That's a common theme that's always coming up where you need to get things done, but you're not that person's line manager.

37:25Anna Aden: You're not their direct boss. Sometimes the best thing that you can do is contribute to a positive working environment for them, is listen to their stresses, why they're so frustrated, why it is that they've realized they can't do this with this other demand that's just come in and help them think through and work through that process. You can't always change what it is that needs to be delivered to the client, nor the amount of hours that it will take to produce that output. Those are things that are not necessarily within your control, but you can do a lot to help people maximize their output or at least feel better about doing that.

38:01Anna Aden: And that chief of staff role, because it doesn't have the direct line management, but because the relationships and the trust piece are so strong, oftentimes that's where you're going to be most useful is really being able to listen to people and to listen to their challenges and to help them work through what it is that they're most frustrated with.

38:21Tristan Lim: that connects so many different pieces that I've been thinking about. One is the importance of creating a space where people can feel heard and seen without judgment, especially in a work context where if you have people that report to you, but also a line manager, there's stress from like all sides. Am I a good leader? And then is my leader a good leader to me? So, you know, being able to float almost around in the organization, kind of like check in I think that it can be a very powerful tool, let's say, for a company to have if done right.

38:56Anna Aden: Definitely.

38:57Tristan Lim: Your background is rooted in working in entities with humanitarian values. So working in crisis zones, advocating for people in some of the most difficult situations that we've kind of going through as humans. How do you hold on to that when your work has become much more, let's say, institutional and political? goal?

39:15Anna Aden: I think all work in some way can become political or institutional and everyone needs to have a kind of North star to guide them and to help them prioritize and distill what matters from the noise. For me, I was always and have always been rooted in impact and in thinking about what impact my work is having on humanity. But the truth is like impact is kind of this word that we've now taken to label quote unquote doing good things. But honestly, everything has impact. Every decision has impact. Every industry has impact in some ways in the literal sense of the word. So understanding what matters to you, I think, is all you can do to really consider how you want to show up to work every day and what it is that you want to put your efforts behind.

40:09Anna Aden: I think in the work with TBI, there's a lot of engagement externally with political leaders, and they're very powerful. They run countries and they have mandates that affect the lives of millions of people. And that can be very intimidating to come up against in a professional stakeholder. But for me, it was really helpful because in being grounded on impact, I know that I'm working in a way where I'm trying to enable the best outcomes for their citizens. And I know that as leaders, that's their job. They're also supposed to make decisions and enact policy that will improve the lives of their citizens.

40:50Anna Aden: being able to connect with leaders on that level really helps to remove some of the institutional and political noise because it really distills down what it is that you're both working towards. And it helps you to find that shared foundation that really should underpin everything. So again, I think that most people also want to, in some way, find a positive outcome with what it is that they're doing. And when you can sift through whatever else is getting in the way to find those points where you can align, it really helps to move forward.

41:26Tristan Lim: Yeah. Like what you're saying about finding the commonality of how each person's role is having an impact on people's lives and connecting on that piece. Cause that can often be forgotten when everything is numbers or presentations and it's quite abstract, you know, being sort of on the ground. And one of the most challenging things can be holding different contexts, being privy to so much information in an organization. The same ability that you have of being able to float around and gather the information that also comes with the responsibility of what do you do when you have all this information?

42:03Tristan Lim: How do you think about that? How do you handle privacy? How do you think about what is important for who? What has it been like for you?

42:10Anna Aden: You know, it's a blessing and a curse to have so much information from across an organization and to know when to deploy it. I think one of the most important pieces that a chief of staff needs to have in order to execute effectively is to hold trust and to value the relationships that they have with stakeholders internally across an organization. You need people to come to you with issues. You need people to share what they really think and what it actually looks like on the ground. If you don't have that, you're really stunted in what it is that you're able to do in your role. So knowing that that is kind of the backbone of your effectiveness and really considering everything and all of your relationships with people in those terms, it's not cold or transactional to put at the forefront of your mind that you need this relationship to be positive in order to do your job well.

43:08Anna Aden: It's just the truth of the matter. And having a positive relationship with colleagues is a good thing. So it can be hard to know when to deploy discretion and when to share information. People, of course, are aware that as a chief of staff, you do know quite a lot that's going on, usually sooner than other people do. And in a company where there's growth or uncertainty, Of course, that has an impact on other colleagues, but people also understand that you can't tell everyone everything all the time. And I think actually a larger piece of it goes towards trust in the organization and in the company itself.

43:48Anna Aden: If people trust the organization and company, they trust their own manager, then they hopefully would trust that information would come to them when it's needed. They know that the role of a chief of staff is to be able to constantly weave the pieces together. So they know that information flow is necessary. So in that sense, I think people will help you do your job if you can build a nice relationship with them, but it's tough. I think one part for me that was really helpful when I worked as chief of staff with the managing director for Asia was we had a great relationship. We would go on business trips all the time and we're constantly back and forth talking about different developments in each of the countries, whether they were countries that we were operating in or new options for expansion and having that trusted relationship with the principal.

44:39Anna Aden: So being able to have that sounding board back and forth where you can bounce things off of the principal and understand where you might need to share more or less information. I think that can be really helpful as well.

44:53Tristan Lim: How do you fix or regain trust when it's broken? An example you mentioned about, you know, ideally your team trusts in the organization that, you know, information will come out when it needs to come out. There are times when teams can get caught super surprised by announcements being made, cuts to the company, change in direction. And speaking from experience, trust gets broken when that happens. How do you think about how to begin mending or repairing from that place?

45:22Anna Aden: It's a hard one. I think that that's something that unfortunately most of us have probably experienced to some degree in our careers. Sometimes it's mended well and sometimes it's not. There's a fine line between recognizing when people's feelings have been hurt or people feel like they've been done wrong somehow and also moving forward and being able to strike that balance well can make all of the difference in helping to rebuild that trust. Listening, of course, is critical. Giving people a forum to express their thoughts and their experiences is really important. But sometimes you see culturally that that's not always something people are comfortable with or that they want to do.

46:09Anna Aden: So you need to pivot then or you need to offer alternatives. clear sharing of information as and when you're able to share it, I think is always the best approach. So tending towards acknowledgement over silence would be my opinion in most of those situations. So even if you send an all staff email that says, we know there's a lot going on right now and you guys are really confused, we'll share information with you as soon as the dust settles. That tells a company employees nothing, but sometimes will help them feel better versus sending absolutely nothing. So I think that knowing how to sort internal communications is really critical.

46:55Anna Aden: Having a strong internal comms team is definitely one of the relationships that's very critical for a chief of staff and can be a massive tool or a massive hindrance depending on how that team is working. Trust is really hard to rebuild. And I think that that's one of the most important pieces of understanding, not just organizational health, but also the role of the chief of staff is that if you don't have a strong suite of relationships across the organization, or unfortunately, and I was lucky that this was never the case for me, but I have colleagues in other companies across the industry who have not had good relationships with their principle, it's really hard to come back from something like that.

47:34Anna Aden: And sometimes you just need to make some structural changes that allow people to thrive in the best way because trust is very fickle. And even in a corporate setting where, you know, people aren't hopefully aren't living and breathing by their jobs every day, it does matter how people feel when they show up to work every day. And it's best to be able to acknowledge and recognize that.

47:54Tristan Lim: so Anna you've worked in humanitarian response impact measurement government advisory and now as a chief of staff your career hasn't really followed a straight line and yet maybe there's a through line that connects everything do you see any threads for me I realized especially

48:14Anna Aden: when I considered transitioning out of the humanitarian sector I guess at this point that was what, four or five years ago, what it is that I wanted to do and what I wanted to direct my energies towards. The reason I was interested in moving over to the private sector initially, and now kind of spanning private and public sectors is the banner I've always had is impact at scale. How do you press the lever with the least amount of pressure because I'm one person and enact the largest amount of change? That's something I was really interested in pursuing when I went to business school. It's something I was really interested in pursuing when I worked in financial consulting.

48:53Anna Aden: So I worked for a number of private equity and blended finance firms doing capital deployment. And there are a number of different ways, as we've discussed already, that people can have impact because every decision, every person has impact in some way. So I've always been most interested in figuring out how I can have impact at scale. I pretty much found three different ways that I thought would be the most effective for me. One was financial, one was capital deployment. The next one was policy. And the third one was technology, just looking at the direction that humanity is going and what influences us as a society.

49:34Anna Aden: So actually coming out of my business degree, I initially wanted to move towards capital deployment. I was working for a firm in London and thought that being able to deploy funds towards projects was the fastest way that I could help facilitate growth. Then the TBI opportunity came up and I thought, okay, well, policy is also one of the levers that I've identified. So let me give that a go. But those are the different sides of the coin that I've been interested in interrogating, thinking through where am I with my skillset and my interests most effectively suited towards being able to bring about the changes that I want to see.

50:14Anna Aden: And that question is going to have a different answer for everybody. It's going to have a different answer based on not just your interest, but your skillset, you know, and, and being honest with that, what it is that you like to do every day, what it is that you're good at doing is really important to a chief of staff role is exciting, but it takes a lot of energy. You have to be good at working with ambiguity. You have to be good at pivoting at a moment's notice, shifting priorities, accommodating changes, building relationships very quickly under high stakes situations. And that's not necessarily something that everyone's going to be good at doing.

50:53Anna Aden: If you are good at that, there's a lot of different ways that that skillset can be deployed across policy as I've been experiencing, but also in other areas like tech and capital deployment as well. So I think that it's for me been an exploration throughout my career, figuring out what context will give me the best opportunity to be able to deploy my skillset towards achieving the changes that I want to see and being able to work on the problems that I find to be most interesting.

51:23Tristan Lim: You also strike me as someone that takes time to reflect on what has happened and what can happen perhaps in the future. Is reflection part of your practice? Do you journal? How do you practice that?

51:35Anna Aden: I do that in my personal life quite a lot. I have a lot of trusted friends that are impressive in their careers, but also, you know, people that I've built really trusted relationships with. And we have a good practice of using each other as sounding boards and of having, you know, time to reflect in a more structured way, actually together, which is really helpful because it feels like a luxury sometimes to sit around and chat with your friends. Like, man, I'm so busy at work. Why would I do that? But it actually is really important to make sure that you're still oriented towards your values and still oriented towards what it is that you're actually working towards.

52:14Anna Aden: I think that's also equally important in a professional context. Having a postmortem is sometimes really frustrating because people want to move on and it's boring and you have to write what you did and everyone kind of hates reporting. We all, I hate it. You know, it's not something that is the most exciting, but being able to actually learn from what you've done and also to help others learn from what you've done, that's super valuable. So taking the time to go through what worked and what didn't and why we made certain decisions and whether we should make those again or should make different decisions in the future, that is extremely important.

52:52Anna Aden: So being able to see the whole situation is aided by talking to other people and finding out what their perspectives also illuminate for you.

53:02Tristan Lim: So I think reflection is really important. Especially when so much happens, right?

53:07Anna Aden: Absolutely. Every day, you know?

53:09Tristan Lim: Yeah. So taking time to release the pressure valve and kind of reset it.

53:14Anna Aden: Yeah.

53:14Tristan Lim: For someone who's listening, who doesn't come from a traditional background, so not from consulting, finance, or tech, and they're looking to kind of go into the chief of staff role, what would you tell them?

53:26Anna Aden: I think that people think there's a structure to a chief of staff role, but there oftentimes isn't. And what we see across the role as it expands in different industries is that it takes on a different form and it takes on a different form from one company to another, from one principle to another within the same company. So that structure, it's not something that you should see as prohibiting you from being able to access a role like that if you're interested in it. It's also, as we've already discussed, it's heavily personally dependent. So there will be principles that you will gel with and there will be principles

54:06Tristan Lim: that you won't.

54:07Anna Aden: I would say that and the relationships that you have within the company that you're interested in working with, those are far more important than specific credentials. When we talk about what a chief of staff does, people use frameworks like you act as a bridge or a systems integrator or a translator. Those aren't things that come from one specific industry. Those are things that are learned. And that's something that different people who have different backgrounds will either have or they won't. And it's not because you got a specific degree or worked in a specific sector. So I'd say none of that should necessarily hold you back.

54:44Anna Aden: If you think that working within that chaos, thriving with a heavy dose of ambiguity every single day, needing to build relationships as a currency, but also needing them to hold value and actually be real. If those are things that you enjoy doing, then great. You should have a go at it. And the best way to do it is to just start with building those relationships and think about who it is that you want to work with, whether it's an individual or a company and why you want to work with them and what it is that you could bring to the table.

55:17Tristan Lim: What would you say is one thing you wish someone had told you before you stepped into being a chief of staff?

55:23Anna Aden: You know, when I was taking on the role of chief of staff, there was an incredible colleague that I was picking up the reigns from. And I was nervous and I was just waiting for her handover note. And I thought that it would hold all of the answers. I finally got her handover note when I was starting and it was one page and it was extremely brief. I was a little bit scared because I was like, wait, where are all of the answers to the questions that I'm going to have? But to be honest, once I started working, I almost never needed to refer to it. And she knew that that's why she didn't write anything because things are always changing and you're going to make the role into your own.

56:04Anna Aden: You can't do it the way that someone else did it because you're not that person. You're someone else. You have your own personality. You have your own relationships. You have your own structure, the way that your brain thinks. So you don't need a thing from a person that will enable you to do your job well. I got really lucky the day that I started. My boss sent me an email. I think it was two lines. It was, congratulations, Anna. I can't wait to work with you. You have my full confidence. And that really stuck with me throughout the whole time that I was working to know that someone, my principal believed in me and was going to facilitate my success.

56:45Anna Aden: That made all the difference. So honestly, we're all capable of doing so much more than we think we are. And to have that confidence in ourselves and to trust ourselves that we care and we have the intent to succeed and we will show up. And if we don't know how to figure it out, we'll figure out how to figure it out. That matters so much more than one anecdote or quick tip or anything like that to just know that you come into it with eyes wide open and you roll up your sleeves and you get it done.

57:14Tristan Lim: There's a threat that we've been pulling on, which is creating the right environments for people to succeed. And something that you've been saying, which I really, really appreciate is we can do so much more than we think we can, especially if we have the right environment, i.e. the people and the, I guess, like systems in place that encourage us to keep on trying. Last question for you, Anna. How has being a chief of staff impacted your life outside of work?

57:39Anna Aden: Well, I certainly slept a lot less after taking on the role. But no, I think that that actually is true. It can spill into your life in so many ways. And the chief of staff role can be never ending because there's always more information that you can surface, more people that you can listen to, more initiatives that you can kickstart. It showed me the importance of boundaries. So I mentioned earlier, working across time zones and having really late calls put on the calendar and realizing very quickly, I need to decline a lot of these and I need to set specific working hours. And the idea of boundaries too, I think can cascade beyond obviously just working hours, but thinking through what things are worth your time and attention and your prioritization and what things do you need to put to the side?

58:32Anna Aden: Do you need to give to someone else? Do you need to decline? That ability to set healthy boundaries makes you better at your job. And when people have clarity around that, it makes it easier to work with you. So being able to say, I don't take calls after 10 PM. If you have that clarity, people can understand and they can accommodate that. It's not rude. It's not wrong. It's very understandable to be honest, but that's something that you can really take into other parts of your life too. You need to set your boundaries around what it is that you're capable of, where you put yourself in the best frame of mind to deliver what you care about.

59:08Anna Aden: And whether that's nurturing personal relationships, nurturing professional relationships, whatever it is that you're putting your mind towards. Boundaries are an extremely healthy tool. And when you're in a chief of staff role, you're kind of forced in a lot of ways to confront that. But I think that it's a really good practice and something that I've seen benefit me in other parts of my life as well.

59:26Tristan Lim: Great. And anything else you want to share with us today? you walk through.

59:29Anna Aden: No, it's been great chatting with you. I think that the chief of staff role, it's really exciting to see the growth in this field. I think it's extremely useful, especially as we have technology growing at the pace that it is and AI taking up so many functions that were previously done by people. The chief of staff role remains one that I really think offers a personal element to a company. It's relationship-based. And look, we're not talking about someone who's there to make everyone in the office feel good. You have a really high degree of responsibilities that you need to execute, but the role requires the interpersonal component.

1:00:10Anna Aden: And it's good to remember that it is still important to have the people in the workplace and to see the importance of that playing out across all industries as this role grows is really heartening as well.

1:00:23Tristan Lim: Couldn't agree more. All right. Thank you so much for your time.

1:00:26Anna Aden: Thanks, Tristan. It's been a pleasure.

1:00:34Thank you.