The Beauty and Weight of Getting Organized

Editor’s Note: In this guest perspective, Humanity United collaborator Pedro Portela shares some key lessons in governance from his work with HU and partners. For greater insight into the case studies referenced in this piece, read the full reflection here.

Over the past eight years, I have been working in partnership with Humanity United to understand how groups collaborate in complex environments. What began as a technical inquiry—applying engineering and systems thinking to peacebuilding—slowly pulled me into a far more human, uncertain, and emotionally complex landscape.

I wasn’t supposed to be in this field. I was trained as an aerospace engineer, someone accustomed to working with systems that behave according to rules, tolerances, and models you can test. But when I found myself standing beside peacebuilders, facilitators, and community leaders—people working with trauma, identity, conflict, and memory—I entered a world for which no simulation could prepare me.

For a long time, I tried to navigate this space using technical logic: network diagrams, system dynamics, complexity theory. But the more time I spent in the field, the more I saw that the systems I was studying weren’t abstract. They were made of people—stories, contradictions, relationships, silences, power, fear, care. And slowly, almost reluctantly, I realized that my work wasn’t really about networks. It was about governance: the quiet, fragile, often invisible ways people try to stay together long enough to do something meaningful.

Through three case studies, I confronted a difficult but clarifying truth: collaboration doesn’t remove conflict; it reveals it. Groups behave like nonlinear systems. Small shifts create disproportionate effects. And what ultimately matters is not whether a network “succeeded,” but whether the people involved gained agency, clarity, and the capacity to adapt under pressure and uncertainty.

This blog post is an attempt to offer a window into the lessons from that journey—the beauty and the weight of trying to get organized in conditions that are anything but simple.

Lesson 1: Collaboration Is a Catalyst for Conflict

We often imagine that collaboration creates unity. But in practice, collaboration exposes the fractures that were already there. In every peacebuilding context I worked in, the moment people began to organize was the moment the contradictions surfaced—differences in power, expectations, trauma histories, and thresholds for risk. Collaboration didn’t create these tensions; it simply made them visible.

Coming from engineering, this was a difficult lesson to accept. Engineers are trained to assume that if something is failing, you redesign the structure. But in peacebuilding, tension is not a malfunction—it is a diagnostic. It tells us where meaning, identity, and fear collide. Seeing tension clearly is part of the work. Turning away from it is what creates fragility.

Lesson 2: Groups Behave Like Chaotic Systems

In engineering, systems behave according to tolerances you can calculate. In peacebuilding, groups behave like nonlinear, sensitive, fragile ecosystems. A small shift—a decision, a rumor, a fatigue cycle—can destabilize months of progress. Best practices rarely travel intact across contexts. Stability is temporary. Change is constant.

I am struck by how little this chaotic behavior is acknowledged. The dominant narrative was still one of optimism, strategy, and linear improvement—as if peace could be engineered through goodwill and coordination alone. But the field is messier than that. Peacebuilding happens in human terrain, not controlled environments. Nonlinearity isn’t a limitation of the work—it is its defining condition.

Predictability is not the goal—discernment is.

Lesson 3: The Goal Is Not Stability—It’s Adaptability

Across all three cases I examined, the groups that survived were not the ones with elegant designs or clearly defined roadmaps. They were the ones able to pause, renegotiate, and stretch without breaking. Peacebuilding requires this elasticity. It asks people to hold competing truths, manage trust and distrust at the same time, and maintain enough structure to act without suffocating emergence.

Governance, I learned, is not a manual. It’s a practice. Not something a group has, but something it continually does—especially when conditions are uncertain.

None of the cases were clean successes. None were failures either. They lived in the uncomfortable middle—between optimism and constraint, between aspiration and what the context would allow. And perhaps this is where peacebuilding truly lives: not in the certainty of plans, but in the courage to work with reality as it is, not as we wish it to be.

This work sits in what some have called a hiatus—a space between non‑success and non‑failure, where meaning is made through practice rather than outcomes. And across every case, the thread that held was agency: people becoming a little more able to act, to discern, to navigate complexity with intention.

In peacebuilding—as in all complex systems—agency may be the closest thing we have to a measure of success.

These reflections are only a doorway into a much larger set of questions. The full article explores them in depth, for anyone who wishes to step further into the beauty and weight of getting organized.

Pedro Portela has a background in mechanical and aerospace engineering, but his true passion lies in helping teams and organizations self-organize. Based in Portugal, he is a trainer and facilitator in social complex systems, network weaving, and governance. He has been collaborating with HU since 2017.