Small Bands of Determined People: Leadership When the Ground Keeps Shifting

Paul Taylor spent 26 years in the British Army — Northern Ireland, the Gulf War, the Balkans, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan — before a sliding-doors moment took him into expedition guiding. Then the 2015 Nepal earthquake happened, and three and a half weeks working as a medic alongside a scratch team of Argentinian climbers and local Nepali staff changed the direction of his life. He's now the International Operations Manger for REACT Disaster Response, a UK humanitarian charity, deploying into some of the most volatile environments on earth.

This conversation covers what actually holds a team together when the plan falls apart: why Paul selects for character over skills, what "cognitive diversity" looks like in practice versus the tick-box version, how to build psychological safety on the side of a hill in a gale, and why leaving your ego at the door isn't a platitude — it's operationally necessary.

• The Nepal earthquake and the Road to Damascus moment: how a scratch international team with no shared training outperformed expectations, and what that taught Paul about collective competence over individual brilliance
• Selecting for character, not skills: knowledge and experience can be built; character shows up under pressure or not at all
• Cognitive diversity vs. tick-box diversity: why the goal is different ways of seeing a problem, not just different faces in the room
• Situational leadership: reading the moment: when to be directive (the ground is literally shaking) and when to slow down and make space for everyone's voice
• Building psychological safety in the field: the practical, physical choices that shape whether people speak up: where you stand, how loud you talk, whether you sit down to their level
• The OODA-adjacent instinct for uncertainty: "absence of the normal, presence of the abnormal," and how to build situational awareness in a place you've never been
• Selfless commitment, and its limits: the discipline of putting the team and the mission first, and the equally important discipline of knowing when to stop, eat, sleep, and go again tomorrow
• Daily learning in the field: why after-action reviews shouldn't wait for the debrief back home, and the value of the fire-side "how are we feeling?" conversation
• Leaving your ego at the door and why that's an operational requirement, not a nice-to-have
• A message from the House of Commons: Paul's reflections on soft power, hard power, and the humanitarians operating right now in Gaza, Ukraine, and Sudan

Paul's off to Sweden this week for a 300km sea-kayak crossing of the Baltic, from Finland back to Stockholm, with a small group of friends. Ten days, a few weather windows built in, no room for over-planning.

Four things, really, rolled into one: emotional intelligence, a unifying goal everyone can buy into, attitude and effort as the non-negotiable baseline, as well as a sense of humour, because taking the work seriously doesn't mean taking yourself too seriously.

• React Disaster Response: react.org.uk
• Learning from the Edge: learningfromtheedge.co.uk