The police siren, fast-and-almost-furious cars trailing each other, with us sat down inside one of the dedicated cars. Chauffeurs. Roadblocks. No red light matters to our vehicles.

We are invincible.

Stunned at witnessing Power being exercised, I said to my colleague: “I don’t think I’m going to even consider going back to clinical medicine.”

I said that in April 2022, after we were welcomed at the Prambanan Temple, the very first event we conducted in our Presidency. Power, exercised. At that moment, I realized how powerful conversation is, 3-minute interventions are, and the subtle art of reading between the lines. Culture. Way of speaking. The silence before or after a response. Interest. Willingness. The atmosphere in the room might shift civilization forward.

At one point, the tipping point was in my hands. I need to play my cards.

After one and a half years, the attention slowly fades to the excruciating fate of time. Time flies. Like it or not, we must hand it over. I imagine this 20-year cycle of Presidency might have expounded in Malcolm Gladwell’s most popular book, Outliers, which was meant to shape and clear the dust on the global stage of the upcoming Indonesian generations. My generation. Suit the style, know your fellows, and talk the walk.

I think I did well. At least from what I heard directly, I received positive feedback and gestures toward “a job well done.” That’s what I like. Some deliverables are impossible, or maybe just simply hard, and we managed to manage our expectations. I felt like we kinda float above our dreamy words and did not exercise grounding often enough.

Changing the world.

Leading from behind.

Blah blah blah -- vomiting flowery words.

I learned a lot about global health this past year by a huge margin compared to previous efforts by attending workshops, webinars, courses, and so on. Bizarre enough for me, I started reading fiction/literature right after I started working in G20, and I must say, the reality is much weirder than fiction. In fiction, we read stories about how the main character slew the dragons. In reality, you are not even sure other people can see the dragon, much less care about slaying it. It is part of the job to identify the dragon and help other people see it too.

I am immensely blessed to participate in this historic year-long assumed leadership, and that’s why I’m thrilled to immortalize the experience and lessons I learned through this writing--hoping it will inspire one or two people, and ignite a new connection or friendship with my readers.

For a starter, here are two golden nuggets I collected from the first half of the G20 Indonesia experience:

That's probably my go-to advice to those who ask about my experience. I've been working with the government for more than a year and their bureaucracies are... complicated. We must be slippery, find bypasses and shortcuts, and get the attention of our busy leaders.

I’m not saying we should cheat or topple the structure, but we can't get anything done by coursing through the rules—you will only get slapped by their multiple layers of command. We must find ways to present the urgency and importance of our agenda and deliverables.

I’m also not saying elbowing down your colleagues is the way to ascend. Trust me, we all know when someone does that. Status games have been plaguing humans since the beginning, and so we develop a kind of spidey sense when someone does that.

No, not the judgmental, negative type of judgment. But rather, we measure everyone. Capabilities, interest, and forté. For example, my upline recognized that I’m good with organizing, documentation, and keeping our knowledge searchable and accessible. Eventually, everyone realized that and I’m getting more tasks in that area compared to logistics or administration. Everyone is trying to work their way and deliver their responsibilities, so everyone will devise a plan, identify key persons, and work their way. And yes, if you are full of shit, everyone knows. They just didn’t show it in front of you.

One of the most confusing parts of working in G20 is when we crafted a timeline, a set of activities, milestones, and targets based on the direction given to us a few months earlier, only to be annulled at the last minute. After six months of work, one last touch is needed to set the gear in motion. And then he said no.

Ok, I guess? Here we go.. again?

Sometimes I wonder whether the others knew that we were clueless.

(I bet my money that they knew.)

I questioned myself at that point: where is this going? What's the end goal I'm trying to help them achieve? Because it does not matter what I do today and tomorrow if we don't know where we are heading to. Or maybe we knew for a moment but it is a moving target. The Myth of Sisyphus turns into reality.

We need to find the dragon.

However, there's a limit to what I can push from behind. I've been a "sponge" in trying to absorb and learn how to read the playbook and navigate the chain of commands, but if the substance is not handled, we are playing the organizer game. We are not utilizing the Presidency status.

Everyone knows that our Presidency was in a difficult situation because of the geopolitical tension in Russia and Ukraine. From my personal involvement, I kinda get along with how the Ministry of Foreign Affairs handled the situation and I’m awaiting their guidance. On one occasion, I remember all the Working Groups had a meeting where we received direction from G20’s main two tracks: Finance and Sherpa.

“We are not here to be an Event Organizer. We must exercise our position as Presidency. Approach them, ask them what they want, and make sure we address them in the forum. They need to know we are listening, and we are trying our best to reach a consensus. For the past few years, the G20 has depended on International Organizations. We must change it. Our presidency must be led by the country, Indonesia.”

That less-than-a-minute leadership changed the way I approached the second half of the G20 Health Working Group.

The plan never works out. That’s the first step toward conducting a successful meeting at G20. It is a unique forum where the outcome must be agreed upon by every member of G20. As someone said during the meeting, nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. So, in that sense, it is futile to specifically determine what you want the other countries to do/agree upon. It is best to let your deliverables be vague, spur discussions and let solutions emerge from the countries. We, as the Presidency, set the issue and the stage. We pit ideas against each other and hope the best one wins.

Or is it?

Not always. The best does not always win, it depends on who is speaking, the negotiation, and the leverage we bring to the table.

The mistake I noticed is that we thought about materializing deliverables into action in a short span of time. We couldn’t transform multilateral cooperation into a hackathon where 20 countries, with 20 interests, differences, and priorities, agree to do one thing. It takes time. So, I’d say:

Embrace the spontaneity, abstract ideas, and word fights you need to engage and win your priorities over their priorities. Keep things messy, and the dust will settle where the wind blows. It is better to negotiate half your way, instead of losing everything for a minor detail they can’t agree upon. Walk into the meeting like you own it.

The Ministry of Health, and so are other ministries, have an established structure. G20 is only a part of what they do/engage with, not necessarily determining this is all they do. That fact alone should be a sobering reminder that our leaders are not 100% following the issues’ development we proposed or what happened last year that we should continue. I summed up advice I would give my younger self suppose I could rewind the earliest days of my G20 experience:

It is imperative to accept that some people work through WhatsApp... Just WhatsApp. They don’t work through email regularly, and information got lost in the ephemeral nature of WhatsApp chats. I didn’t expect it would be that chaotic, but we managed to store information and keep track of all that was happening with external apps, such as Google Drive, Docs, and Slides. I almost never shared any offline Word documents. I “forced” them to work through online documents. Never push, but don’t give them options that make your life hard.

until it becomes automatic for them to repeat it themselves. Everyone is competing for attention and priorities. Repetition is a tool to make them remember something. And if you think something is important, repeat it in every presentation.

Push for one idea, and repeat them until it is the only thing they see. From my experience and understanding, meetings will not facilitate brainstorming. Best ideas will be sidelined by the person in charge’s opinion because there are hierarchies and they will not challenge their bosses. The risks weigh more than the benefits. That’s why I suggest ideas and brainstorming happen in a written form. Pit the ideas on a level playing field. I particularly liked Jeff Bezos’s rules to run a meeting: Two Pizza team, No PowerPoint, and Start with Silence.

I saw that people in Indonesia are somewhat addicted to synchronized meetings and the chain of commands must be expressed verbally, so you need to record everything. Meeting Notes, key takeaways, action points, everything must be recorded. You need a plan to organize all this information in a neat, accessible way.

One of the most important persuasion techniques: anchoring. Once you create the zero draft, the direction is set from that document. It gets revised, sure, but it rarely deviates so much from the document that needs to be reworked from zero: no one wants to redraft it. Your zero draft must reflect the magnitude of issues you want to bring, cover everything, and provide space for other countries to chip in their opinion towards your deliverable.

The whole concept of knowledge, stored inside our brain and the people who participated in the meeting is highly valuable. People with experience get paid way higher than those without. Is there a way, then, to manage what’s within the brain? Or outside the brain of other people who are related to our work? Is it possible to access our knowledge like, let’s say, Wikipedia? When a topic is mentioned, can we click it and open a world related to that word that is ready at hand? This is an overlooked topic. We rely on someone’s memory and wisdom to decide, but we don't have a clear objective view of their knowledge, regardless of their biases and personal preference. Knowledge management systems, either personal and/or organizational, will be increasingly considered part of the core management of an organization. That leads to my last two pieces of advice for global health:

Papers, publications, reports, you need to master them all. Or at least, you know where to find what. What has happened, what are the roadmaps, the efforts that have been done, where the big players are working on, what waves you can ride on and amplify your voice, etc. It is particularly embarrassing when you come up with an “innovative” idea only to be dismantled by “but we already have that.” I’m a huge advocate of Personal Knowledge Management and moreover, Organizational Knowledge Management. I think it is a pity that what an organization has been through, is stored in countless, unlinked documents without notes. That’s why tools such as Roam Research, Obsidian, Logseq, and now the new kid on the block, Tana, are pushing our knowledge management forward. We are at the beginning, and I believe every global health organization should have one Chief Knowledge Management Officer.

I myself exercised this in our G20 Presidency: I hired myself. We utilized Roam Research from 2021 to store information, analysis, and bank our collective knowledge, including meeting notes, to-do lists, and open questions. The challenge is how do we prevent ourselves from hoarding fleeting notes, and only save the best notes? We want to separate and categorize them, create workflows and make sure the best ideas keep resurfacing. We also don’t want our system to be high-maintenance. We want to take notes without friction, and ideas flow without constraint.