David Jensen: What I Learned About Myself After 20 Years in the UN

At the end of 2025, after twenty years as a UN staff member, I made the decision to leave.

Before I did, I wrote about it honestly, and at length. The Substack piece covers twenty lessons from twenty years: how large institutions really work, how influence moves, how to build things inside systems that weren’t designed for them. It was ready in January. It reached readers six months later, after a delay at the UN’s request. Draw your own conclusions.

But as I was writing, I kept running into a limit. I could describe the system clearly enough. I could map its incentives, its informal power structures, its tribal loyalties. What I found harder to see was myself inside it. Not what I had built, but why I built it the way I did. Which patterns of behavior, repeated over two decades, had both made me effective and eventually made me someone the institution found difficult to direct and contain.

I didn’t just want to reflect on what I had learned about institutions. I wanted to understand what those twenty years had revealed about my own character.

An executive coach suggested I take a Hogan personality assessment. I was glad he did.

The Hogan measures three things: how you perform at your best, what drives you underneath, and which tendencies become liabilities under pressure. I expected confirmation of what I already thought I knew. What I got was precision and an objective assessment of my blind spots.

Here is what the data showed, and what I’m carrying forward as part of my professional development.

Three things that made me effective

My highest Hogan scores cluster around ambition (90%), sociability (90%), and what Hogan calls “imaginative” thinking (97%). In plain terms: I’m wired to see around corners, build coalitions around new ideas, and operate outside established frameworks. Recognition (97%) and altruism (96%) are my dominant motivators, which explains why I kept starting programs that didn’t yet exist, and why the mission always mattered more to me than the hierarchy and power (Tradition: 18%, Security: 2%, Power: 49%).

The record fits the profile. Two programs co-founded from scratch. $75 million raised. Coalitions and projects built across more than 30 countries. Over 20 flagship publications. That doesn’t happen without a high tolerance for ambiguity, genuine care for the people involved, and a willingness to act before anyone gives you permission.

What shadows each strength

The Hogan also measures what those same strengths look like under pressure, and how they can derail success.

Being imaginative (97%) is a double-edged score. The quality that generates new fields like environmental peacebuilding and digital sustainability also produces ideas that colleagues experience as impractical or hard to follow. When I was excited, my thinking regularly outran the organization’s capacity to stay with it. Ideas got lost, not because they were wrong, but because the communication around them wasn’t clear enough for others to act on.

Mischievous (92%) and Colourful (90%) are the shadows of the coalition-builder. The Hogan flags both as carrying an impulsive streak, and the data is right. I commit fast, I move fast, and I find routine detail tedious. Over time, that combination puts trust under strain. People experience it as over-promising, as moving on before the last thing is finished, as energy that generates momentum but doesn’t always deliver closure. Perhaps I move to the next thing a little too quickly. My impatience for impact has always been the engine. It has also, at times, been the weakness.

Perhaps the most revealing number is Dutiful at 1%. In Hogan terms, that means independent, self-reliant, and unwilling to defer to authority for its own sake. This result elicited enormous laughter when I first read the profile, mixed with an equal amount of shame. But it is true. I act without prior approval. I work best with leaders who trust my judgment and worst with those who need to control it. I seek forgiveness rather than permission. That is not a flaw in the abstract. But in a conservative system that rewards procedural compliance and manages risk upward, it is a structural mismatch. One that holds for two decades when you have the right champion, and becomes an acute liability the moment you don’t.

But if Dutiful made me laugh, Hedonism at 95% made me double over. The Hogan defines it as a desire for fun, excitement, variety, and pleasure. And yes, that is also true. I enjoy people. I enjoy life. I work best in coalitions that can laugh while doing hard things. This can also pull me toward groups that know how to have fun, and away from those that do the hard work more quietly. Worth watching.

What I’m taking forward

Looking at the full profile, one thing becomes clear: at heart, I am an entrepreneur who spent twenty years working inside a large institution. When the conditions rewarded that, I thrived. When they stopped, I couldn’t stay.

I wrote in the lessons learned paper that the qualities that enable impact inside large institutions are often the same ones those institutions find hardest to accommodate over time. I believed it when I wrote it. Now I have the data to show why it was true in my specific case.

The profile also clarified something I hadn’t fully understood before: why I ended up in digital sustainability rather than conventional environmental work. Traditional environmental governance is linear by design: global commitments lead to national strategies, strategies to legislation, legislation to regulation, regulation to monitoring and enforcement. That process moves at the speed of institutions. The drivers of environmental change do not. Digital technologies, designed with sustainability built in from the start, offer a different trajectory. They could help solve environmental problems at the scale and speed needed to finally bend the curve and help humanity stay within planetary boundaries. But only if that goal remains the priority. For someone wired the way I am, this was never really a choice. It was personality. That doesn’t make me a techno-optimist. I’m more of a human pessimist. We are short-term and pleasure-seeking, tribal and emotional, easily distracted by shiny objects. I know this because the Hogan showed me these tendencies in myself.

To date, we have not found the right incentives to steer human behavior toward sustainability. But if sustainable behaviors can become the default by design for digital technologies, and if digital technologies can amplify these behaviors at a global scale and exponential speed, maybe, just maybe, we have a chance.

The Hogan doesn’t just diagnose. It clarifies how to work well. The vision, the coalition-building, the ability to see around corners and move fast in new fields. Those are real, and they are what clients engage me for. What I have learned is to design carefully around the edges: partnering with people who are stronger on execution and detail, communicating clearly enough that ideas can actually be acted on, and building structures that hold the work beyond the initial momentum. The consultancy practice I’m now building, focused on digital sustainability and AI, is designed around exactly those conditions: fast-moving problems, cross-sector coalitions, fields without established playbooks. Self-awareness isn’t a substitute for discipline. But it is where discipline starts.

Twenty years taught me how complex systems work. The Hogan profile taught me, with more precision than I expected, how I work inside them and what kind of people and projects I should be working with. Thanks to my executive coach, Jeremy Sutton, for pointing me toward it.

The longer piece, Thriving and Surviving in the UN System: 20 Years of Service – 20 Lessons Learned, is on Substack.