What if the UN could regenerate from the inside out—one meeting, one ritual, one relationship at a time?
In this insightful conversation, host Silke von Brockhausen speaks with Liliana Uruburo, a culture-change advisor in the UN Secretariat’s Business Transformation and Accountability Division. Instead of debating large-scale reforms, they explore what every UN staff member can actually do tomorrow morning to make work more humane, energized, and effective—no matter their grade or duty station.

Liliana introduces the idea of tending the UN’s “social soil”—the web of trust, presence, and relationships that makes everything else grow. Through small, repeatable habits, she shows how we can shift from fatigue and fragmentation toward clarity and collaboration.

Key Themes

• Culture before structure: Technology enables change, but people and relationships carry it.
• Micro-habits of regeneration: How brief practices like breath resets and collective listening can transform meetings.
• Middle management as the system’s pivot: Why the “squeezed middle” determines whether change sticks.
• Empowered early-career staff: Building credibility through clarity, kindness, and quiet value creation.
• Regeneration as participation: Re-imagining the UN’s renewal as a shared, living process—not another reform task force.

💡 Practical Takeaways

Try these this month:

1. Open–Listen–Close: Start with a 3-minute reset, practice collective listening mid-meeting, and end with one-line commitments and an energy check.
2. Borrow before building: Before starting a new initiative, find an existing one and collaborate.
3. Trust the outputs: Focus on outcomes over optics—flex where, when, and how work gets done.
4. Find your circle: Join a practice group such as Transformative Spaces or NewWork to keep skills alive and embodied.

Further Resources

• Explore Transformative Spaces and NewWork within the UN system for bite-size, experiential learning.
• Connect with Liliana Uruburo on LinkedIn.
• Discover more about The RE:Generation Collective and upcoming events here: regeneration-collective.org