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See if these sound familiar. We'll get to that after the gala. I will address that problem once we get through this transition. I'm going to address all of this chaos when things start to settle down a little bit. If you've been saying some version of this to yourself, and I hear this constantly from the leaders that I work with, then I want to offer something today that I think can be one of the most important reframes in this work. That instinct. It's actually a really logical response to to a really illogical situation. But it is costing you. And today we're going to talk about why. Welcome to the Nonprofit Mastermind podcast, where we name what's really happening inside growing nonprofits and what it actually takes to design a high impact nonprofit the right way. I'm Brooke Richie Babbage, longtime nonprofit strategist and coach. Each week I unpack the systems, strategies and specific mindset shifts that help growing nonprofits get smart and intentional about growing their impact without burning out along the way. This show is about moving beyond grit to design. It's about building organizations that have the systems, structures and leadership capacity to truly hold the weight of their mission. Welcome. The core problem that most nonprofits have is that they're operating on an unconscious assumption that calm is a precondition for building, that you need stable ground before you can design something solid. But here's what I've watched happen over and over. Chaos never pauses. It only compounds. Every week without a system, someone will reinvent the wheel. Every month, without clear rolls, the same ambiguities create new friction. And every season that passes without real operating rhythms for your team, for your board, for your fundraising, more and more of that weight lands on you as the leader. This isn't a season that you're in. For a lot of organizations, this will become your default. All of this points to the existence of what I call design deficits. These are the gap between the size of your work and the infrastructure holding it. And when you're operating with design deficits, your organization is essentially asking the humans, you and your team and your board to do what systems should be doing. And that's exhausting. It's also organizationally fragile and ultimately it's not sustainable. Here's the thing about chaos. It doesn't create the conditions for building. It creates the conditions for more chaos. It perpetuates itself. There are two reasons that this I'll get to it when logic breaks down. I'm going to walk through each one one and I'm just going to Shoot you straight here. There is no later. The gala will end. The new hire will start, the new board chair will start. The thing that you're waiting until after the thing will happen and then something else will fill the space, the transition will wrap up and a new urgent thing will emerge. This is the nature of growth. And that filling of the space, the perpetuation of chaos, is the nature of growth without infrastructure, the capacity to think clearly, to plan strategically, and to build intentionally, which is what leads to sustainability never appears on its own. There is no later. It has to be created as you go. Here's the second reason. The longer you wait, the harder it gets. So it's not just that there's no later, it's that waiting for later means the problems that you're going to try to solve. Those design deficits, those gaps will just get bigger. Reactive mode will start to feel normal. It doesn't feel better, it just feels normal, right? The organization, you and your team, you build habits, you build workarounds, informal systems that help you navigate the chaos. But these workarounds are load bearing, right? They aren't actually structured fixes or structural fixes. They're workarounds. They're intended to be temporary. They are reactive. But because they become the norm, the longer you wait, the harder it is to unwind them. Even when they aren't healthy, right? Even when they aren't long term sustainable. One of the organizations that I worked with, $2.2 million organization, had somehow fallen into a habit of twice a week check in meetings with the whole leadership team. If you are doing that, I'm just going to say now that's not sustainable. That's not a good meeting cadence for the leadership team. But they had gone through a period of sort of crisis, internal crisis, around funding and some board turnover. And they really did need to meet that frequently to stay on the same page and to move together, right? With real precision and clarity. But that moment ended and they hadn't actually gone deeper to build a structure around what meetings mean and the role that they play. They had just started having meetings and so they had nothing to fall back to. And so now here they are a year and a half later. There is no crisis. They're a healthy organization, but they're drowning in meetings, right? Here's a good analogy that I have often found helpful. It's like trying to renovate a house while you're living in it. It's never going to be the right time. I don't know if any of you have ever gone through that. I have gone through that. It's never the right time. But waiting until you can move out isn't an option either. You have to start somewhere and you have to start at some point in time, even with people in the rooms. So this is the reframe or the sort of belief shift that I want to invite you into. Calm doesn't come before systems. Calm is what systems create. Leaders who feel the steadiest, the ones who seem to move through hard seasons without completely unraveling. It's not just that they're like more resilient or quote unquote, better at their job. I've heard that one too. And it's always a red flag for me. That is not what's happening. It's not that some people are just better at handling stress necessarily. There are some people, but that's usually not what you're seeing. What you're seeing is that they've built something. They built an institution or a structure that holds the weight of the organization so that they don't have to hold it all themselves. Right? The organization becomes load bearing instead of the people. That is what I call a stability flywheel. All of my work is about helping organizations build the parts of their stability flywheel so that they can look around the institution that they work in and realize that it's holding the weight, it's holding the growth and the questions and the strategic redesigns. Everything that's happening sits in the organization, not on the shoulders of the leader. And when your infrastructure is sound, when the house that you've redesigned is a good solid house, when the walls are good and the windows have been fixed and the infrastructure is strong, each part of the system supports the others. Decisions don't all escalate or boomerang back to you as the leader. Your team doesn't need you to be present for every moving part. You don't have to have twice a week meetings. You can actually think and vision and strategize and plan. You can actually lead in a high leverage way. The waiting version of this is the opposite. Every deferred system just creates more friction, which creates more fire, which creates less capacity to build and plan and strategize and vision, which creates more deferral, it's like the opposite of a stability flywheel. It's like an instability flywheel. I'm gonna say this fully shift again. You don't wait until things are calm to build. You build your way to calm. Now, I'm not gonna give you like a five step plan. But I am gonna suggest three honest shifts, right? How you can begin to do the rebuild even while you're living in the house. Right? How to move even in the mess. First, stop looking for the right moment. Find the smallest useful one. Right? In business, we talk about minimum viable product. What's the minimum viable moment? Right. You don't need a whole clear quarter or honestly even a month to quote, unquote, get started. You need one hour and one thing. What's the single decision that keeps landing on your desk that shouldn't start with one, right? What's the one process your team has to recreate from scratch every time? That's your starting your minimum viable moment. Second, honest shift you can make. I really want you to treat imperfect systems as real, right? They are real systems. A meeting template written on a napkin is still a meeting template. A rough version of a process doc or a standard operating procedure. An SOP is still an sop. The goal isn't perfection. It isn't polish. It's just something that exists outside of your head that doesn't require you to remember it or hold it every time. So you do get to say we are setting up systems, even if those systems aren't perfect, right? The walls do not have to be perfect for you to say they are holding up the ceiling. Final shift that I recommend, reframe planning as the work, not a break from it. And this is a big one for the folks that work with me. And if you've listened to my podcast for a while, you will. You may note that I talk about planning throughout the year, right? There's year end planning, there's mid year planning, which I talk about usually in May or June, and then once or twice a quarter. There's something about planning, strategic vision, revisiting priorities, revisiting outcomes and key results planning, thinking ahead, being intentional is always part of the work, right? It's the work that you do so that you can do the other work. It's the unsexy stuff, but you have to create time to do it so that you are creating space for the other work, for the visioning, for the planning, for the strategizing. Now, I will say that this one is hard for a lot of the leaders that I work with, for most of the leaders, honestly in our sector, and I know that this one was hard for me because we are socialized to equate busyness with productivity, especially, especially when we are the CEO of an organization. But I want you to think about how different an hour of clear thinking feels from an hour of putting out fires, right? An hour of clear thinking about your structure, about your partnerships, about your fundraising revenue lines. That hour has an outsized return. It is a high leverage hour. It is different than that same number of minutes spent responding to emails, especially if those are emails someone else could have responded to. That hour of clear thinking multiplies the effectiveness of everything else. That's how I want you to think about planning when you do it well, it does not have to take a long time, but when you integrate it into the ongoing work, it will multiply the effectiveness of everything else you do. I want to bring it back to where I started. If your leadership feels heavy or your systems feel fragile, if you just know in your bones that you're absorbing more than you should, this is a design problem. And design is something you can change. So I want you to think about these three reframes or shifts that I suggested. Find your minimum viable moment. Treat imperfect systems as real systems and integrate planning into all of your work. Right? Reframe planning adds the work, not a break from it. Think about those and start this week. What is one minimum viable moment you can find to begin redesigning, even if you're living in the house? That is it for this week. I will see you back here next week for more Mastermind. Thanks for listening. If this episode resonated, leave a review. I read them and they do matter. And make sure your subscribe so that you never miss a deep dive into building your resilient nonprofit. And finally, if you're ready to move from grit to good Design, head to brookrichybabbage.com backslash strong to take the 90 second quiz and find out where to start.