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Welcome to the Nonprofit Mastermind podcast where

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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 and to design. It's about building organizations that have the systems, structures and leadership capacity to truly

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hold the weight of their mission. Welcome. Let's talk about that creeping feeling that comes around right at the beginning of spring. Is my plan for the year already falling apart? It's early March if you're listening to this live and if you're like the leaders that I work with. You spent real time on annual planning last year or even earlier this quarter. You mapped out your goals, you hosted a retreat, you got some initial momentum and now the wheels feel like they're starting to come off. The assumptions you made aren't holding up. The team's working hard, but starting to feel like they're getting off track and can't quite put your finger on why. Everything is taking longer than you expected and it's throwing all of your projections off and you are still stuck in the weeds and you're wondering what happened? How could I have avoided this? Now this is you first. I want to normalize it. It's not a failure of planning and it's definitely not a failure of leadership or discipline or hustle or any of the things that the mean gremlins in your head might be telling you. This happens because most annual plans are built on top of an under designed structure. That is the truth that almost no one says out loud today. I want to walk you through why even good plans collapse right around now, right around March, and what it looks like to build a plan that doesn't. So let's start here. Annual plans often do not fail because because they're bad. Or I'll put it this way, just because your annual plan started to come apart does not mean it was bad. There can be bad annual plans, but you can't necessarily assume that yours is bad because you have that what happened moment. Very often what's actually going on is that annual plans, work plans, goals, OKRs, whatever you set with your team, they're actually built as scaffolding on top of a system that actually can't support them. Right? You don't actually have the infrastructure capacity team. All of the resources, all of the systems that you need to achieve the goals you've set. And if you're like most leaders, you planned in good faith, you and your team set your goals, you aligned yourselves, you set priorities. Even the best plan is going to collapse if the container underneath it is cracked. Now, what do I mean by container? I mean the systems, the roles, the rhythms, the infrastructure, the bones, or even more appropriate, the interstitial tissue that connects the bones. All of the things that are supposed to carry your plan forward without you all having to carry it on your back. That's what I mean by the container. It's the institution that is supposed to hold you and your team and the work, rather than the other way around. Now, when that institution, when that container, when the systems and roles and rhythms and infrastructure are weak, then the weight of all of your goals, the whole weight of your plan, even a really good plan, becomes unsustainable. You simply cannot outplan a lack of infrastructure. Now, let's look at where most plans fall apart, and I'll give you a little insight into why. These breakdowns map directly onto three pillars that make up your organization's stability. And if you have been listening to me for a while, you have heard me talk about these, these three pillars, they're essential to the health of every organization. They make up what I call your stability flywheel. And the breakdowns most often happen in one or more of these three pillars. Capital capacity and clarity. I'm going to go through each one of them one at a time, briefly. So the first is what I call a capital design deficit or a capital failure. This is usually going to show up as some version of we don't actually have the money we plan to have. That can be structural, meaning like a structural deficit, meaning we are just not going to get the money we plan to have. Or it can be the money that we thought we'd have by March is now coming in, in August, right? Both of those happen. And often that kind of backup and misalignment starts to show up right around now, right. Right around late February, March. If you're on a calendar fiscal year, you're heading into your year and already funders are starting to shift priorities or shift timing. If you're in a June to July calendar year, you're looking at the back end of your year thinking, shit, we're not going to actually make our budget, right? So either. Either way, irrespective of what your fiscal year is, this season seems to be when this capital design deficit becomes really Loud and really noticeable and really scary. This is the hidden trap of annual planning. We assume future revenue will show up on schedule. It's one of the reasons that I'm a big fan of scenario planning. I will include a link to my scenario planning toolkit in the show notes for those of you who are feeling this one and want to do some actual structured scenario planning. If your capital engine isn't built for predictable revenue, but if there's no system for donor retention, no rhythm for things like post campaign stewardship, no predictable, consistent revenue calendar, then when your revenue dips, your whole plan wobbles. Suddenly the budget you built is aspirational and not actually operational. Your work depends on funding that hasn't been secured, which makes it feel more fragile. Things like hiring, growth, investment in professional development, benefits. All of the things that are reflections of the values that your organization holds. Those things feel tenuous. Your team slows down even without realizing it, because it starts to be unclear which of the priorities are still greenlit, right? Which are still good to go. So now you're cutting corners, you're tripping the scope of work, you're quietly pushing deadlines out, which really means they stop meaning anything in reality. And it's not because of poor planning. That's what I'm going to keep coming back to. It's not because the plan was wrong. It's because the money didn't behave like the spreadsheet said it would. And that is why I talk so much about the stability flywheel. Your annual plan should be designed inside of a flywheel, not on a cliff. You need revenue infrastructure that feeds and sustains your plan and your work quarter after quarter after quarter, reliably and consistently, not just in a spreadsheet at the end of the year. So the second design deficit that often shows up now, or capacity failure, as I call it, is the work is all coming back to me, right? This is the delegation boomerang, and it's a big one. The plan was supposed to spread the work, but somehow things are still landing back on your plate. Why does this happen? Because your plan made assumptions about capacity that weren't structurally true, right? Notice the theme here. Assumptions about future revenue, assumptions about existing or future capacity that just aren't real. As you're thinking about your plan, you might look at your shared goals, right? Or shared priorities and think, okay, every person on the leadership team has two core priorities. But. And that on paper, looks fine. Everybody's like, great, we can hold these. We have goals within our priorities. Everything looks balanced on paper. But roles weren't actually designed around those specific priorities. No one really knows the outcome. They only know the work. Your team still sees you as the backstop of key decisions. If any one of those three things is true, which often all three of them are true, then what happens is pressure builds, deadlines, confusion, interpersonal tension. The work flows back up the chain and lands on your shoulders. A resilient annual plan. An annual plan that actually takes capacity accurately into account is paired with things like clear decision rights that are mapped onto your specific annual priorities and goals up to date. Role descriptions, not job descriptions. Role descriptions that adjust to and take into account the work that needs to happen within the goals that you've set. Things like updating your delegation plans and your delegation systems so that new workflows are accounted for. These are the unsexy things that often we don't think about when we're doing our annual work planning. But this is where your capacity matrix comes in. This is how you anticipate capacity designed assets and build that, that assessment, build that understanding of your true capacity into your work plans. Without that layer, without this layer of the capacity matrix, your annual work plans are very nicely organized to do lists for you in large part. So the third one, the third pillar that often shows up right now is a clarity failure or a clarity design deficit. This is the. We're trying to do 14 things at once, right? This is probably next to the revenue. This one gives the Revenue 1 a run for its money. In terms of the most common. All three of these happen all the time. But this one, this one just. Everybody deals with this one also just in life, we're trying to do too many things at once, and they all feel equally weighty and important. So your plan, your annual plan, again, looks great on paper. Everybody has two priorities and their three goals, and you've identified your OKRs, your outcomes and key results. I work with a lot of leaders that even color code their plans. I will admit I'm a big color coder. I have lots of boxes and dropdowns. It all looks great. But when execution begins, you look up, your team is working hard, but they're complaining about being burned out. They're stretched too thin. Balls are dropping, Goals shift a little bit, priorities are multiplying. So whereas your chief operating officer had two core priorities, now by March, there are two core priorities and four non core priorities. Four other things have crept in that feel just as weighty, that feel just as important. And so now, three months into your year, or three months into the calendar year, depending on what your fiscal year is, too many things feel important. So nothing is getting the focus that it's supposed to get. Nothing's getting done well. And this is where having a really clear north star, I call it your clarity compass, becomes really crucial. Because a work plan without sharp clarity doesn't actually force you to engage with true trade offs, right? It doesn't give you a decision making framework, a compass that helps you decide in real time when things get messy, what actually is a priority, where you actually are going to focus and, and what you can say no to, what you can let go of, which balls you can let drop. It makes it really difficult to be flexible when something unexpected happens. And so what happens is your plan stops being a plan and it turns into a wish list. So if you are already seeing your plan for the year buckle under the weight of real life, I want to say again, it's not because you didn't plan well necessarily. It's not because you're necessarily disorganized, and it's not because your team isn't trying. It's because your container wasn't designed to hold your plan. And I want you to see that not as a judgment, right? No judgment here. This is a mastermind. It's a safe space. I want you to see it as a design opportunity because this is what a well designed annual plan actually looks like. And it's never too late to go back and make these adjustments. A well designed annual plan is grounded in predictable revenue. It's built around actual team and organizational capacity. It includes decision matrices for true priorities. It has clear ownership on your leadership team, which parts are owned by who with shared language about success and real authority in workflows. A well designed annual plan lives inside a structural container that distributes work. It absorbs pressure rather than it landing on the shoulders of your team. And it makes progress feel like it's coming from momentum, right? It perpetuates itself. You're able to step into a state of flow with your team, right? So when I talk about, and you may have heard me talk about this on the podcast, architect level leadership, that's what I'm talking about, right? You and your team are not just setting goals. You're crafting a vision for where you're going to be in a year. And then you're building the institution to get you there. So if your plan starting to wobble, here's what I want you to do this week, right? You can do this right away. I want you to take 30 minutes? Even just 20, if that's all you have. And ask yourself these three questions. First, looking at our plan that we came into the year with, do we have the revenue infrastructure to fund this plan without sprinting or starting from scratch every quarter? If not, take a look at your capital engine. Look at donor retention. Look at your revenue calendar. At your fundraising calendar, look at your recurring giving systems. What are the parts of your revenue engine that are tied to predictability and consistency? Second question, do our roles and rhythms and team norms actually support executing our plan? You've learned some stuff between January and now. What insight does that give you into your true capacity? If not, look at things like clear ownership expectations and accountability. Delegation systems, right? What does delegation look like in practice? How are you actually passing the baton and ensuring that the people you're passing it to have what they need to keep it so it doesn't come back to you? Third question, can my leadership team clearly articulate two to three organization wide priorities that are our compass that actually serve as a North Star and do we have what we need to say no to the rest of things? If not, and this is a big one, revisit with your leadership team. What are the trade offs that are coming across our desks? What are the trade offs we're willing to make? What is not getting done because we are prioritizing the wrong things. This is not about rewriting your whole plan, but it is about pressure testing it and optimizing it so that it doesn't feel wobbly. Right? So that you're investing time and resources and energy into a plan that can actually hold your work. It's about strengthening the container or the foundation that your plan rests on before the weight becomes wholly unsustainable. So that's it for this week's episode. If you are sitting with a great plan that's already starting to wobble, I hope this helped you see that the issue isn't about your effort or your leadership. It's about design. You're not failing. Here's to outgrowing your old infrastructure. And now is a great time to take a look at your capital, your clarity and your capacity and see where you can design differently. See you back here next week for more Mastermind. Thanks for listening.