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Nonprofit Mastermind Podcast
Why Pretending the Organization Is Simpler Than It Is Doesn't Work
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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 shift 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. See if this sounds familiar. You're in a meeting, maybe a leadership team meeting, board meeting, and there is a real topic on the table for discussion. For example, there's a funding cliff coming four months away. You can see it, and funding is getting shaky. Or a program direction clearly isn't working and you really need to figure out what you're going to do before the next program cycle starts. Maybe there is real burnout on the team. Key staff members are burning out in ways that might not be reversible. And you and your board are sitting with what might this mean for the structure of our team and how we get our work done? These are real topics and they're complex. So the conversation starts, but instead of going deeper, the room sort of migrates to the edge of the problem. People update one another about what they've already done. You map out actions, but they're actions that really people already know how to take, right? The things that feel doable. And you are working through a version of the problem that doesn't sit with the full messiness. It doesn't require anyone to say a hard thing out loud. Maybe we need to make cuts or this person's not pulling their weight, or the team as currently structured isn't the right team. Or maybe this is not the right program for us. Whatever the hard thing is is not being said. So the meeting ends with a robust to do list. If it's a good meeting, if people feel good, there's a sense of momentum. People know what they're supposed to do. Sometimes the to do list is really solid and the actual problem is still sitting there basically untouched because nobody named it at its real size and its real complexity. So this is a problem, right? And it's a hard one to catch because it doesn't look like avoidance. It looks like a productive meeting. People were engaged, action items got assigned. There's often real relief in the room as people move on. Okay, we're making progress, we're moving forward. But a busy meeting and a real meeting can look identical from the outside, even though they are not the same thing. And unfortunately, the person who will feel this the most without always being able to name it necessarily is executive Director. Right? You walk out with this uncomfortable sense that something important didn't get said or resolved. Nobody lied. The conversation wasn't bad. Like I said, action items got assigned, but the depth of the real problem just left the room with you. And it's still mostly unaddressed. So I'm going to be direct here. This is a really common problem. And it is not a deficit of courage or capacity that the people in these rooms aren't necessarily conflict avoidant. They're mission driven, they're intelligent, they're overextended leaders who care about the organization. This is a structural problem, not a team problem or a board problem or a character problem. Complexity becomes manageable through container, through shared frameworks for naming hard things. Clear decision rights that say whose job it is to hold which parts of a problem, through processes that separate diagnosing from solving. When that infrastructure doesn't exist, complexity becomes personal. And when it's personal, the self protective move is to simplify it. So here's the mechanism at work in an under resourced organization. Naming a complex problem feels like volunteering to own it. When everyone's already at capacity, nobody can absorb one more impossible thing. The cognitive load is overwhelming. Even just knowing that it is sitting there to be resolved can be just really overwhelming. So the room stays at the surface, right? All of the people stay at the surface. It is not a conspiracy. It is a rational response to an environment with no container to hold hard things. This is a design deficit. Specifically, it's a clarity compass deficit. The organization hasn't built the design architecture or the shared frameworks that let complexity live structurally instead of on people's shoulders. Instead of personal, what can look like a team or a board. Avoiding isn't. It's that there's nowhere organizational to put the complexity. So there's three moves that complexity avoidance makes. I'm going to name them so you can keep your eye out for them in your own organization. First, implementation is compression. It's when the problem gets renamed into something smaller that feels less overwhelming. So we have a funding concentration problem or there is a funding cliff on the horizon. Becomes we just need two new funders this year. Both of those statements are accurate, right? They are true. But the problem is that the solution? Or the second statement, we just need two new funders, doesn't Capture the full complexity of the actual problem. Two new funders doesn't solve a funding concentration problem, right? Those are two different problems in scope and scale. So the tell is often something like the word just we just need. And it almost never fully describes the situation that's what you're looking for. So the antidote to this, to compression is not trying harder to face it. It's not like we just need to be more aware or we need to be braver. That's not the antidote. The antidote is having a framework that gives your team and gives your board language for the problem's actual size and scope and scale. The second move, the peripheral solve. This is where real tasks get assigned, real people commit to real things, and none of it touches the core problem. Scheduling a funder meeting when 78% of revenue sits in two sources, or hiring a part time ops person when the organizational design has been layering on itself for three years. I just watched this happen with an organization that came into my program. She had multiple years of not designing any part of her ops infrastructure. No sops, no systems, no processes that were named. It was genuine organizational chaos. And they were well over $2 million and they'd been keeping it together. And she was really embarrassed to share that as part of the first thing we do in the next level nonprofit is a, is an assessment, right? Where are we seeing design deficits? And she felt really bad. And then I was like, oh, actually I see this all the time. Four different organizations have an under designed ops infrastructure. But what had been happening that led her actually into the program was that she and her team kept in her mind, they kept trying to solve this problem, right? And they hired a part time ops person and that ops person didn't fix the problem. And then they decided they were going to do a capacity infrastructure audit and they did it. And it was so overwhelming for people, they just never came back to it, right? So they kept trying to solve what is a structural redesign problem at the edges. And it can feel like progress in the moment because motion feels like progress. But as happened with this leader six months later, back in the same room, back with the same problem, it's just wearing a different outfit. So the third move that complexity avoidance makes is the collective agreement. And this one's my favorite. Everyone can see and feel the real problem and nobody is naming it for all the reasons we talked about. This is like an invisible contract and it's usually set by whoever has the most power in the room, often without meaning to. It's invisible. It's happening behind the scenes, beneath the surface. When the contract says we're going to agree that this is manageable, everybody wants that to be true. So everybody signs the contract. Everybody agrees collectively, it's not the deception, it's self protection. Once the real thing gets named, once somebody says this feels unmesageable, I don't know what to do here. Or I do know what to do, and it feels overwhelming to do it. When somebody says that, then the timeline changes, accountability changes, money changes, people's roles might change, and that feels scary. So everybody just agrees that we're just going to say this is manageable. Right? These three complexity moves feed off of one another and they require a really intentional interrupt. So here's the interrupt for you. It's one question you can bring to your next leadership team meeting or board meeting where there is a real complex issue that needs to be discussed. Here's the question. What is the version of this problem we're not talking about? Okay, I'm gonna say it again. What is the version of this problem, this issue we are not talking about? Not what are we missing? That's too abstract, right? Not, what do we think? Even more abstract, very specifically, write this down. What is the version of this problem we are not talking about? You say it and then you wait for the confused looks and the distraction and the no, we're talking about it. And you ask it again. This phrasing forces a concrete answer. And the truth is, the people in the room with you, they know the answer. They've been waiting for permission to say it. And you can say to them, you can follow up in whatever language works for your culture. We don't have to solve this problem here today. But let's talk about the complexity of the problem, right? Complexity that gets avoided, doesn't disappear. It grows, it compounds. It gets more complex. What you didn't name in September becomes the crisis that you're managing in February. And the February version is always more expensive in money, in time, in staff morale, in board engagement than the version that was on the table in September. So if this is naming something for you, that's been true in your board meetings or your leadership team meetings, or just your own internal narrative, it's worth paying attention to. And what I described today, as I said, it's a clarity, compass deficit. It happens all the time. And building the architecture to hold it is exactly the work we do inside the next level nonprofit mastermind. If you're leading an organization at or past the million dollar mark, and this is resonating. Fill out a fit check, sign up for a clarity call, and let's talk about whether the Mastermind is your right next step. You can get the fit check at brooke richiebabbage.com backslash fitch that's 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 you're subscribed 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 Brook Rich ub garbage.com strong to take the 92nd quiz and find out where to start.