Change we can say yes to
I was on a lovely call today with another consultant and we had an epiphany. She does evaluation and learning work, I do operations, but twenty minutes in, we realized we were hitting the same wall with the same people at the same point in their work.
Very few people go into nonprofit work because they love change.
They go into it because they want to change the world.
Then I got on a second call an hour later, this one with a practitioner who has been in house for twenty-five years, and heard the same thing again from a completely different angle. He calls it the paint and plumbing paradox. Plumbing is the data, the systems, the way one office collects information and another office never sees it.
Paint is the new CRM you like because it is blue. Paint is easy to say yes to. It looks like progress, it photographs well in a board report, and somebody at a conference already made the case for you in a booth with a nice t-shirt. Plumbing is invisible until it fails, and fixing it means admitting that the way you have been working is part of the problem.
That is the wall. The mission is the reason people show up in the morning, and the database is not. Every hour spent fixing how the work gets done is an hour not spent doing the work, and when you are already short staffed that math feels obvious, so the CRM stays the way it is and the spreadsheet stays and the process nobody can fully explain stays, because the person who built it is still here and it still sort of works.
That holds right up until something pressure tests it. Systems do not break on a schedule, they break when you ask them for something new. The CRM stops working the day you need a report it was never set up to produce. The spreadsheet stops working the day the event program gets big enough to need real tracking. The process nobody wrote down stops working the day the person who knew it walks out the door, and a new strategic plan lands and everyone discovers none of it exists on paper anywhere.
That is the moment the door opens, and a good argument for change is not what opens it.
Near the end of the first call, the person I was talking with said something I keep turning over: if you want things to be different, you have to do things differently. It sounds obvious written down and it is brutal in practice, because doing things differently costs something now and pays you back later, if it pays you back at all. That is where most change efforts lose people. The ask almost always sounds like more. More steps, more documentation, more training, more meetings about the new system. For a team already running past capacity, more is not a real option no matter how good the reasoning behind it is.
So I start with less. Show me the cords. Dump them on the table. Why can we not report, why can we not communicate, why are we not raising money. I spent a good part of this year inside one organization’s procedures, writing down how the work actually gets done, and most of what I found was not missing. It was redundant. Steps that existed because somebody needed them once, in a role that no longer exists, approved by a person who retired.
The second thing my afternoon call said that stuck with me is that for some organizations, a spreadsheet is fine. Give them a pivot table or two, set the columns up so that in three or five years the whole thing can be imported into something bigger, and let them go raise money. Nobody sells that at a conference. It is still the right answer more often than the sector wants to admit.
Subtraction is the version of change people can say yes to. It gives time back in the first month instead of asking for more, and it makes the next change possible, because the team has now watched one happen that did not cost them anything.
So start there. Find the smallest thing inside your operation that costs you time and does nothing for anyone, and take it out before something forces your hand. Before the Edit walks nine systems across people, tools, and guides, and shows you where the pressure is going to hit first.
Erin Peshoff is the Founder of Vivid Operational Advisors. She has spent thirty years inside nonprofit operations, helped raise over $100 million for institutional missions, and built Vivid around the operating discipline most strategic engagements skip.
