Deciding Anyway
It's decision day. Two months from today, my office lease expires. The renewal deadline is tomorrow. Deciding what to do is more an act of faith, a bet on the future, than a decision made with apparent certainty. Data shows the past which, perhaps particularly these days, can wildly differ from the next month or year. Many nonprofits hire consultants like me to help them craft "strategic plans," often with a two-to-five-year time horizon. Creating them can be lucrative for the consultant but is most often a waste of time for the client. Either they aren't followed or quickly become irrelevant because the context in which they were developed has changed. I'm switching my focus away from planning and toward helping organizations better understand and address the reasons that they think they need one. There's a difference between trying to define a predictable and achievable future and fostering the capacity to stay true to a vision through evolving circumstances. These nonprofit plans (are they ever "un-strategic"?) most often cloak ambiguity, provide the illusion of alignment and certainty, and distract from operational shortcomings. Most often, there is deeper work to do. Professionally, I know where I'm going on various fronts, my direction is set, but beyond the next step or two, I don't know how I'll get there, or even if "there" will look like what I currently imagine it to be. But I don't need to know more than this. I made peace with co-existing with degrees of ambiguity long ago. It wasn't easy to learn, but the capacity served me well and is perhaps something worth helping others develop, whether from an office or not.
