Lately in my work with executives and boards, I keep finding myself in a particular kind of conversation, one where people are doing everything the mission asks of them on paper and still feeling a growing distance from the reason they came to this work in the first place, and I’ve started to think that distance has something important to tell us about the difference between being accountable to a mission and being in genuine relationship with one.
When the world outside gets loud and threatening, boards often have an organizational inward folding, the way certain plants close themselves in response to cold or drought, drawing their energy toward the center and away from the edges where growth actually happens. It is a survival instinct, and like most survival instincts, it serves the organism well in the short term while costing it something essential over time. What gets lost in that folding is usually the communities furthest from the center of organizational power, the people the mission was originally written in service of, whose well being becomes, almost imperceptibly, secondary to the organization’s own.
We are living through a moment that is testing that instinct in ways that are new even when the underlying dynamic is ancient. The deliberate dismantling of equity frameworks at the federal and local levels, the stigmatizing of language that many of our organizations built their entire theory of change around, and the pressure on funders whose anxiety ripples directly into boardrooms across the country are all activating something in nonprofit governance that I think we need to name before we can work with it. When a board quietly softens the language on its website after a tense funder conversation, or sets aside a program evaluation that surfaced uncomfortable truths about who the organization is actually reaching, it is not making a communications decision or a strategic one. It is making a governance decision about whose reality the organization is willing to hold, and whose it is willing to release in the interest of its own continuity.
I don’t say this as condemnation, because I don’t think condemnation is what this moment needs from us. I say it because I think the most important thing a board can do right now is to become curious about its own fear rather than managed by it, and that requires naming fear honestly as the organizing force it has quietly become in so many governance cultures.
Peter Block writes in Community: The Structure of Belonging about the power of shifting the context within which we act, and I keep returning to that framing in my work with boards right now because context is everything when human systems are under stress. The context of scarcity, which is the context that most nonprofit boards default to even in relatively stable times, produces a particular kind of governance that is cautious, self-protective, and oriented toward the organization’s survival as the primary good. There is a seductive logic to it, because an organization that doesn’t survive cannot serve anyone, and I want to honor the genuine fear that underlies that logic rather than dismiss it. But what I’ve observed, across years of sitting with boards in hard moments, is that organizations governed primarily from a survival instinct tend to drift from their missions in ways that are very difficult to reverse, not because anyone made a deliberate decision to abandon the mission, but because a hundred small decisions accumulated over time into a posture that the mission could no longer recognize as its own.
Emergent strategy, as adrienne maree brown has articulated it, asks us to pay attention to what is actually happening, to work with the patterns we observe rather than the plans we made before the patterns became visible, and to trust that small, intentional shifts in how we relate and decide will compound into something larger and more durable over time. I think that is precisely the kind of governance practice this moment is asking nonprofit boards to develop, not a new strategic plan or a communications pivot, but a living, practiced relationship with the question that sits underneath all of it: what would need to be true, in the world and in this organization, for the communities we exist to serve to actually thrive?
That question, held consistently and returned to honestly across meeting after meeting, is what I think of as an abundance mindset in practice. It is not optimism about resources and it is not naivety about the very real risks that boards are navigating right now. It is a commitment to locating the board’s decision-making in relationship to purpose rather than in relationship to threat, and to trusting that decisions made from that location, including the difficult ones, will be more coherent, more sustainable, and more worthy of the people whose lives are shaped by them.
In our thirty minutes together this month at the Board Buzz we’re going to sit with the tension between institutional prudence and mission integrity, which I don’t believe can or should be resolved prematurely but can absolutely be navigated with far more consciousness than most boards currently bring to it. We’re going to explore what it takes to create the conditions in a board meeting for the conversation that actually needs to happen, the one about what board members genuinely believe, what they are genuinely afraid of, and what they understand themselves to be responsible for when they accepted a seat at that table. And we’re going to look at some specific practices, drawn from participatory facilitation and human systems dynamics, for shifting a board’s culture meeting by meeting toward the kind of governance that can hold complexity over time without collapsing under the weight of it.
The boards that find their way through moments like this one, in my experience, are not the ones that had the most favorable political or funding environments. They are the ones that have done the slower, less visible work of building a governance culture where mission was an actual decision-making tool rather than a framing device, and where board members had practiced, through honest conversation over time, the discipline of returning to purpose when everything outside was pushing them somewhere else. Building that kind of culture is exactly what this work is for.
