Too often in the nonprofit world we get lost in strategy and matrixes and spreadsheets. We are people—whether volunteer or paid—and trust is established between people, not between plans.
I was talking with an airline pilot and asked him how he was taught to handle a crisis. He said there were three instructions: “Breath. Look around. Fly the plane.”
In our society, we tend to prize innovation, imagination, and outside-the-box thinking. In our internal nonprofit structures, we tend to prize … dogged resistance to change.