Your Pillars Are a Problem
Are you struggling with getting your team or board to adopt new ways of working or to move beyond “we’ve always done it this way”?
Here’s a critical reframe that can help your organization move from stuck to strategic.
For several decades, nonprofit strategy has relied on the imagery of pillars to establish an organization’s core areas of focus, work, and investment.
Pillars are meant to show we’re well-established, strong, and clear about the foundation of our organization. Sounds nice, right?
But there are some big problems with pillars:
They remain immovable and rooted in one place – which isn’t particularly helpful when the world, our field, and our communities’ needs are moving and changing.
To provide effective support, pillars all need to be the same height – which creates a false sense of equality between all areas of our work, leading us to keep stacking on more programs, more projects, more, more, more, instead of spending the right amount of time and energy on the right things.
They can cover everything but can’t carry anything – in how they’re written and practiced, strategic pillars usually don’t offer enough information to help us make decisions about what to pursue or what our true capacity is, and almost any project an organization takes on can be shoe-horned into the vague pillar descriptions.
Pillars are designed to stand still and keep us rooted in place – so if you’re an innovative leader trying to move an organization forward, you need a different way to understand these core areas of your work.
Different concepts work well for different organizations, but here’s one that can help you reframe and reset.
Instead of pillars, try buckets.
Buckets come in different shapes, sizes, and materials – they enable us to consider how we’ll group like-work together and how big each bucket must be if we’re going to accomplish our goals.
Buckets inherently consider capacity – put too many things in a bucket, it’ll overflow. We can’t do – or carry – everything.
Buckets promote thoughtful decision-making – when we can’t carry it all, we can be intentional about what we will carry, for how long, and how far we want to take it.
The practical effect of reframing your work in this way is that it invites honest conversations – among your board, your leadership team, and throughout your staff – about:
What the organization can, should, and will carry forward (and what it won’t),
Who is doing the carrying, and
How quickly you can move given everything that’s in your buckets.
Are you ready to reframe your strategic approach for better results? Send me a message to get started.