Where is your team entering the same information twice?
What process works mainly because everyone knows how to work around it?
And what would happen if you made just one of those things 10% better?
I once worked for a nonprofit that delivered several community programs.
Participant information was recorded in its case-management system. But the system didn’t produce quite what one funder needed, so Susan created an Excel spreadsheet.
Fast forward five years and staff were still entering participant details into the system and then adding some of the same information to the spreadsheet. At reporting time, someone checked the two against each other because, inevitably, they didn’t always match.
Nobody thought of this as a major organizational problem.
The programs were running. The data got submitted. Staff knew what to do.
It worked.
But it only worked because people became very good at compensating for the fact that it didn’t work particularly well.
We get used to friction
Organizations need routines. They stop us from redesigning the way we work every Monday morning.
But research on organizational routines shows that routines aren’t fixed. As organizations grow, staff adapt processes to deal with new demands, new funders and new ways of working.
Those small adjustments can accumulate until the way something is actually done looks very different from the process originally created.
Susan’s spreadsheet is a perfect example.
It began as a sensible solution to a real problem. Then another column was added. Then another reporting requirement. Five years later, nobody was entirely sure what Column AB did, but nobody was brave enough to delete it.
It was just the way we did it.
And once something becomes part of the job, we stop asking whether it should actually be part of the job.
If four staff members each spend just ten minutes a day duplicating information, over 220 working days that’s around 147 hours – more than 18 full working days.
Eighteen days spent keeping a spreadsheet happy.
And time isn’t the only issue.
Which record is correct when the spreadsheet and database disagree? Who actually understands how the tracker works? And what happens when Susan goes on leave – or leaves altogether?
The workaround can hide the problem
Research on workarounds shows something interesting.
Workarounds help people get past obstacles and get the job done. They can be useful and entirely rational.
I’ve found nonprofit staff are particularly good at workarounds and making things work with limited people, systems and resources. Give us a slightly unsuitable database and a reporting deadline and, apparently, we’ll find a way.
But workarounds can also become established ways of working.
That matters because a good workaround can make a poor process surprisingly easy to tolerate.
The report gets submitted. Nobody complains loudly enough. Susan’s spreadsheet lives to see another year.
The problem never becomes big enough to demand attention.
It just costs a little bit of time. Every single day.
Not everything needs transforming
When we talk about organizational improvement, you often hear “new strategies,” “new systems” or “let’s restructure.”
A recent review of 111 studies on organizational change in nonprofits distinguished between incremental and comprehensive change – and found that research has focused much more heavily on large-scale change.
But improving an organization doesn’t always mean changing everything at once.
That’s what we mean by the 10% better nonprofit.
Not a 10% target. And definitely not another KPI.
Maybe we make the way participant data is recorded a little easier.
Then we look at another process.
And then another.
One workaround disappears. Someone gets a few hours back every month. Small improvements start to add up.
Sometimes the next level isn’t transformation.
Sometimes it’s noticing what your organization has become unnecessarily good at tolerating – and making it a little better.
