Stop Writing Strategic Plans. Start Building a Moral Framework
The Conversation Nonprofit Leaders Are Having Off the Record
Stop for a moment right now and think about a problem you’re trying to solve in your work. It could be anything, cash flow issues, tough personnel decisions, not enough time to complete tasks, accusations of mission creep. Go ahead and think about it. Now if there was one problem you could solve this instant, which one would it be?
I’ve been sitting with that question a lot lately, because I think a lot of people I respect have too.
Over the past few months, I’ve spoken with a handful of CEOs navigating real organizational complexity. One is managing growing tensions among board members, the kind of tension that quietly stalls decision-making without anyone naming it out loud. Another is trying to build the talent her organization needs to move forward after a season of painful transitions. Another is staring down a funding cliff while trying to hold staff morale together.
But one conversation stopped me cold.
A CEO I’ve known for years, someone I deeply respect, leaned into her Zoom camera and lowered her voice. She told me that she’d been having a lot of conversations with her peers lately, over drinks, at local cafés, sometimes over personal phones rather than Zoom, because Zoom can be recorded. And in those conversations, one issue keeps surfacing. The same issue, over and over. Yet almost no one is talking about it openly.
I asked her what it was.
She paused, then said: “There’s something fundamentally missing with today’s workforce” she commented.
The Silent Conversation\
Today’s workforce is genuinely struggling with ambiguity, uncertainty, shifting expectations, and the gap between what they signed up to do and what the work actually demands. When those struggles go unaddressed, they bleed into something harder to fix: suspicion of leadership, fragmentation of trust, and organizational cultures that quietly turn toxic. At that point, no strategy document fixes it.
She shared with me that today’s workforce, understandably, prefers a strategy, an action plan, a logic model, a clearly defined problem with a clearly measurable solution. If you’ve spent any time in philanthropy, this probably sounds very familiar.
But I spoke recently with another CEO who pushed that even further. She told me her organization was in the middle of what she was calling a “strategy refresh,” and she was careful about that language. Not a new strategic plan, she said. A refresh. Because you can’t actually plan for a pandemic. You can’t build a three-year strategy around a movement for Black lives, or an AI revolution, or whatever is coming next that none of us can see yet. There’s too much uncertainty for a traditional strategic plan to hold.
What her organization actually needed, she said, wasn’t a new plan. It was a moral framework. A values compass. Something stable enough to orient people when the terrain keeps shifting, something that doesn’t require you to know what’s coming in order to know which direction you’re facing.
I think she’s naming something a lot of leaders are feeling but don’t have words for yet. We’ve been reaching for plans when what we actually need is orientation. We’ve been building better maps when the map itself has become unreliable. What holds people together when the strategy can’t keep up with the moment isn’t a better logic model. It’s a shared sense of what we believe, what we’re willing to protect, and why.
The hard truth is that this isn’t just about the workforce. It’s also about the systems we’ve built them inside of. Justice systems, social work institutions, philanthropic organizations, none of these were designed for the conditions we’re facing right now. Public resources are drying up. The scale of need keeps growing. And the institutions we’ve long depended on are showing their limits in ways we can no longer explain away.
What’s most unsettling isn’t any one of those things in isolation. It’s the gap. Because even our most thoughtful, strategic, well-resourced efforts aren’t moving things the way we thought they would. And that gap deserves a hard look.
The funding was never the problem. The wound was. A cracked vessel can absorb every resource you throw at it and still come up empty. No logic model fixes that. No theory of change reaches that deep.
The Car With No Fuel
Another CEO I spoke with offered a metaphor that I haven’t been able to shake. She said: “It’s like we’ve built an incredible car, with everything you’d need for the journey, but we don’t have the fuel to make it go.”
The scaffolding is there. The infrastructure is there. The logic models are tight. The language is right. But there’s a thinness when it comes to purpose, a brittleness when it comes to sitting with complexity, and a real fragility when it comes to holding multiple perspectives at once without collapsing into a single story.
What she was describing, and what I’ve been hearing in different forms from leaders across the country, is a growing concern about non-technical leadership competencies. We’ve invested heavily in systems, structures, and strategies. We’ve underinvested in the interior conditions that make any of those things actually work.
By interior conditions, I don’t mean self-care routines or wellness workshops, though rest matters. I mean the capacity to stay grounded when outcomes are uncertain. The ability to build genuine trust across difference. The willingness to examine our own assumptions before demanding change from others. The discipline to hold complexity long enough to actually understand it, rather than rushing toward resolution because sitting in the mess feels unbearable.
These aren’t soft skills. They’re the fuel. And a moral framework, a real one, not a laminated values statement on a conference room wall, is part of what generates it. It’s what allows people to act with confidence when the strategy can’t give them certainty. It’s what keeps a team oriented when the map stops working.
Why We’re Whispering
So why is this conversation happening in whispers?
Part of it is vulnerability. Admitting that your organization has a culture problem, or that your team is struggling with purpose, or that your most carefully built systems aren’t working the way you hoped, feels like personal failure. We’ve been trained to lead with confidence and project competence. There isn’t a lot of space in our sector for leaders to say out loud: I think something is fundamentally broken, and I don’t know how to fix it.
Part of it is also fear. Fear of being seen as ineffective. Fear that funders will lose confidence. Fear that the staff will panic. Fear that naming the problem makes it real in a way that not naming it doesn’t.
But the things we don’t name don’t disappear. They fester. They show up in passive-aggressive board meetings, in staff retention crises, in the quiet resignation of talented people who simply stop believing the work is going anywhere. The silence isn’t protecting anyone.
And maybe most importantly, we can’t solve what we won’t say out loud.
What This Calls For
I’m not going to pretend I have a clean framework for all of this, because I don’t, and I’d be skeptical of anyone who does. But I do think there are some honest questions worth sitting with:
For you as a leader:
Where are you leading from strategy and structure, and where is the work actually calling for something more interior?
What are you carrying privately that your leadership community doesn’t know about? And what would it mean to name it?
Where has your logic model become a way of avoiding a harder conversation?
For your organization:
Where is the culture operating on suspicion rather than trust? What’s feeding that?
What does your team believe is possible right now? Not what you want them to believe, what they actually believe?
Does your organization have a moral framework, a real values compass, that people can orient by when the strategy can’t keep up with the moment? If not, what would it take to build one?
For the sector:
What would it look like to invest as seriously in leadership interiority as we invest in programmatic infrastructure?
What would it mean to create real space, not just retreats, but ongoing structures, for leaders to be honest with each other?
What are the costs of keeping this conversation in the café and off the Zoom call?
The car is built. That’s real, and it matters. Years of work went into it. But we have to be honest about the fuel. And the fuel isn’t another logic model, and it isn’t a new strategic plan either. It’s the interior condition of the people doing this work, and the trust between them, and a shared moral framework sturdy enough to hold people together when the ground keeps shifting.
The conversation is already happening. The question is whether we’re willing to have it in public, with the same honesty we’re bringing to those late-night phone calls and café meetings.
I think we are. I think that’s actually what this moment is asking of us.
What’s the conversation you’ve been having in secret? I’d love to hear it.