The End of Stability: Why Nonprofits Must Stop Waiting for Normal

“…for the past five years or so, we’ve been living in what a futurist calls the BANI world– brittle, anxious, non-linear, and incomprehensible. And we know that the pace and volume of change will never again be as slow or as small as it is today, if you can believe that.”

Denver: Nancy, in the first 70 days of 2025, 10,000 full-time nonprofit jobs disappeared. You’ve called this an unprecedented wave of change. What’s driving this crisis that many nonprofit leaders still don’t see coming?

Nancy: Oof, well, for the past five years or so, we’ve been living in what a futurist calls the BANI world– brittle, anxious, non-linear, and incomprehensible. And we know that the pace and volume of change will never again be as slow or as small as it is today, if you can believe that.

Denver: Right.

Nancy: And so, I mean, what’s driving this is everything’s in upheaval, and most leaders don’t know what they don’t know. It’s impossible to see everything that’s coming around every corner these days. So, too many leaders– private sector, nonprofit, government alike are relying on outdated mindsets and models for organizational readiness and how to be prepared for whatever’s coming next.

Denver: What’s the major mindset change that they need to make in order to be able to have that adaptive leadership which is being called for?

Nancy: Yeah. Well, one thing you mentioned when we were chatting before we hopped on here is that most leaders we know from lots of recent research, that they’re still waiting to exhale from the pandemic. And they can’t because extreme leadership, that’s one of the 10 meta trends we identified this year, extreme leadership is what is being required of them at their absolute, very best, top of their game, every moment of every hour of every day.

So they don’t have that time to really step back, to recoup and to recalibrate for their organizations to be in what we know we need now, which is a perpetual state of agility and change readiness.

Denver: Yeah.

Nancy: And to share with others in their organization that change is now the norm. So things are going to change more frequently and more quickly inside our organization than they used to. And that doesn’t mean we’re indecisive. It doesn’t mean things are falling apart or coming off the rails. It doesn’t mean I’m a bad leader. So one thing they need, one mindset they need to shift is the expectation around how frequently things will change.

Denver: Oh, that’s an interesting observation. It sounds as if they need to have that change agility inside the organization that’s happening outside their organization.

Nancy: Oh, a hundred percent.

Denver: The world is changing so fast, you can’t expect to have a static organization where we have a plan…. We’re going to stick to it… because things are changing every single day.

Nancy: I mean, you can expect that, and you will very quickly in this world become irrelevant, or end up one of those nonprofits that’s now begging for a merger, or for someone to take on their best programs. The funders are not going to be attracted to you. You’re not going to keep staff. You’re not going to stay relevant.

Denver: Yeah. Well, let’s think about that. I know the number of donors have gone down, but we’re getting record charitable giving. And that’s happening alongside record nonprofit closures. How do you explain that paradox, Nancy, and what does it tell you about which organizations survive, versus which ones won’t?

Nancy: I think I’ll go back to my answer to the first question, which is we’re seeing more and more things that don’t make sense to us or don’t fit our model of the way the world works because the world is now brittle, anxious, non-linear and incomprehensible, right? So this is the world we’re living in.

Things that used to fit together or have a specific cause and effect, don’t anymore. So what’s going to make the difference about organizations that survive in this and ones that don’t? I mean, my expectation and my commitment,  why I get out of bed every day, is to help organizations become stronger on the other side of this.

And so what can we learn that helps us be more change capable, change ready, change resilient? And a big part of that is remembering that… we call it our minefields and moonshots, and we actually have a whole program we’re working with a lot of foundations on right now for them to help safeguard their impact and their investments and their grantees’ missions.

And that is, we need to look for the risks. We need to understand where we are vulnerable. And we need to remember to dream.

Denver: Yeah.

Nancy: So when everything is in upheaval… we saw this in the beginning of the pandemic. Things that in January of 2020 were seemingly impossible, were all of a sudden, entirely possible. Because when everything’s in upheaval, that dream you once had about how you might solve the problem you work on that impacts millions of people, and you might solve it for good, that moonshot, that dream you had might be worth pursuing now.

But if we get so locked into sadness around the loss of the way things were, or the loss of the status quo, we’re going to miss that opportunity in the crisis for imagination, for dreaming, for pursuing that moonshot. And those are the organizations I think that are going to end up going away in this time.

Whereas those who can recalibrate their expectations for change, find the space to dream, along with protecting and looking at the risks– doing those in equal measure– those are the ones that are going to come out on the other side of this stronger.

“When it comes to being able to adapt quickly to display the two leadership skills we need the most of right now– speed and discernment– which sometimes seem incongruent, trust is essential. But how trust gets built with board members who don’t see each other every single day is in opportunities for social connection, opportunities for people to get to know each other personally. And so many times, our board meetings aren’t structured that way. So that’s one thing that we unearth through Board CQ…”

Denver: Makes a lot of sense. Risk is the four-letter word of this sector. It’s never discussed. I mean, when I go to my investment advisor, she’ll tell me that you can do this, but you got some risk here. You never talk about that when you’re funding a grant. It’s not like, Well, this might not work.

And you’re right. I think as far as the dreaming is concerned, that’s the way to keep the staff morale up. You know, work is hard on a day-to-day basis, but if there’s a vision that you can see where you’re going, it can really boost energy.

Well, you have thankfully created the Board CQ Change Readiness Index because you saw a dangerous gap. What’s the difference between how nonprofit boards think they handle change versus how they actually perform when crisis hits?

Nancy: Well, let me say a little bit about what Board CQ is so that people understand how this illuminates that for us. So this is something we developed. It’s the first of its kind only objective measure of change readiness for nonprofit boards.

And I came to these questions and the eight essential characteristics of change-ready boards through my own experience as a nonprofit board member, nonprofit board chair, nonprofit staff person, and of course consultant to lots of organizations, and seeing, appreciating some of those blind spots.

So now we have these 38 prompts that take about five minutes. Every board member and the chief executive answer these questions, and then the organization gets their rating on these eight scales. Everything from foresight, speaking of risk, to transparency and identity. Does the board see themselves as change leaders? Do they see the staff as capable?

And so where we see some of the most common gaps are around things like trust, but not trust always in the way we think about it. So most board members and certainly chief executives are very driven people. They’re very results-oriented. They want to get stuff done. They’re very busy. They come in… they run the meeting… they check things off the list… Boom!

When it comes to being able to adapt quickly to display the two leadership skills we need the most of right now– speed and discernment– which sometimes seem incongruent, trust is essential. But how trust gets built with board members who don’t see each other every single day is in opportunities for social connection, opportunities for people to get to know each other personally. And so many times, our board meetings aren’t structured that way.

So that’s one thing that we unearth through Board CQ and we’ve been having lots of fun conversations at board briefings around these baseline reports of: how do you create more time for board members to just have that lunch after your board meeting, encourage them to hop on Zoom 15 minutes before the meeting starts, and just share some things personally.

Because that’s the fabric that weaves together for trust to emerge, and then that trust enables the speed and discernment in the moment when those tough conversations have to happen, tough decisions need to be made quickly.

Denver: Yeah. It is funny how a CEO very often is looking at his staff and thinking about building a team, and we have to be one team. They never look at the board as a team, and the board members never look at themselves as a team.

As you just said so well, they parachute in, they make their contribution. I’m a finance guy, I am a tech guy or whatever… and then they’re back on the plane again, and it’s just a bunch of individuals. And as long as it remains that way, you are never going to get what you just described.

Nancy: Right. Then you have a nice group of advisors, but you don’t really have a governing board because we know the board only has authority when it operates collectively. And if we’re just a bunch of individuals who all show up with our different perspectives and identity, we’re not going to get that benefit.

Denver: That’s right. Checking to see what time my flight is. That’s what happens. So we can get out of here in time.

So when crisis strikes, what should nonprofit leaders do, let’s say, Nancy, in the first 72 hours that most just don’t do, or get completely wrong?

Nancy: Well, I would say what they should do in the first 72 hours is actually not to be done in the first 72 hours, right?

Denver: Right.

Nancy: So I like to look at this asd: How are we in that perpetual state of change, readiness, and agility?  And if you wait till the first 72 hours, you’re probably… it’s too late.

So I’m a big believer in that we make the one decision that eliminates a thousand others. So what are those things we need to have decided in partnership with our executive team, in partnership with our board, way before a crisis hits, so that we know: These are our core values. This is how we use them to make decisions. This is what we won’t compromise on or walk away from, no matter what. And we’ve already decided that in partnership with whomever needs to be part of that decision, so that in the first 72 hours after a crisis hits or a massive disruption happens, those thousand little decisions are already made.

Denver: Yeah.

Nancy: And we can continue to focus on the big pieces that require that speed and discernment, but we’re not getting trapped in the thousand little decisions that we probably could have preempted and pre-made, if you will.

Denver: Yeah. Because your values and your principles and your scenario is all there, so you know how to behave.

You have written about mid-level leaders becoming the make-or-break factor for organizations. And I got to tell you, Nancy, I probably hear about this more than almost any other issue from the guests on the show… about that mid-level challenge that they have. Why are they so critical, and why are they struggling?

Nancy: Well, they’re so critical because they are the essential stabilizers in any organization. They’re the ones who are interpreting, getting the information from senior leaders, that vision that they have to make real. They’re also closer to the frontline challenges, the frontline solutions. And they’re getting that pushback from workers who are trying to deliver services and programs every single day.

So they’re essential in times of disruption because they’re actually feeding information and providing support in both directions, that managing up and down and all around. And they are our change enablers. So if they’re not able to translate that vision, if they’re not supportive of it, even if it’s maybe not a choice they would’ve made, then they’re not going to be able to take the solutions if their frontline staff, their teams don’t trust them.

They’re not going to be able to get the solutions and the challenges and feed those back up. So they are essential to stabilizing in times of disruption and to realizing the vision for change or implementing successful change initiatives. They’re struggling so much right now because that position is a difficult one in the best of times.

Denver: Yeah.

Nancy: You are sort of constantly getting squeezed and pulled in all the directions. You’re constantly… you have a lot of responsibility, but not that much authority.

Denver: That’s right.

Nancy: So that’s challenging in stable times.

Right now, we know, I think it was Gallup that documented most middle managers have three times as many direct reports as they did in 2019. So there, we’re seeing one of our other 10 meta trends we identified for 2025, is the missing middle and not showing up in lots of different ways. Not just shrinking middle management, but it is showing up there as well.

So people are looking at AI and other things or just general cost savings, so they’re eliminating more middle managers. So they’re having a lot more piled on them. And at the same time, they’re the least invested in leadership level in most organizations.

So your executive might have their board chair relationship. They might get executive coaching. They might be part of executive round tables with other CEOs. Your frontline workers are getting pretty good skills training to do their jobs on a regular basis, but that middle manager level is often the least invested in.

Denver: Yeah. Yeah. And can become the most cynical as a result, because, I mean…

Nancy: Absolutely.

Denver: …they’ve been there 5, 6, 7 years. So the blush of the new organization has worn off. They’re getting these directives of senior management, which seem almost impossible. They have frontline workers who are worried about work-life balance or whatever, and no one pays any attention to them.

They are so taken for granted. And I would imagine they’re probably more subject to burnout than almost any other person in the organization.

Nancy: Oh, absolutely.

Denver: Yeah.

Nancy: And we’re seeing anywhere… depending on what study you look at… from 70% to 77% of middle managers saying they experience high levels of burnout on a regular basis, and they’re considering leaving their role as a result. So what happens when we continue to gut that, those essential stabilizers and those change enablers, it’s only going to put our organizations at greater risk.

Denver: Do you think foundations should invest in building organizational resilience upfront, rather than maybe funding programs to the extent that they do?

Nancy: Well, I hate to answer that universally…

Denver: I know.

Nancy: …for every foundation because we have lots of different flavors of philanthropy, just like we have lots of different flavors of everything. So do I wish we had more of that? More of that general operating support, more of that trust-based philanthropy approach, more support for change ready, change capable, change resilient organizational development? A thousand percent.

And that’s not going to be the answer for every single foundation. So I wish that those foundations that have a naturally higher risk tolerance, or who could be more innovative or take a little more risk, were more willing to do so on a consistent basis and not just in times of crisis. 

So we, back in the middle of 2020, sparked by a catchup coffee Zoom conversation with my former colleague and good friend, Kristen Campbell at PACE, Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement…We were just chatting about our frustration on this exact thing and how so many foundations were like, Oh, we’re going to reduce our reporting guidelines. Or, we’re going to start giving general operating support.  Or we’re going to have an emergency fund set up because of the pandemic and then the racial reckoning, and after the death of George Floyd.

And we ended up creating this guide called Crisis as Catalyst out of that initial conversation. It was a conversation starter to help foundations reimagine what could be next and how they could, if those things were possible in a crisis, maybe it was worth revisiting what was possible or necessary in times of stability.

And I’m not sure we sparked enough conversation that we had hoped we could spark, but the guide is still available. And now…

Denver: Oh, there you go.

Nancy: …it’s as good a time as any for people to dive into those conversations again. So I wish we had more of it. It’s probably not the right answer for everyone.

Denver: Yeah. It’s unfortunate I think that some of the things that happened during the crisis, COVID… we’ve kind of resorted back to where we were in too many cases. Not all cases, but in many in terms of the speed, the general operating and things of that sort. And I think there was a moment there where we hoped that would not be the case, but it has turned out to be more so than I would’ve wished.

You work with intrapreneurs. These are internal changemakers who disrupt from within. Who are these people? Why are they essential for survival? And how do leaders identify and even protect them?

Nancy: Well, it’s interesting, I think reading your background and bio, you were probably one of these people, right? You tend to use phrases like pioneer, maverick, innovator. Intrapreneurs are people who bring that entrepreneurial mindset and want to disrupt systems organizations, but they do it from within.

So sometimes we have the social entrepreneurs who go off, and they start their own thing, and they’re going to try to change the way a problem gets solved or the way a need gets met. Intrapreneurs do that inside large legacy organizations, and we need both because large legacy institutions have a bigger scale. They have a bigger reach. They often have more resources right from the get-go.

So if we can get them to change, then we’ll see the results faster. So intrapreneurs, it’s easy to identify them because they are typically raising their hand. They’re the ones who are always challenging the status quo inside our organizations. They are naturally more open to, receptive to, excited about change.

So it’s often easy to identify them, but sometimes we see them more as troublemakers than as helpful because well, Why are they always telling us we should be doing things differently? So they will identify themselves if we’re willing to see them as helpful change agents in achieving a broader vision for the organization, and not that sort of thorn in my side as the CEO, always asking me why things can’t be better, different, move faster, be more innovative, whatever.

So the ways to support them are to help them understand how to influence in ways that are more effective, so that they’re able to challenge that status quo in ways that people will hear it, consider it, and then actually make the change.

Denver: Yeah. I think the most dangerous intrapreneurs, as far as sometimes senior leadership or a CEO is concerned, is one who has a bunch of people in their office, and they got themselves a posse, a crowd.

And if they’re that way and they got nine people and they’re all talking, you just see senior management walking by, saying, uh-oh. You know what I mean? What is going on here? But they can be incredibly influential once you work with them and you walk alongside them, and they buy into one of your initiatives. They can bring so many parts of the organization along that as a leader, you could probably never touch.

Nancy: Yeah, they have informal authority oftentimes, and they certainly have influence. So how do you direct that energy in ways that are maybe more helpful to where the organization needs and wants to go? And that is a lot of art and probably a little less science, but certainly want to leverage that energy in positive ways.

Denver: What are you doing today with your clients that you weren’t doing 18 months ago?

Nancy: Something we’re doing more and more of in the last few, probably 90 days, are these middle managers… Now we were doing some of that before, but we’re really seeing more enterprise-wide programs. So looking at… we believe we need change capable leaders at all levels of the organization, and more and more organizations are seeing the value of investing in those middle managers.

So we’re doing more training; skills boost leadership, change leadership development for those level of leaders. We’re getting ready to launch in September a partnership with a national nonprofit membership association to offer that level of capacity building for all of their member organizations because not every organization has the financial or time resources to be able to customize those programs in-house.

The second thing we’re doing a lot more of these days are these executive team alignment labs. So especially heading into 2026, things are changing so fast. People, even small leadership teams, aren’t necessarily all on the same page, or haven’t put those pieces in place, made those one or two decisions that will eliminate a thousand other decisions down the road, and communicated those collectively.

Understand really how to leverage each other’s strengths so that they’re more change resilient. So we’re doing a lot of that. And then of course definitely looking at this safeguarding impact concept, which we weren’t really doing 18 months ago, but working both with foundations and with large nonprofits on this minefields and moonshots kind of combination. Doing some risk planning and using Board CQ as a tool to inform all of that.

Denver: Oh, all sound great. I mean, with middle managers too, what a way to retain staff because people, they don’t train them anymore.  Just do what we do…and that makes sense. And I went into an organization a number of years ago and spoke to 20 senior leaders, and I asked them what the number one priority of the organization was, and I got 12 different answers.

And it is amazing how team alignment is not across the board. People have different ideas, and it really does shock leadership, they think. I’ve done a lot of work also in culture, and the workplace culture of the organization is much better in the C-suite than it is throughout the organization. They have a completely different idea as the gap is significant.

So looking ahead three to five years, what’s the biggest disruption coming to the nonprofit sector that will catch most leaders a little bit off balance, let’s say?

Nancy: Hmm. Well, I’m not a huge fan of making predictions necessarily because humans are bad crystal balls, let’s just say that. So what I do…

Denver: But we all enjoy hearing them.

Nancy: Of course we do. Of course you do. And then we look back, and we’re like, “Woo, we were so off base there.” So I’ll say a couple things on that. One: We do track 10 meta trends. So every year, between December and end of January, early February, we look across hundreds of industries, and globally, different sectors, everything from pharma to zoology, to nonprofits, to retail, hospitality.

And we try to see: What are the trends that are common across all this? So not predictions necessarily, but what trends are out there percolating. And how can we bubble them up and help everybody see the implications of those? So, definitely stay tuned if you want to hear what we’ve got coming out for 2026.

Denver: Could you give us a sneak preview of just one?

Nancy: Well, I can tell you what we’ve identified for 2025.

Denver: Okay.

Nancy: And what we are experiencing for certain. So one of those is nostalgia. So with speed, you mentioned earlier, everything’s getting faster. Thank you, Amazon, for creating our impatience if we can’t get it in two hours, right? So we expect things to move so quickly… and all the AI and tech changes and upheavals in all sorts of sectors.

So nostalgia is one meta trend that’s showing up in people wanting dumb phones again, or vinyl records, or the way we see now design elements coming back from the ’50s, all the reboots of old TV shows. Even our politics– Make America Great Again. It’s like we want to go back in time. So that’s one.

 Extreme leadership is another that I mentioned.

I think when we look at all of this, the AI, not just being prevalent, but it being agentic, anthropomorphic, being able to anticipate our needs, we’re interacting with AI now more through avatars or bots that have human-like physical qualities. So we’re seeing it embedded in everything we do; we almost don’t notice it in a lot of cases now. And so all of that coming together, I’ll go back to where I started: this brittle, anxious, non-linear, incomprehensible world, the pace and volume of change, never again being as slow or small as it is today.

So what’s going to transform nonprofits is all of this coming together. It’s going to be hitting our donors, the problems we solve, our partners, our staff, our volunteers, our boards. And the biggest mistake that leaders can make in response to that is deciding they’re going to wait for things to settle down. They’re not going to change. They’re not going to react or respond. They’re just going to wait for stability to come back.

We saw this in the early days of the pandemic, and those organizations that were able to stay really, really close to the changing needs of the people they served and their funders and partners in those moments, and adapt accordingly… maybe not make a huge shift in the first week. But after two, three weeks, we were all hoping things were going to get back to normal, and they didn’t for months and even years. So that is the new normal. That is going to continue.

So waiting for things to get back to normal or to stabilize is the biggest mistake that leaders can make in this moment. Staying close to the changing needs of the people they serve, their funders, their partners, their volunteers, their staff, will enable them to adapt appropriately. And if they’re in that perpetual state of change, readiness and agility, they will be able to do that with more ease and less pain.

“In times of massive change and disruption, it can be helpful to remind ourselves what hasn’t changed. Because even if it’s one tiny thing, there’s always one thing that hasn’t changed. And we can stand on that foundation and take the leap into the unknown from there. So ask yourselves: What hasn’t changed?”

Denver: So change is constant, and if you can communicate that to your staff, they’re going to be better off.

It is amazing sometimes what you said there in terms of this uncertain state. Every once in a while, I’ll turn on CNBC. And they’ll talk about the investment market here going forward. And they’ll say, Really, we’re in an unprecedented time. See, the next six months is completely uncertain.

And I’m saying, Do you realize you idiots have been saying that for five years? And we look back once it’s been done as if that was a certain time. It’s always going to be uncertain when you don’t know. But once it’s happened: “Well, yeah, we kind of predicted that or kind of knew that was happening.”

So what would be that one word of advice that you would give a nonprofit leader right now if they sat down with you, and you would put it and frame it in a positive way, which says: This is what you need to do tomorrow.

Nancy: I’ll say two things. One is for yourself and for those around you, for your staff: In times of massive change and disruption, it can be helpful to remind ourselves what hasn’t changed. Because even if it’s one tiny thing, there’s always one thing that hasn’t changed. And we can stand on that foundation and take the leap into the unknown from there. So ask yourselves: What hasn’t changed?

Then, I’ll go back to something I said earlier. Create the expectation of change. So if we normalize this, and we normalize the feelings coming with it, it will be less disruptive when it happens. And when we make that mindset shift, we can then make the investments in getting our organization change ready and change capable, so that we’re change resilient.

Denver: Change is exciting.

Nancy: It can be. It can be.

Denver: It’s like, we all love change. You know what I mean? Boring otherwise! a

Nancy, for listeners who want to learn more, tell us about the CSR Communications website and what they’ll find there… and mega trends, and all the other things that you’ve spoken about.

Nancy: Absolutely. Our website is csrcommunications.com. And at our website, you’ll find our Insights Hub, which has great resources, especially for nonprofits, some really helpful articles, some insight papers on the board-staff gap, on leading through change for boards. You’ll also find information about Board CQ and a quick quiz you can take to see how Board CQ might benefit your board and your organization.

And of course, you can find more information about our services and how we help organizations become change ready, change capable, and change resilient.

Denver: Well, change is exciting. I think taking quizzes is exciting, too. Nancy, this has been incredibly valuable. I want to thank you so much for being with us today on The Business of Giving.

Nancy: Thanks for having me.