A nonprofit ED sat across from a funder she'd wanted to partner with for the better part of a year.
He asked her a simple question: What do you do?
She heard herself answer, and somewhere in the middle of her own sentence she realized the words coming out were a version she'd built two funders ago, for a program she had since outgrown. The work had changed but the description hadn't.
He nodded, told her it sounded interesting, and never wrote back. She spent the next several months convinced she had a fundraising problem.
She didn't. She had a strategy that had stopped matching the organization it was describing.
The discrepancy wasn't exactly a secret. Her board had circled it in that careful way boards do, asking for "a little more clarity on direction" three meetings running and then moving on.
She'd felt it herself, in the half-second before she answered questions she used to answer without thinking. But saying it out loud meant admitting that the strategy she was leading on wasn't working anymore.
An ignored gap between what your organization does and the story it tells about itself widens on its own, while you're busy running activities. By the time the drift becomes visible, the people you most wanted in your corner have already, privately, decided against you.
Her problem was a description that had aged out.
Yours might be a different gap entirely: Maybe it's the metric you still report because you've always reported it, even though your team internally acknowledges it's a vanity play.
Maybe it's the program that no longer fits the mission but employs people you care about, so it stays, unexamined, on the strategy deck.
Maybe it's the answer to "what's next" that you give confidently in public and don't actually believe in private.
The underlying challenge is always that you have aged out of your current strategy.
So your strategy needs to change. You already know that, or you wouldn't have read this far.
If you're the kind of leader who can feel the gap, you also almost always have a rough sense of how to solve it. Something you could gesture at, even if you don't have the full shape. The trouble is that "a rough sense" sounds better in your head than it is the moment you try to say it.
If you had to share your envisioned change in one sentence to someone who already trusts you, what would you say?
I can tell you what happens when you try to say it:
You'll start and then reach for an example — then you'll describe a program instead of stating a strategy.
Or you'll hedge it into something so broad no one could disagree, which is the same as saying nothing.
Or you'll say it clearly, without caveats, and watch the person's face stay politely blank, which might make you backtrack (maybe you'll be worried it's too bold, or too dramatic of a shift — maybe you'll feel like you didn't explain it properly).
Thinking is not the same skill as articulating, and no leader gets good at the second one alone.
Own Your Strategy:
This is the work I do: Over nine weeks I sit with a mission driven leader and we take the new direction for their organization that they can almost explain, and expand it into a stress tested strategy that they can defend to anyone; a strategy that brings their organization into a future that re-awakens their excitement for the work.
I will be taking five leaders through the Own Your Strategy intensive. Here's what one leader said after the first module:
"You converted me — thank you. I now feel I've lost so much time not working on [my company's] communication, but also I think this is not something that could have been done before going deep into the sector. Thank you. The work matters and needs to be shared the right way."
Reply and tell me: if you had to describe your strategy in one sentence, what would you say?
