This week, I’m sharing something from the archives. It’s an oldie but a goodie.
Let me know what symptoms vs root causes you’re experiencing; I’d love to hear from you!
Sometimes treating symptoms feels productive in ways that addressing a root cause doesn't.
When people are leaving, hiring feels like action. When grants are getting rejected, bringing in fundraising help feels responsible. When your calendar is out of control, adding project management software feels like progress.
Symptoms are urgent, visible and create immediate pain…And they come with obvious solutions that you can explain to your board in one sentence.
Root causes are different. They're slower. They're structural. They require uncomfortable conversations about things that have been true for years.
What the Framework Shows You
I made the diagnostic framework below to map five pillars that determine organizational health:
Strategy & Planning
Financial Sustainability
Systems & Processes
Culture & People
Impact & Learning.
Most times you will experience crises on the diagonal - the fundraising problem feels like a fundraising problem, the retention crisis feels like a retention problem. But the framework shows that sometimes, the real bottleneck is usually one or two steps away from where the pain is most acute.
Root Cause framework
How to use it:
Start with your symptom across the top - what's keeping you up at night?
Read down that column until you find the description that makes you say "that's exactly us." That row is your root cause.
Now read across that row to see all the problems this root cause is creating.
The colors tell you the intervention sequence:
🔴 FOUNDATIONAL means you must fix the root cause first - treating the symptom alone will fail because the root cause keeps regenerating it.
🟡 ENABLING means fixing the root cause removes barriers and makes the symptom easier to address, though the symptom may still need direct attention afterward.
🔵 PARALLEL means you can get quick wins on the symptom while fixing the root cause - those wins create the breathing room to complete the deeper work.
Common Patterns
Financial crisis: If you can't raise money and the root cause is Impact & Learning, that's red (foundational). Build impact measurement before hiring fundraising help. If you don’t, you risk being like the organization that hired a development manager to fix their fundraising problem. Eighteen months later, the development manager quit because every funder meeting ended with the same question: "What impact have you had with the funding we already gave you?"
Systems crisis: If everything depends on you and the root cause is also Systems, consider how you can start using formal decision making processes. It’s not as fun as the scrappy entrepreneurial culture many nonprofits start off with, but it is essential growth infrastructure.
Culture crisis: If good people keep leaving, almost every root cause is red (foundational). You’ll be tempted to postpone dealing with it, or to partially deal with it while you keep everything else running. I recommend that you stop, get outside help, and fix this before making any other major plans.
Root causes require sustained attention and organizational commitment, but addressing them is the only way to stop spending money to recreate the same problems.
Can You Do This Without Outside Help?
It depends on your root cause. Systems work (documentation, process design) can often be led internally if you have someone with capacity. Culture transformation and strategic clarification typically require outside facilitation because you're too close to see clearly. Financial diversification needs expertise you may not have in-house. Impact measurement needs both technical skills and objectivity.
I help organizations diagnose their primary constraint and build the infrastructure that makes everything else possible. Book time to discuss here.
If you're unsure whether you need help, we can figure that out together.
You’ve got this. ✨
