Why We Get Stuck in Status Quo: 4 Pitfalls to Addressing Dysfunction and Opportunity in Grantmaking

As grantmakers and changemakers, we have tremendous opportunities to unite frustration and dysfunction with hope and the possibility of generating transformative change.

Working with organizations that want to avoid the status quo for more than a decade, I’ve led groups through activities where we identify key themes for dysfunction and what is providing hope. I’ve found that there are typically four key sticking points that keep us tethered to the status quo.

Here are the four common pitfalls to addressing dysfunction in your grantmaking processes and how your organization can overcome them.

1. How We Choose Challenges

It may seem odd to say that we don’t know how to identify and choose challenges when they surround us. I bet that right now you could easily name many.

While it might sound simple to pick a challenge, three of the top five perceived dysfunctions in the sector, Resistance to Change and Rigid Structures, Lack of Inclusion and Empowerment in Decision-Making, and Staff Burnout and Unrealistic Expectations, are connected to how challenges are named, selected, and addressed.

At the root of this pitfall and these dysfunctions are communication and power. When choosing a challenge, I often see the decision is made by those with the most institutional power. This is part of the rigid hierarchies of many organizations – management sees an issue and assigns a team to work on addressing it.

At its inception, this super common process is deeply flawed, because it fails to include the perspectives of the many different stakeholders impacted by the challenge. Are there other viewpoints held by all levels of staff? How does the community think about the challenge? How might your partners perceive the problem at hand?

In our eagerness (and often a necessity) to find solutions, we jump to brainstorming and implementation, eliminating the opportunities for others to be recognized, heard, and included. The ripple effect of this practice is that people feel left out, and further exhausted and frustrated by being asked to design, execute, and participate in solutions for which they were never consulted.

2. How We Fear Empathy

It might sound odd or inaccurate to say that a sector based on love and care fears empathy (and let’s say, at a minimum often avoids it). When we participate in the actions of eliminating the perspectives of others from the very first step of creating impact (identifying a challenge), we are, from the outset, eliminating empathy.

There are many reasons we shy away from empathy as human beings, but I see a few common practices in my work with leaders and teams. Sometimes showing up with empathy feels too vulnerable or threatening for those who desire traditional power or control.

Others I’ve worked with felt that engaging stakeholders beyond who they perceived to be “key decision makers” would just create delays, cost too much, and open a Pandora’s box of other issues, so they continued to avoid it. Others have feared that asking for feedback creates an expectation of action and change, which is something they are not prepared to commit.

Not only are each of these concerns unfounded, but also our fear and reluctance to engage empathetically is harming our sector, our organizations and staff members, and our communities. When four of the five reasons we have hope in the sector, Equity and Inclusion, Human Connection and Collective Effort, Mental Health and Well-being, and Hope and Resilience, are rooted in care for one another, empathy is essential.

3. How We Lose Abundance in Our Potential Solutions

We as individuals, organizations, and a sector often have unrecognized harmful and wasteful habits for how we pursue potential solutions. Usually, it follows the status quo path I’ve already discussed, “See a problem, think of a solution, and execute.”

The key here is that we usually focus on one solution. We are rewarded for action, even if that means mounting months and years of potentially wasteful planning, partnering, programming, and oh yes, funding, onto one idea, only to find that we missed the mark.

The one solution carries not only all our resource investment, but it also often is a one-size-fits-all solution. These singular solutions feel simple and clear, but essentially when we create one program, we often make it the job of the stakeholders to figure out where they fit in and where to find value.

This focus on one solution is tied to many of the dysfunctions in the sector, but two, Overdependence on Data and Quantitative Metrics, and Funding Constraints and Grant Dependency, are most intimately tied to how we typically bring solutions to life.

We are rewarded for moving forward by our current grant mechanisms and review processes, but it often means that we lack the information we need to even imagine a variety of the most potentially impactful solutions. When we lack feedback about what challenge to pursue and then lack empathy from ignoring the many stakeholders most impacted by a challenge, we brainstorm potential solutions in silos and in disconnection to our detriment, wasting essential resources.

4. How We Execute Without Testing First

Just as we are rewarded for crafting a plan for a singular solution, we are held to an often-impossible standard of success. Our desire and reward for action as an antidote to uncertainty creates a scenario in which we are judged by what we create and what we complete. We are not supported for what we learn, for understanding the “why” behind our actions, and for how we make evidence-informed decisions.

Over and over when talking about dysfunctions in the sector, people talked about context. The contexts of our communities, local social impact ecosystems, the systems and structures within which we currently operate, and the complex contexts of our individual organizations and staff dynamics, are rarely acknowledged when we are expected to successfully execute a plan.

We are really good at creating visual and written expressions of how things should or could work, usually in the forms of our grant proposals, logic models, Gantt charts, and

program designs. We like to represent our work like it’s clean, under control, and spot-on. However, when using existing problem-solving skills, we disregard that all our work is essentially a collection of hypotheses buttressed by shaky foundations of numerous unnamed and untested assumptions.

In your experience, how often has a plan you’ve crafted gone 100% as designed? We humans and our plans rarely account for the unknown and unexpected. Our work in the sector is messy and unpredictable because we are a sector of human care. Human needs are ever evolving, and humans are often messy and unpredictable.

Break Free from Status-Quo Problem Solving

Due to the complexity of uncertainty and the challenges we exist to address, we need new mechanisms, allowances, structures, communication, and rewards that recognize and account for testing potential solutions before we put them into practice. When we break free of status quo problem-solving, we have the freedom to pause, be curious, name our unknowns, list out our assumptions, and test them quickly amidst an abundance of solution ideas.

We can challenge the dysfunctions that leave us stagnant and frustrated and pursue what gives us hope and is full of possibility. Check out our webinar, Why We Get Stuck and How to Get Unstuck, to dive more deeply into these four pitfalls and learn simple strategies you can use to overcome the status quo.