Doing the Next Right Thing: Why Capacity Doesn’t Need to Be All or Nothing
After more than 20 years in non-profits, I’ve noticed a pattern.
An organization spends most of its energy keeping the lights on. The team is stretched well past honest capacity, and the building has problems nobody has the budget to fix. Somewhere along the way, the strategic plan stopped reflecting reality. Every staff meeting includes a moment when someone says, “once things settle down, we should really…”
Things don’t settle down. They haven’t, for a while.
What I hear most often from the leaders I work with isn’t that they don’t see what’s wrong. It’s that they used to be able to help someone find a job, secure housing, or participate fully in their community, and now they are stretching to help that same person meet basic needs. The work hasn’t gotten lighter, and the systems have only become more broken. The gap between what you came into this work to do, and what you actually have the time and resources to do, keeps widening. The quiet grief of that gap compounds.
None of this is your fault.
I believe we’ve been sold a lie about what it takes to shift it. We’ve been told the forward-looking work, the planning, the imagining, the building, requires energy and conditions we don’t have, so we wait for a fairy godmother (funder) to grant us these wishes. That doesn’t happen, and the forward-looking work keeps getting postponed. The heaviness of that postponement itself becomes part of the weight we carry.
Capacity isn’t all or nothing; sometimes it’s as simple as a different choice, made today, with what you already have.
A good chunk of my work happens with Sustainable Livelihoods Canada. The Sustainable Livelihoods framework, originally for individuals and communities, asks what we have to build the lives we want, and what holds us back. Our team has been adapting it for the organizations we work with, grounded in three ideas in the framework:
Conditions are the foundations to operate at all: lights on, building safe, enough staff to do the day’s work, today’s resources.
Capacity is what becomes possible above that floor, the moments when you can lift your head and dream forward.
Vulnerability context is the water we’re all swimming in. The funding models that pay for outputs but not for the time it takes to think. The pressure to balance budgets in ways that leave little room for experimentation, learning, risk, or recovery. The quiet sector norm that has come to treat exhaustion as evidence of commitment. No single organization controls it, and yet it shapes what we can do.
The vulnerability context is real, and it is not your fault. The conditions you’re working to maintain are real, and not your fault either. But the capacity layer is where small choices live, and those choices, made with intention, are how movement begins.
A leadership team I’ve worked with recently committed to one hour a month of strategy-focused meeting time, against every reasonable voice in the room that said we don’t have time. They didn’t add capacity. They spent what they already had differently. Over those meetings, they noticed work they’d been duplicating, surfaced strengths they hadn’t been fully leveraging, and quickly found that the hour was returning far more capacity than they were investing.
You don’t have to start with an hour a month. You can start much smaller.
What I keep coming back to, in client work and in everyday choices, is the next right thing (thank Anna from Frozen 2 for the earworm). Not the most ambitious, not the perfect one, the next right one. The smallest move that still points in the right direction, the one you can take this week with what you already have.
It can look like asking one different question in the meeting you’re already in. Holding a beat of space before the instinctive yes to something new. Taking the breath before the reaction. Naming a strength on your team that hasn’t been said out loud. The next right thing, and then the one after it.
dr. monique liston, founder of UBUNTU Research & Evaluation, frames liberation, not systems change, as the right accountability metric for our work. What I take from her, on the harder days, is that liberation doesn’t wait at the end of the right strategic planning retreat. It lives in the smaller choices, plural, that point in a different direction. Yours might start very small. They still count.
You have more agency than the day has made room for, and you don’t need to solve the whole thing today. The next right thing, and the one after that, will add up. You may not see the signs of transformation right away. But quietly, and then less quietly, you’re building something for you, your team, and the community you support.
What’s the next right thing for you this week? Whatever it is, that’s where I’d start.
Allison Prieur is a Credentialed Evaluator, the founder of DARE Impact Consulting, and a student in the Interdisciplinary PhD in Evaluation program at Western Michigan University. She helps organizations learn and improve using evidence-informed systems, strategies, and culture. You can find more about her at www.dareic.com.