Some of the worst organizational systems started with the sentence, “We’ll just do this for now.”
And sometimes, “for now” is exactly what you need.
Someone leaves unexpectedly.
A major grant doesn’t renew.
A program grows faster than anticipated.
A partnership suddenly creates twice the work anyone expected.
Something happens that nobody planned for, and there isn’t time to spend three months designing the perfect response.
You need to keep payroll moving.
You need the report submitted.
You need participants served.
You need someone to answer the email, attend the meeting, approve the invoice, or make the decision.
So you improvise.
That isn’t bad leadership.
Sometimes it is very good leadership.
The problem comes later.
Because temporary solutions have a bad habit of becoming permanent systems when nobody goes back to question them.
“We’ll Just Do This for Now”
Imagine a nonprofit with a small leadership team.
One employee leaves unexpectedly.
There isn’t time to immediately hire a replacement, so another staff member agrees to temporarily absorb the most important pieces of the vacant position.
It makes sense. She knows the programs. She understands the organization. She already works with many of the same people.
Everyone agrees this is temporary.
Because she is now covering two roles, a weekly meeting is added so the team can coordinate.
An additional approval step is created because she doesn’t have the same authority as the person who left.
Reporting changes because information now has to move between departments differently.
A few responsibilities are shifted to other employees.
Some deadlines are adjusted.
Everyone pitches in.
It isn’t elegant, but it works.
The organization keeps moving.
Three months pass.
Then four.
Then six.
The position still hasn’t been filled.
The employee covering both roles is exhausted.
The temporary weekly meeting is still on everyone’s calendar.
The additional approval process is now treated as standard procedure.
The reporting workaround has become the reporting system.
Other employees have quietly absorbed pieces of work that were never added to their actual job descriptions.
Nobody intentionally designed this structure.
It simply happened.
The organization survived the crisis.
Then it accidentally institutionalized the crisis response.
That is the part leaders need to watch.
Surviving Is Not the Same as Designing
There are times when the only question that matters is:
How do we get through this?
Solve that problem first, but once things stabilize, leadership needs to ask a different question:
Is this how we actually want to operate?
Those are two very different leadership tasks.
Crisis management prioritizes speed. Sustainable organizational design requires intention.
During a crisis, you may accept inefficiency because keeping something moving matters more.
You may ask someone to temporarily take on additional work.
You may add meetings because communication needs to increase.
You may create an extra approval because the normal decision-maker isn’t available.
You may move money, change deadlines, pause projects, or shift responsibilities.
Fine.
But every emergency workaround creates a potential new system.
Unless someone goes back and reviews it.
Tool #1: Conduct a Post-Crisis Systems Review
Thirty to 90 days after a significant disruption, put a Post-Crisis Systems Review on the calendar.
Don’t wait until everything is perfectly settled.
It probably won’t be.
Choose a point when the immediate emergency has passed and you have enough distance to see what happened.
Bring together the people most affected by the changes and ask six questions.
1. What did we change because of the crisis?
Start by making a list.
Don’t evaluate anything yet.
What meetings were added?
What responsibilities moved?
What approval processes changed?
What deadlines shifted?
What reports changed?
What projects stopped?
What technology or spreadsheets were created?
What responsibilities did people quietly absorb?
You may be surprised by how much changed.
2. What worked?
Not every emergency solution is bad.
Sometimes a crisis forces an organization to simplify something that was unnecessarily complicated.
Maybe you discovered that a weekly two-hour meeting could become a 30-minute check-in.
Maybe a different employee turned out to be much better suited to a responsibility.
Maybe a process became faster.
Keep what genuinely improved the organization.
3. What created new problems?
This is where you need honesty.
Did someone absorb too much work?
Did communication improve in one area but become harder somewhere else?
Did a workaround create duplicate reporting?
Did temporary approvals slow decisions?
Did employees start working outside normal hours to keep everything moving?
A solution can solve one problem while creating three others.
Look for both.
4. What should remain?
Some crisis-driven changes deserve to become permanent.
Name them intentionally.
Don’t keep them because “that’s how we’re doing it now.”
Keep them because you’ve reviewed them and decided they improve the organization.
5. What should end?
This is often the question organizations skip.
What can stop?
End the extra meeting.
Return the temporary responsibility.
Remove the unnecessary approval.
Restart something that was paused.
Delete the spreadsheet nobody needs anymore.
Temporary should actually mean temporary.
6. What needs to be redesigned?
Some things shouldn’t return to the old system, but the emergency solution isn’t sustainable either.
That’s your redesign list.
You don’t have to solve every item immediately.
Assign an owner and a deadline.
Otherwise, “needs to be redesigned” becomes another version of “we’ll do this for now.”
Tool #2: Label Changes Temporary, Test, or Permanent
One simple habit can prevent a lot of accidental systems.
Every time you change a process during a crisis, label it.
TEMPORARY: We are doing this because of the immediate situation. It is not intended to continue.
TEST: We don’t know whether this is the right long-term solution. We are trying it and will evaluate the results.
PERMANENT: We have intentionally decided this is how the organization will operate going forward.
Then add one more thing; a review date.
If something is temporary, decide when it will be reviewed.
If something is a test, determine what you’re testing and when you will evaluate it.
For example:
“Jordan will temporarily approve program expenses through October 31. Leadership will review the approval process during the week of October 20.”
Now everyone knows this isn’t automatically the new system.
Without a date, temporary arrangements have a remarkable ability to live forever.
Tool #3: Put an Expiration Date on Extra Work
This is particularly important when employees absorb responsibilities after someone leaves.
Don’t say:
“Can you handle this until we figure things out?”
Define the arrangement.
What responsibilities are they taking?
What responsibilities are they not taking?
How long will this continue?
What authority comes with the added responsibility?
What support do they need?
What existing work will be reduced?
When will you review the arrangement?
That last part matters because temporary workload increases are easy to underestimate.
Someone may be able to carry 120 percent of a job for three weeks.
That doesn’t mean they can carry it for six months.
And if someone is doing two jobs indefinitely, you haven’t solved the staffing problem.
You’ve moved it.
Tool #4: Use a Capacity Test Before Adding Anything New
Crisis isn’t the only way organizations overload their systems.
Growth can do it too.
A new funding opportunity appears.
A potential partner calls.
Someone suggests a new program.
A funder asks whether you could expand into another community.
Everyone gets excited.
The conversation becomes can we do this?
I would add another question; what will it take to do this well?
Before launching a program, accepting a partnership, pursuing a major opportunity, or adding a significant responsibility, answer six questions.
Who owns this?
Name the person.
Not “the development team.”
Not “program staff.”
Who is accountable?
If nobody owns it, everyone assumes someone else does.
How many staff hours will it require?
Estimate honestly.
Include planning.
Meetings.
Emails.
Reporting.
Data collection.
Relationship management.
Administration.
Training.
Travel.
The visible work is rarely the entire workload.
What resources does it require?
Money?
Technology?
Consultants?
Space?
Transportation?
Supplies?
Training?
New staff?
Don’t assume existing infrastructure can absorb everything.
What reporting comes with it?
This is particularly important with funding and partnerships.
A $25,000 grant that requires significant data collection, monthly meetings, multiple reports, and customized programming may cost far more organizational capacity than the award amount suggests.
Understand the entire obligation.
What happens if the person responsible leaves?
This question forces you to think beyond the immediate opportunity.
Is the process documented?
Does anyone else understand it?
Are important contacts stored centrally?
Could someone step in?
Growth built entirely around one person’s capacity creates vulnerability.
What will we stop doing to create capacity?
This may be the most important question on the list.
And organizations hate it.
Because we like adding.
We are much less comfortable subtracting.
New program?
Add it.
New grant?
Pursue it.
New event?
Put it on the calendar.
New partnership?
Of course.
New reporting requirement?
We’ll figure it out.
But staff capacity isn’t infinite.
Every new responsibility consumes something.
Time.
Attention.
Energy.
Money.
Management capacity.
Administrative capacity.
If everyone’s workload is already full, a new initiative cannot simply be added without something else changing.
Something gets delayed.
Something receives less attention.
Someone works longer hours.
Quality declines.
Or employees quietly compensate until they cannot anymore.
Organizations frequently call this growth.
Sometimes it is simply more work added to already full positions.
Before saying yes to something new, ask:
What are we willing to stop, reduce, delegate, automate, delay, or redesign to make room for this?
If the answer is nothing, you may not actually have capacity for the opportunity.
Tool #5: Create a “Stop Doing” List
Most strategic plans have a list of things the organization wants to accomplish.
Very few have a list of things the organization has intentionally decided not to do anymore.
Create one.
Once a quarter, ask each department:
- What are we doing because we’ve always done it?
- What takes significant time but creates little value?
- What was created for a situation that no longer exists?
- What report is nobody using?
- What meeting could disappear?
- What process has more steps than it needs?
- What responsibility no longer belongs with this role?
You don’t need to eliminate everything people dislike.
Some necessary work is tedious.
But you should know why you’re doing it.
“Because we’ve always done it this way” isn’t a strategy.
Neither is “because we started doing it during the crisis and never stopped.”
Tool #6: Watch for Hidden Capacity
Sometimes an emergency system appears to be working because employees are quietly making it work.
That distinction matters.
Ask:
- Is this process actually sustainable, or is someone compensating for it?
- Are employees working additional hours?
- Are managers doing administrative work because there isn’t enough support?
- Are people creating personal spreadsheets to compensate for inadequate systems?
- Are deadlines being met because one employee constantly reminds everyone?
- Are responsibilities happening outside formal job descriptions?
- Would this process still work if the person holding it together took two weeks off?
A system that only works because a very capable person continually rescues it isn’t a strong system.
It is a dependency.
Put the Review on the Calendar Now
You don’t need a complicated organizational development initiative to start doing this.
Think about the last major disruption your organization experienced.
A resignation.
A funding loss.
Rapid growth.
A leadership transition.
A new program.
A crisis.
A major partnership.
Then schedule one 60-minute Post-Crisis Systems Review.
Bring the people affected by it into the room.
Ask:
- What did we change?
- What worked?
- What created problems?
- What should stay?
- What should stop?
- What needs to be redesigned?
You may discover systems everyone has been tolerating simply because nobody remembered they were temporary.
The Bigger Leadership Lesson
Organizations need to be able to respond quickly when circumstances change.
That is part of being resilient.
But resilience does not mean permanently operating in emergency mode.
There is a difference between being able to sprint when necessary and designing an organization that requires everyone to sprint indefinitely.
Sometimes leadership needs to say:
For the next 30 days, this is what we’re doing.
And sometimes, 30 days later, leadership needs to come back and say:
Okay. We survived that.
Now let’s decide how we actually want this to work.
Both matter.
Surviving disruption and designing a sustainable organization are two different leadership tasks.
First stabilize.
Then redesign.
The Rule to Carry Forward
Do what you need to survive the crisis. Then intentionally decide what deserves to stay.
Use the workaround.
Move the responsibility.
Add the meeting.
Change the process.
Do what you need to keep the organization moving.
Just put a date on the calendar to come back and look at what you built.
Because “we’ll just do this for now” can be a perfectly reasonable response to a crisis.
It just shouldn’t become your organizational strategy.