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When the World Moves Faster Than Your Organization

When the World Moves Faster Than Your Organization

Chapter Leadership Brief 10.17.25

by Matthew Weber
CEO, Development Guild

 

The World is Moving at Warp Speed

Look around. Politics, AI, economics — everything is shifting faster than any one leader, board, or organization can track. Your donors, staff, and community are living in a different reality every six months. The ground is not just shifting under your feet — it’s accelerating.

Meanwhile, your board cycle is quarterly. Your planning cycle is annual. Your strategic plan is five years old and out of date.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth: when the world moves faster than your organization, you fall behind. You lose relevance, trust, and momentum.

Nonprofits are built to endure — but right now, endurance is not enough.

The Problem Isn’t Just Speed — It’s Alignment

Most organizations are not short on ideas. Staff have them. Donors have them. Communities have them. The problem is that leadership often doesn’t know what their people are actually thinking. They don’t know the insight, hopes, or hidden energy inside the organization.

Instead, boards make decisions based on fragments: a consultant’s report, a few major donors’ voices, the staff who spoke loudest at the retreat. That’s not strategy. That’s selective listening.

When everyone in your ecosystem is moving at their own speed — donors, staff, alumni, patients, members — the risk isn’t just confusion. It’s fragmentation. A base that could be galvanized splinters. Leaders push forward with outdated assumptions. And the mission suffers.

Practical Ways to Get Informed When the World is Moving Faster

The common challenge is not a lack of information — it’s a lack of timely, aligned information. Different parts of the organization are hearing different things, and by the time it’s pulled together, the moment has passed.

There are ways to sharpen the picture:

  • Micro-surveys in the flow of engagement. Short, frequent questions after events or in emails can provide quicker reads than an annual survey cycle.
  • Listening circles. Brief, structured sessions with donors, alumni, or staff surface themes that might otherwise remain siloed.
  • Social media signals. Your community is already expressing what it cares about online. Tracking what gains traction — and what falls flat — provides a real-time pulse.
  • Staff as early detectors. Program staff and gift officers often sense shifts before leadership does. A regular channel to capture what they’re hearing keeps signal flowing to the top.

Each of these helps. But each is still a snapshot — partial, slow to compile, and hard to translate into the kind of clarity boards need to move decisively.

Listening at the Scale of Your Mission

Mission isn’t shaped by a handful of voices — it lives in the whole ecosystem. For a university, that can mean 300,000–500,000 people when you include alumni, students, faculty, staff, neighbors, and partners. For a hospital, it’s patients, families, clinicians, donors, and advocates. Citywide nonprofits can encompass entire neighborhoods. That’s the true scale — and it’s where decision-making breaks down, because traditional methods can’t reach that many people fast enough.

BIG Question collapses the lag. What used to take months — interviews, surveys, analysis, a slide deck — now happens in hours. It runs as a live, always-on strategic conversation: you pose one bold question, your community responds immediately, and AI surfaces patterns in real time. By the time your board meets tomorrow, you’re not relying on fragments. You’re looking at a living, collective picture of what matters now — not last quarter.

And it’s not "listening" for its own sake. It’s decision-grade output.

Here's what you can expect:

  • Top three mission priorities with quantified backing from your full community.
  • Trade-offs surfaced — the tensions your board must address head-on.
  • Clear next actions: what to do in the next 90 days vs. the next three years.
  • Signals of risk and opportunity — blind spots, minority views, and emerging trends.
  • Language that lands: distilled phrases and framing you can use immediately with donors, press, and staff.

That’s the difference between chasing your mission and driving it: hours, not months; always-on, not once-a-year; results you can act on while the moment is still hot.

Strategy at the Speed of Mission

The real opportunity is not simply to gather more input, but to align your community fast enough that it makes a difference. Hours, not months. A living picture of what matters now, not what mattered last quarter.

Because when leaders move with speed and alignment, momentum follows. Decisions carry weight, communication lands cleanly, and the mission advances with the full force of its people behind it.

That’s the essence of leadership in a fast-moving world: not chasing urgency for its own sake, but channeling it into clarity, coherence, and action.

Innovation and collaboration are at the heart of Matthew’s work at Development Guild. Matthew currently serves as our CEO, and previously led our product team through the conception, development and launch of our AI platform.

Matthew joined Development Guild as a strategic executive from the tech world and as a professor from higher education. His professional work includes collaborations with clients such as Sesame Workshop, Morgan Stanley, and the Olympics. He taught for 14 years, first as a professor at New York University and later as a lecturer at Columbia University. As a speaker, Matthew has presented at NASA, won pitch competitions, and continues to speak at universities.

In his free time Matthew enjoys learning Spanish and spending time with his family in New Jersey.

 

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