The Capacity We’re Quietly Losing
I continue to sit with the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s State of Nonprofits 2026 report that was released a few months ago. It’s not the headline numbers that caught me, though those are concerning enough: almost 40% of nonprofits ran a budget deficit last year, up from 22% in 2022. Nearly 60% say it’s hard to secure foundation funding than previous years. Many have reduced staff or are cutting overhead simply to survivor.
What I’ve been thinking about is what those numbers don’t measure. Organizations are facing increasing uncertainty while simultaneously losing the very practices that help them navigate uncertainty.
When budgets tighten, the things most likely to disappear are rarely the programs themselves. They’re the after action review that gets canceled because everyone is too busy, the cross-team meeting that becomes another status update, the evaluation project that feels easier to postpone, the community conversation that never quite gets scheduled, and the afternoon people used to spend reflecting before moving on to the next grant cycle.
Each decision makes sense on its own. But together, they quietly erode something organizations need now more than ever: the ability to learn while they’re doing the work.
For a long time, this looked like an evaluation challenge - a question of better data, better dashboards, better reports. Increasingly, it looks like a learning challenge instead. The organizations that navigate uncertainty most effectively aren’t necessarily the ones with the most sophisticated strategic plans. They’re the ones that have built simple, consistent ways of noticing what’s changing, making sense of it together, and adjusting as they go.
A few practices show up again and again among the organizations that manage this well.
They create intentional opportunities to notice.
That might sound obvious, but noticing doesn’t happen automatically in busy organizations. Most people are moving from one meeting to the next, solving immediate problems, and responding to today’s urgency.
Adaptive organizations build a small, recurring container for this instead of hoping it happens on its own. Often nothing more than the last 10 minutes of a meeting that already exists. They use that time to ask questions like:
What surprised us this month?
What are we hearing repeatedly from community members or partners?
What’s becoming harder? What’s becoming easier?
What feels different than it did three months ago?
Those questions aren’t designed to produce immediate answers. They’re designed to surface signals that might otherwise go unnoticed and to make noticing something the team does on a schedule, not something that only happens when someone happens to bring it up.
They make meaning together.
Information is rarely the problem. Most organizations already have more data than they know what to do with.
The challenge is interpretation.
A program manager notices declining participation.
A community partners hears a new concern.
Someone reviewing survey responses spots an unexpected pattern.
None of those observations means very much on its own.
Insight emerges when people bring those pieces together and ask, “What might this be telling us?” That’s a conversation, not a report. It works best as a standing 30 minutes where two or three people compare what they’re each noticing, out loud, before anyone writes a summary. The summary can come after. The sensemaking has to happen in the room.
They treat their strategies as hypotheses rather than conclusions.
Instead of asking only, “did we execute the plan?,” they continue asking questions about the plan itself:
What assumptions are we making?
What would tell us those assumptions are no longer true
What are we learning that should change how we move forward?
That doesn’t mean changing direction every month. It means creating permission to revisit the plan when the world changes around you, instead of assuming the original version must always be right.
They capture learning before it disappears.
Learning is fragile. If no one takes the time to document what was surprising, what changed, what people would do differently next time, those insights tend to disappear into the pace of daily work.
The organizations that do this well don’t necessarily have elaborate knowledge management systems. Often they rely on lightweight practices: short after action reviews, shared learning notes, reflection prompts at the end of meetings, or a simply habit of recording key decisions and what informed them. The specific tool matters less than the consistency of the practice.
They use a simple rule for telling a blip from a trend.
Every organization experiences surprises. The question isn’t whether someone unexpected happened. It’s whether it’s worth acting on yet, or whether acting on it now would be a mistake.
A useful rule: one data point is an anecdote. Two related ones, from different sources, in the same direction, are worth a conversation. Three are worth a decision. It’s not scientific, but it’s concrete enough to keep a team from either overreacting to a single complaint or waiting for certainty to arrive. The habit that matters is tracking a signal across a few cycles before deciding what it means, not reacting to it and not shelving it either.
They close the loop with a decision, not just a discussion.
Noticing something and making sense of it together can feel like progress…and it is. But without a next step, insight tends to evaporate into “that was a good conversation,” and nothing actually changes.
Adaptive organizations build a small habit around this: every sensemaking conversation ends with someone naming one thing that will be different because of it, who owns making that change, and by when. It doesn’t have to be dramatic. It might we “we’re rewording the intake form,” “Maria’s going to check in with three more partners before we decide,” or “we’re flagging this for the board.” The point isn’t the size of the change. It’s that the conversation produces an owner and a date, not just a shared understanding. This closes the loop instead of circling back to the same observation next quarter.
None of these practices is particularly expensive. None requires a new strategic plan or a sophisticated evaluation system. Most are simply habits of paying attention together. Individually, they may seem small. Collectively, they create something much larger: an organization that’s better able to learn while the future is still unclear.
As uncertainty continues to grow, maybe the better question isn’t, “can we afford to invest in learning?” It’s “what practices help us keep learning, even when we have the least amount of time to do it?”
Because those practices may be easier to protect than they are to rebuild once they’re gone.
