Why I built this
The pressure that made this practice necessary wasn’t singular but compounded — in many rooms, from different seats, over time.
There was no single moment.
People expect an origin story to have a scene in it — one room, one leader, one realization that changed everything. Mine doesn’t work that way. What I have instead is a long accumulation: years of rooms, conversations, and decisions of consequence that pressed on the same place until I couldn’t ignore where they were pointing.
I know the rooms well. I have sat in the one where a budget gets balanced by putting duct tape over the real issue, because the real issue is too big to face in the time available. I have made the choice myself — set aside the long-term thinking I knew mattered to deal with the more urgent thing in front of me, and told myself I’d come back to it. I have watched a chief executive struggle to be forthright with their board, not because they lacked the answer, but because they feared that naming the problem out loud would be read as incompetence. I have watched a board chair choose consensus over leadership, because consensus is safer and leadership is exposed.
None of those people were failing. That is the part the sector misses. In almost every one of those rooms, the strategy was already present, the competence was already in the building, the mission was intact. What was missing was something smaller and harder to name: room to think, and someone alongside for the part that takes nerve.
I have come to believe that most organizations in a hard season are not broken. They are buried — the strategy, the people, the purpose all still there, under everything that has piled on top. And the work that matters most is not adding more. It is clearing enough room to see what’s already there, and making the brave choice possible to stand in, rather than leaving someone to find it on their own.
What I know, and what I refuse to accept
I have never been comfortable with “no,” or with “it’s not possible,” as the answer to a problem. I don’t mean that as bravado. I mean that I have rarely encountered a situation that didn’t have a way through it — and where there genuinely wasn’t one, the courage was in naming that early, clearly, before it cost more than it had to.
The sector struggles with exactly this. We struggle to have hard conversations. We struggle to hold space for conflict. We struggle to take risks with money that isn’t ours but has been entrusted to us, in an environment that treats any admission of difficulty as a failure rather than a truth to be met. So the honest conversations don’t happen, or they happen too late, in the worst conditions — when the stakes are highest, when the decision is partly about the person being asked to make it, and when that person has been forced to navigate it alone.
Decisions here feel more consequential than the word “sector” admits — and “the sector” is itself a flattening term, holding a volunteer-run food bank and a national research university, a hospice and a symphony, a crisis line and a teaching hospital, as if they shared a single set of stakes. They don’t.
But they share this. Revenue falls for reasons that often have nothing to do with the quality of the work — a contract not renewed, a grant cycle ending — and cuts have to come from somewhere. A board will almost always look first to overhead, to protect direct service. The instinct is humane; the word is a misnomer. “Overhead” is the organization’s own capacity — the people and the systems that hold everything else up. So the cut spares the program on paper and lands on staff in practice, feeding the burnout that is now endemic to the work, while the longer-term bill comes due in the quality and sustainability of the very work the organization exists to do. And the decision is usually made in a vacuum, on a twelve-month horizon, with no room to weigh the complexity or the longer arc — because a sector bound to political cycles and zero-based budgeting rarely gets to think past the year it is in. From inside that, doing the right thing can feel impossible. So when a leader hesitates to say the hard thing out loud, it is rarely timidity. It is the weight of knowing exactly who pays if the decision is wrong.
I have spent close to thirty years in this work, and I have sat in all three of the chairs that usually face one another across the table. I have been the chief executive carrying a decision the table had no room to hold. I have been the board chair trying to be the room that could. I have been the funder on the other side, watching organizations talk around the real issue because the table never felt safe enough to name it. What they taught me is this: to bring the hardest decision into the open, you need what is almost never there — the time, the space, and a board able to hold two conflicting truths at once and carry the outsized risk that comes with them. When those conditions are missing, the decision isn’t shared. It stays with one person, by default — in isolation, without the voices it most needed.
The pressure to build it
This practice did not begin as a plan. It began as a pressure that kept growing — the sense that I had accumulated something, across all those rooms, that was no longer mine to keep to myself. I could keep lending it to one organization at a time. Or I could put it where it was needed, across many, and give leaders what the sector almost never offers: not just company in the hardest part of the work, but a thinking partner with the wisdom to hold those same truths and that same risk alongside them — because I have carried them, in all three seats.
So that is what this is. A practice built so that going it alone is no longer the default — for everyone trying to do right by the same mission from different seats.
It is deliberately a particular kind of practice. Light touch, heavy impact. Not fifteen-page reports that sit in a drawer. Not strategic plans that die on a shelf. The work is sitting in the hard spaces, asking the questions that have been avoided, and finding the functional way through — and then leaving, so that what gets built belongs to you and not to me. I have defined it as much by what it refuses as by what it offers, because the refusing is the point.
I will tell you plainly that building it is its own hard-season decision. I move between excited and terrified most days. After a career spent inside organizations, doing this on my own is the most exposed I have been. Which is, I suppose, the whole argument. I am asking leaders to face the decisions that take nerve, and I am making one myself, in the same weather, for the same reasons.
These notes are where I’ll think out loud about all of it. Not the names, not the confidences — those stay where they belong. The patterns. What I’m seeing across the rooms, what the seasons ask of the people living them, and what I’ve learned about making the brave choice survivable.
Because the decisions that matter most are rarely the ones a leader can’t see. They are the ones no one should have to meet by themselves.
Apipunsit is a Vancouver advisory practice for the seasons t
hat shape what’s next. apipunsit.com