I love to use a governance teaching case by Peter Dobkin Hall, called Conflicting Managerial Cultures in a Museum.

In the case, a long-slumbering board hires an entrepreneurial executive director to revitalize their museum. He brings in a small cohort of new board members who are local business leaders. Fundraising increases, and the business board members are highly involved, then they become too involved. They make executive decisions behind the director’s back, move the museum’s banking to the board chair’s bank, buy office equipment from another board member’s company, and tie the museum’s signature event to their businesses.

You can imagine the end of this story. Both the executive director and the board chair submit resignations in frustration and the organization is on the brink of collapse.

When I use this case I ask students, or workshop participants, to first determine what actually happened. Step by step, I want them to understand how the decisions unfolded and the relationships unraveled?

Then I ask them to apportion blame among the various parties – there is plenty to go around. Finally I ask them what could be done now. This usually leads to a lively discussion.

Cases are a powerful learning aid, a realization which brought me the following insight: could a nonprofit experiencing significant internal conflict or lack of clarity benefit from writing its own case?

The idea would be to gather organizational leaders from board and staff and give them a structured writing exercise where they describe the road that has gotten them to their current situation. What key decisions, external circumstances, and relationships were most significant? Maybe do it in small group format so that they can later compare and contrast different versions of the story.

This would lead to an airing of different viewpoints and ultimately, with luck and good facilitation, to a shared understanding of the present situation. With agreement on the “what happened” question, I would ask them to address the causes of their current situation, and then what can be done about it now?

This process follows the model of my big picture view of strategy. It asks: where are we, how did we get here, and what do we do about it?

When foundation officers say “we don’t fund capacity building,” I am always tempted to reply, “Is that because you don’t want your programmatic investment to pay off?”

I usually bite my tongue in those situations but I am always left wondering, would your foundation buy a house and then not replace a faulty furnace or broken hot water tank? Would they buy a new car and then never change the oil or spark plugs?

The point is that when you invest in something important you take care of it, you make sure it operates smoothly and occasionally you upgrade it. You don’t just buy it and let it fall apart.

Yet the “no capacity-building” movement among funders, and its close cousin the “no indirect cost” school of thought , somehow assume that the organization’s infrastructure can run on air while the funder’s money goes into the important stuff, the program.

How many times has a funder invested heavily in a new idea only to see it fail to produce the desired outcome? The funder usually decides the innovative idea just wasn’t the right solution and moves on.

However, I know from experience that in many of these situations, the programmatic idea never had a real chance to succeed because a weak board, poor financial management practices, lack of a clear organizational identity and purpose, or similar infrastructure weaknesses doomed the program, and the organization itself, to failure.

If the funder had invested in strengthening the organizational infrastructure, as un-sexy as that might be, the innovative program idea would’ve had a better chance for success.