Questioning the Methuselah Strategy

Leadership turnover in social sector tech projects.

Photo by Fabian Heimann on Unsplash

We recently reread this article by Sean Boots and it made us think about how it applies to our work. In his article, Shrink projects to fit leadership turnover rates, Boots addresses the dangers of overly-ambitious public-sector projects, where within the timeline of a single project, there may be multiple changes in leadership. As a result, responsibility for the project’s success (or failure) doesn’t reside with a single individual, but instead is shared across multiple leadership tenures. This creates a lack of individual accountability. Although the private sector does experience similar effects (see this article on CDO turnover), it doesn’t deal with turnover at the same level as the public sector. 

The nonprofit sector has similar issues as the public sector with leadership turnover and overly-ambitious projects, which spells trouble for our projects (and probably your projects too, dear reader). These projects require singular vision and leadership to succeed, so high turnover rates could result in risks. In the nonprofit sector, we should begin asking ourselves why we are planning for projects that are big enough to fail - and also try to ask ourselves why we expect them to succeed under these conditions. 

Boots offers us two potential ways the issue of project incompletion/failure could be addressed. First, reducing the number of stakeholders and oversight actors involved in a project to create more incentive to see things to completion (we like to call that “creating benevolent dictators” in our projects). The success or failure of a project reflects more on individuals when there are fewer people involved. Second, scaling massive projects down into smaller projects to fit more realistically within the turnover periods for senior leaders. Fitting project timelines within one or two leadership cycles instead of several can help us avoid the negative impacts of multiple leaders. Bonus: Boots didn’t mention this as a solution specifically, but we are also curious about how the public sector could learn from the private sector to actually retain more of our leaders. Again read: CDO turnover. 

Some things may seem impossible to complete in such a short period, but figuring out how to break a behemoth down into small, achievable, individually-useful parts can help save a project from ruination.

For further reading: there are some strategies in this fun article called “Don’t Build It” if you want to keep thinking about this stuff.