I was in a call with a colleague yesterday and we were discussing Founder’s Syndrome. Over the years, it’s one of the more persistent patterns I have seen in non-profits and social enterprises. There are a lot of similar aspects to this pattern, and it generally unfolds like this:
A person or small group of people start something. Usually, they come from the front line and have experience working directly with people, delivering services, restoring landscapes, organizing campaigns, etc. With a little bit of success, these folks start thinking about growing their operations and stabilizing them over time. This means bringing in staff, board members, and funders who believe in them and want to support the vision. Some staff may be the same kind of front-line folks that the founder was. Still, many will be experts in another aspect of growing and operating an organization: managers, board members, marketers, finance people and so on. While these folks are all crucial to running an organization well, they don’t always share the founder’s experience with grassroots or front-line work.
Often, as the organization grows, the founder realizes that their role can no longer be directly involved in the front-line operations of the organization. They retreat to a more visionary role, and, as the holder of the core story and vision of the organization, they become an ambassador for the work, obtaining funding and support and good board members who can oversee the organization. This sounds good, but it can often generate many issues, especially as the founder begins to sense the end of their involvement with their organization.
At this stage a number of inevitable patterns begin to emerge. They don’t always work like this, but these are common enough that I see them over and over in organizations that have been around for a couple of decades, sometimes less.
The founder begins to feel irrelevant and starts getting nosy. If your whole life has been spent creating programs for vulnerable youth, you might not find yourself relishing leading an organization set up to do this. Founders often have a hard time removing themselves from the day-to-day operations because their heart lies with the activism and the work of change-making, not organizational sustaining. Sometimes founders will involve themselves too much in the front-line work, micro-managing and being unaware of their power and influence. This can lead to trust issues, where newer hires don’t feel like they can learn and grow in their jobs. The antidote to this is to establish good governance structures and good roles and for the founder to transition into a new role through learning and cultivating leadership.
Hardly anyone thinks of succession until it’s too late. This controlling dynamic affects the ability of a founder to plan well for succession. Very few founders give much thought to their own disappearance from their life’s work, especially when building and growing an organization which relies so heavily on them. If an organization successfully survives over the long term, there will always come a time when the founder will step back. I have talked with founders who occupy all points of the spectrum that range from “I can’t leave because the organization will collapse without me” to “if the organization dies when I’m gone, I’m okay with that.” Once you’ve created a structure and moved into a leadership role, it is time to think ahead about how you will get out of it. Even if that is 20 years ahead, it shapes your approach to mentorship and shared leadership. Building shared leadership early will help folks move into roles and create mutual support relationships that allow people in the organization to grow into these roles, increasing organizational resiliency over time.
Resisting change. Organizations that grow their stability also become less able to change. Board members appointed to support the founder’s vision often govern to a rigid version of what that looks like, and Boards like this are always more risk-averse than a swashbuckling social entrepreneur. Funders can enforce a kind of rigidity of approach too as funding grants can bend an organization’s operations to the funder’s theory of change rather than create the ongoing ability of social enterprises to grow and adapt. Stability is a polarity, and from the beginning, organizations need to develop resiliency rather than robustness. They must survive by being changed rather than stand as a bulwark against change. This is hard when you deliver services because clients require a continuity of care, and there are no easy answers to these questions. Managing this polarity is crucial for overcoming a founder’s syndrome, where the governance and funding are tied to an original vision and are not allowed to grow beyond the founder.
Splits between board and staff. In the early days of an organization, everyone is moving in the same direction, doing the same things and pitching in wherever they need to. However, as organizations become larger and more stable, roles become highly differentiated. Board members are often chosen more because of their connections to funding and power than to the front-line work. Staff are learning and adapting at the coal face of the work. The two groups often develop a distance between them, making it hard for them to be mutually supportive. When organizations ask me to help them with strategic planning, I always ask them to do it jointly with the board and staff and even clients and other stakeholders. Organizations that set their mandates and future plans through closed board sessions tend to suffer from a deep lack of situational awareness about the organization’s context. This can exacerbate founder’s syndrome even after the founder has left, as they will often invoke the founder’s intentions in their role as stewards and guardians of that vision. Ignoring the needs, concerns, creativity and awareness of staff and partners is a good way to dig a hole of irrelevancy for an organization.
This is just a bit of the ground I covered with my colleague yesterday. What patterns and responses do you notice?
Ta-Nehisi Coates writing to his son, in the book, Between the World and Me:
I have raised you to respect every human being as singular, and you must extend that same respect into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. “Slavery” is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved. She can hope for more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren.
h/t to the Centre for Action and Contemplation, from today’s Daily Meditation.
One of the things I love about sport is the real life that happens out there. Nothing is predictable, nothing is a given. Competitors try themselves against each other, supporters follow and cheer them on and time is marked by transcdent moments on and off the field of play. The game is the setting for stories that are singular in occurrence or narrative arcs that span generations.
While most of the world of sport has its attention turned to the Olympic games, my own attention yesterday was fully devoted to a critical match for the men’s team of the soccer club I co-own, TSS Rovers FC. TSS Rovers are a club with a men’s and a women’s team owned by three majority shareholders and 440 community owners. I’m one of the Trustees for the Spirit of the Rovers Supporters Trust that represents our ownership group on the club board. Yesterday was the Championship Final of the League 1 BC playoffs and having already won the league, our men were poised to take to the field against our rival from North Vancouver, Altitude FC. Because we play at Swangard Stadium in Burnaby, and Altitude plays across Burrard Inlet in North Vancouver, our rivalry is called the Ironworkers Derby, named for the Ironworkers Memorial Second Narrows Bridge, which connects the two cities.
Over the three years our league has existed, this has been a tightly contested derby, and we have had the upper hand in general. Altitude’s men’s team has had two tough seasons, but this year, they finished second in the league and beat the Vancouver Whitecaps Academy to make it to the final. They chased us all the way and if it hadn’t been for a tough 1-0 victory against them, they might have won the League title.
For our part, we have had a historic season. We won our first league title a few weeks ago with a game to spare. Three of us travelled to Kamloops to witness the historic occasion. After two years of more heartbreak and diabolical situations than I could ever describe, and two second-place finishes, we finally won, which meant we qualified for the third year in a row for the Canadian Championship, Canada’s FA Cup competition. Representing League 1 BC, we have the distinction of being the only semi-professional side to knock a professional club out of that tournament when we beat Vaklour FC of Winnipeg 3-1 on April 18 last year.
Our path to the two-round playoff final for League 1 was straightforward enough. We beat Harbourside FC last weekend 4-1 and prepared to face our rival at Swangard Stadium, our home and also the neutral venue chosen by the League for the finals day.
It was not a beautiful game of football.
We went ahead seven seconds into the game with a set piece that came off perfectly from the kickoff and got another goal in the first half from our towering centre-back, Nik White. In the second half, Altitude came back with relentless attacking energy and got a goal back on the hour mark but went down to 10 meant at the 76th minute. It didn’t seem to matter, as they threw everything at us and finally got some reward from their havoc by tying it up on an 84th-minute penalty. Three minutes later, we were awarded a penalty taken by a long time club veteran, Erik Edwardson. In a crazy game in which there was no certainty, Erik’s penalty was the closest thing to a safe bet.
Needing to defend our 3-2 lead, we bunkered down a bit, and Altitude got at us, resulting in a corner off of which ANOTHER penalty was awarded in the 90th minute. In a moment of utter heartbreak from our rivals, the penalty taker skied the kick, and we were able to kill off the six minutes of added time to win our second playoff championship and our first double trophy season.
A million storylines are woven into this match. We started the season with a team stocked with veterans and former professional players who joined us for another chance to play in the Canadian Championship. We took Pacific FC deep into injury time with a 1-0 lead before the professionals scored on the game’s last attempt and then beat us on penalties. Many of our veterans got injured or retired during the season, and players who have been with us for many of the six seasons we have been in existence stepped away from the game. Professional clubs picked up a few, including two of our more prolific strikers, Devon O’Hea and Gurman Sangha. We needed to play kids, literally, with players like 17-year-old midfielder Tristan Otoumagie staking a regular role for themselves on the side. Our coach, Brendan Teeling, had to manage a team going through a generational transition over twelve games in our short and intense season. We held the top spot in the table for most of the season, being pipped only by Altitude and the Whitecaps Academy during a week in which we had games in hand on them. We battled through curses, heartbreak, and a seemingly systemic inability to finish games dating back a couple of seasons. We got a lot of monkeys off our backs last night and saw our team pick themselves up from disappointment and refuse to give in.
And yesterday, we won our second trophy of 2024 and celebrated with many players who have been with us for many years and many who probably played their last games for us yesterday. At the celebration party last night, it was bittersweet thanking and saying goodbye to these players, and exciting to see the young ones clutching their winners’ medals and watching wide-eyed as the veterans of the team heard their songs for the last time and heard some of the stories of what it means to play for this club, Canada’s only supporter owned team, with one of Canada’s most vocal and creative lower-league supporters groups.
When you own a team and are involved in creating the culture and the conditions for people to shine and thrive, whether on or off the pitch, these moments of success are important markers of meaning. They catch and encapsulate the heart of what it means to co-create something, and they mark collective progress in the long development journey. As Colin Elmes, one of our founders, said, “We’re in the relationship business – the soccer just comes along for the ride.“
What we are doing is community.
Trophies aren’t everything, and there are dozens of stories from this season that make me proud to be involved in this club, whether it’s watching our players turn professional or seeing some of our former players like Julia Grosso, Jordyn Huitema and Joel Waterman playing for Canada’s National teams. It could just be getting to witness the inimitable Maddy Mah, a player whose college career was derailed with a concussion before she got to play and who spent three years recovering before finding her mojo again with us last year, board a plane to Toronto to finally start at university and play for the U of T Blues. And it’s about honouring players like Erik Edwardson and Kyle Jones, Ivan Mejia and Gabe Escobar and Justyn Sandhu and Danylo Smychenko, who have been with our team for three years or more, finally savouring the fruits of their work.
These relationships and moments will last a lifetime for all of us, whether we are players, supporters, owners or staff and they give us all a tangible memory of what it means to create community and why it’s important to do so.
Back in 2022 Peter Levine – whose thought blog posts are amongst my favourite reads on a regular basis – wrote the following:
The left should represent the lower-income half of the population; the right should represent the top half. When that happens, the left will generally advocate government spending and regulation. Such policies may or may not be wise, but they can be changed if they fail and prove unpopular. Meanwhile, the right will advocate less government, which (again) may or may not be desirable but will not destroy the constitutional order. After all, limited government is a self-limiting political objective.
When the class-distribution turns upside down, the left will no longer advocate impressive social reforms, because its base will be privileged. And the right will no longer favor limited government, because tax cuts don’t help the poor much. The right will instead embrace government activism in the interests of traditional national, racial or religious hierarchies. The left will frustrate change, while the right–now eager to use the government for its objectives–will become genuinely dangerous
I’m not as sophisticated a political observer as Peter is, but in general i’ve noticed a trend in the political spectrum away from left and right and towards policy focussed versus populism. Although at the moment I think the right generally align to populous politics, I see it on the left as well and to me is concerning. The pandemic showed us that populist governments struggle when confronted with a real crisis. Humanity faces several existential crisis currently, and in the near future, rooted in war, climate change, economic, inequality, mass migrations, and technological issues such as AI and overreliance on algorithms and social media to shape our thinking.
Peter has reflected on these observations on this inversion in a recent blog post in which he looks at recent election results in Europe and thinks about the current election campaigns in the United States. Of course it’s not simple and there are many dynamics that affect American politics that don’t affect European politics or even politics in Canada. But his observations remind me that the political spectrum is changing and for anybody working to get things done at any level in government attending to the shifts provides very useful situation awareness.
I finally managed to update all the broken links and misplaced resources on my Open Space Technology resources and planning pages.
If you now visit the Open Space Planning page and the Open Space Resources page, all the links should be working.
Anything you can’t find there is likely to be found at the Open Space World home including a library of books and papers from Harrison Owen.
Thanks for everyone who kept poking at me to get this done.