Possibility is my word for this season.
I keep coming back to it in my own life, and I’m starting to recognize how much it matters in my work.
Much of my work involves helping leaders understand what is happening in their organizations. We look at participation, giving, engagement, and the other signals that help them see whether their efforts are making a difference.
But the most meaningful moments often happen when someone asks a question we haven’t considered.
The numbers haven’t changed. Yet suddenly, there is another way to understand them. An assumption becomes something we can examine. A familiar story becomes less certain. A next step appears that we couldn’t see before.
That makes me wonder how often we miss a possibility because we’ve already settled on an explanation.
The stories we bring to the numbers
By the time a leadership team opens a report, there is usually a story in the room.
“People just aren’t as committed anymore.”
“Our donors are tired.”
“That program has never worked.”
“We’ve tried that before.”
Those stories come from somewhere. Leaders have experience. They know their organizations. They’ve spent years noticing patterns, navigating challenges, and making difficult decisions.
That experience matters.
But an explanation can become so familiar that we stop treating it as an explanation. We start treating it as a fact.
Then we ask our data to confirm what we already believe.
If we believe people are disengaging, we notice the declining attendance. We may spend less time exploring whether they are participating differently, whether the decline is concentrated in one group, or whether a change in our process has made participation harder.
The decline is real. What it means still deserves investigation.
A number can be accurate while our explanation remains incomplete.
A better question can open the conversation
Imagine a nonprofit whose volunteer numbers have fallen.
The first explanation is that people no longer want to volunteer. The team begins discussing recruitment campaigns, new messaging, and ways to generate more interest.
But someone asks: “Where, exactly, are we losing people?”
Looking more closely, the team discovers that inquiries are steady. People are still expressing interest. The drop happens between the initial inquiry and the first volunteer assignment.
That changes what the team needs to explore.
How long does it take to respond? Is the next step clear? Are the available opportunities compatible with people’s schedules?
A broad concern about commitment becomes a set of specific questions the organization can investigate and act on.
This is a hypothetical example, but it illustrates something I care deeply about in this work: the questions we ask shape the options we can see.
If the only question is “How do we get more people interested?” we may never examine what happens to the people who already are.
Staying open takes something from us
It’s easy to value curiosity when we’re talking about someone else’s assumptions.
It gets harder when the question touches a strategy we championed, a program we built, or a decision we defended.
We have something invested in our explanation. Sometimes our reputation. Sometimes years of effort. Sometimes the comfort of feeling like we know what to do.
Making room for possibility means allowing the evidence to surprise us.
It means being willing to say:
“I thought I understood this. I may be missing something.”
That can feel uncomfortable, especially for leaders who are expected to have answers. But I trust a leader who can revise an explanation when new information emerges.
Their willingness to learn gives the rest of the team permission to do the same.
Possibility has to stay connected to reality
I don’t want possibility to become a reason to avoid difficult facts.
A program may be underperforming. Resources may be insufficient. An approach we love may need to change.
Staying open means being willing to discover those things, too.
The useful question is: “What is happening here, and what does that make possible?”
Sometimes the answer points toward expansion. Sometimes it points toward a smaller experiment, a different process, or an honest decision to stop.
We won’t know if we only allow ourselves to consider the answers we prefer.
Data can help us examine the distance between what we hoped would happen and what actually happened. There is a lot to learn in that space, if we can stay curious long enough to look.
Leaving room for discovery
I’m learning to notice how quickly I move from an observation to an explanation.
How quickly “this happened” becomes “this is why.”
How quickly that explanation starts determining what I think is available next.
Possibility reminds me to pause there.
To ask another question. To listen to someone closer to the experience. To look for the detail that doesn’t fit the story I’ve been telling.
For mission-driven organizations, that pause matters. Our explanations influence where we invest, whom we serve, and what we ask our teams to do. The better we understand reality, the more thoughtfully we can respond.
We can make a decision with the information we have and still leave room to learn.
That is a leadership practice I want to keep developing.
A question for your leadership team
Where have we become so certain about what’s happening that we’ve stopped exploring what else could be true?
