Your organization's capability is not the same as its capacity
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Hey Reader, A few weeks ago, the PTA of my daughter’s school held special elections to fill the role of Communications Chair. No one had run in the elections back in the spring, and the position had been vacant the previous school year as well because no one had run the year before. I love my daughter’s school. It’s a NYC public school in Manhattan, but it’s unzoned, so students come from Manhattan, the Bronx, and Queens to attend. They have ample choice time, a Maker Space, thoughtful and experienced teachers, and a dedication to equity and social justice. But, like a lot of small organizations without ample funding and resources, the administration and PTA are WAY over capacity at all times. And the community suffers for it. Fundraising is difficult. Communication can be fragmented and opaque. Events, information, and calls for volunteering often come in without all of the details, and last-minute. So, this fall, when the PTA called for folks to nominate themselves for Communications Chair and the Zoom meeting remained silent, when another parent finally typed “CAITLIN” in the chat, it didn’t surprise me. Of course I’d be a great Communications Chair. Of course I could help the PTA and the school. But capability is not the same as capacity, and I do not have the capacity right now. Capability is being skilled at doing something and able to do it well. The organizations I work with have admirable capabilities. They’re software designers, mapmakers, educators, grantmakers, healthcare professionals, data scientists, facilitators, and more. They make people’s lives better through education, innovation, technology, human rights, public health, economic development, public transportation, and environmental protection. My clients are great at what they do. Capacity can be a synonym of capability. She has the capacity, or ability, to do that. But there is a nuance: capacity is the maximum that can be contained or accommodated. It has a limit. Your capability can be endless. Your capacity is not. Being over capacity looks like days or weeks with back-to-back meetings, and even some that are double-booked. It’s having a full-time load of “real” work and then another full-time load of shadow work that’s not the “real” work that you're always trying to get back to (listen: if you spend your work time, energy, and other resources on something, it’s real work, so bring shadow work out of the shadows!). It’s piling new initiatives on top of crumbling or nonexistent infrastructure. It’s shiny object syndrome. It’s chasing solution after solution that doesn’t actually address existing problems. It’s operating at breakneck speed, even when a teammate is on vacation or on leave and you’re down a person (or more). It’s distributing a full-time workload to the rest of the team when someone moves on from the organization, and never rectifying that. It's working more than eight hours a day or forty hours a week or working on vacation. It's letting work take over non-work because the work just has to get done because there is so much of it and you're already behind why are you even reading this. I get it. In today’s world, it’s hard to even wrap your head around what working at, or even under capacity, looks like. And when everyone is over capacity, it starts to feel like the norm. Almost every organization I work with is operating well past their capacity when we start new change and transformation projects together. And the very nature of organizational change work is that it is so often more, new, different, hard, surprising, and disruptive. My work can be part of the problem. And yet, the question of capacity is at the core of how I help teams design transformations. Timelines, decisions, governance, meetings, communication, stakeholder engagement, roadmaps, strategies, and plans all live in the ecosystem of a capacity container. Capacity has limits. And that’s okay. While I encourage teams to explore, to question, to test, to push, and to try, I do not encourage them to make operating beyond their capacity the norm. Because work can be expansive without being extractive. Teams can achieve without exhaustion. People can go beyond what they thought was possible without falling off a cliff. What does capacity look like for you and your organization? Is operating beyond it the norm? And I’ll take it one step further: what would it look like to operate under capacity for a day, or a week, or a quarter? In that protected space and time, what could appear, grow, spark, or heal? I really wanted to be on the PTA this year. But rather than reacting in the moment and agreeing because I have the capability, I practiced values-based decision making. My daughter just turned five, and rather than chatting with her while I cooked dinner and eating with my family, I was listening in to the PTA meeting on Zoom. If I joined the Executive Board, that would be the first night of many that I would be on my laptop instead of spending time with her. When she’s older, and eats dinner at friends’ houses and doesn’t want to be my “fridge door assistant” and can read herself books and play outside alone, the PTA might make more sense. It doesn’t right now. It’s beyond my capacity. What’s on your plate right now that’s beyond yours? And what can you do about it? Talk soon, Caitlin Caitlin Harper From Commcoterie's Coterie: Awesome Folks in My Network and How They Make an Impactcoterie: co`te*rie" (k?`te-r?"), n. A set or circle of persons who meet familiarly, as for social, literary, or other purposes; a clique
Modern change management for mission-driven companies and nonprofits
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