“You are fettered," said Scrooge, trembling. "Tell me why?" "I wear the chain I forged in life," replied the Ghost. "I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.”
― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
This is another in my long list of “I hear this all the time”.
“Why are you doing x/y/z? What does it do? What are the dependencies?”
“I was told to do this when I joined.”
“How long have you worked here?”
“12 years.”
Like the ghost, this is a chain that’s been carried around for years and no one quite remembers where it started. Processes have to change. They change because fundraising changes. Systems change. Teams change. Expectations change.
And for that to happen, someone has to be prepared to ask: “Why exactly are we doing this?”
One of the things I value most is curiosity. Not because every process is wrong – plenty are good – but because every process deserves to be understood. If I’m asked to do something, I want to know why I’m doing it.
If I’m asked to jump, I don’t ask how high – I ask why I’m jumping.
So often I’m asked to sort something out that isn’t working. Often it’s presented as: “xyz CRM isn’t working.” But when you start pulling at the thread, what you actually find is a process that made perfect sense five years ago and has quietly become the constraint.
What’s harder is when people feel unable to change it. Not because they don’t want improvement, but because changing a process feels risky when nobody remembers what might break.
And I’m going to go out on a limb here and probably not make friends…
Long-winded processes often seem to appear where systems overlap – and finance and fundraising is one of the places I see this most.
For the record, and if you’ve not heard me say it before: A fundraising CRM is not a finance system.
That doesn’t mean finance isn’t important. It means fundraising processes shouldn’t become so constrained by finance processes that progress and income generation become harder than they need to be. If something feels difficult, repetitive, long-winded or impossible to explain – it’s worth asking whether the process still serves the organisation, or whether the organisation is serving the process.
I’ve got some space over the coming months to help teams untangle processes, challenge inherited ways of working and make systems support the work rather than dictate it.
And if you know a team carrying around a few ghosts of processes past – I’d really appreciate an introduction.
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