Nonprofits can learn to problem-solve like artists
Before I worked in nonprofits, my first career was making artwork and photographs and teaching others how to make them. One of the most important things I learned during that time was not how to use a camera or work in the darkroom, but rather how to look and problem-solve creatively. Artists do not start with a solution; they start with a problem they do not yet fully understand, and they sit with it long enough to interrogate the constraints before committing to a response. That discipline, it turns out, is one of the most useful things I have ever brought into consulting work.
A piece in the Stanford Social Innovation Review published earlier this year makes the case for something similar at an organizational level, arguing that nonprofits navigating real pressure, which is most of them right now, have something to gain by borrowing from the creative paradigm: flexible, outcome-oriented problem-solving that relies on discernment as much as metrics, and that treats iteration as a feature rather than a failure. The authors are writing from a management theory framework, but the underlying instinct is one I recognize immediately, as it is the same instinct I bring to every engagement I take on.
I think about this most when I run my workshop, Mindfully Hiring a Consultant. The exercise I come back to again and again is one I call "symptoms versus root causes," and the way it works is simple: an organization comes in saying, "we need a fundraising consultant," and when we work through the 5 Whys together, we often find a different problem underneath. No one is accountable for donor relationships. The database has not been maintained in years. The board has never been introduced to individual donors. A grant writer cannot fix any of those things, and hiring one would only address the symptoms while the root cause continues to compound. The question was never about writing.
Artists interrogate the problem and its constraints before responding to it. They ask whether the problem they are looking at is the problem worth solving, or whether it is a symptom of something older and quieter that has been building for a while, and they hold that uncertainty long enough to find out. The organizations I have watched adapt well in this funding environment are doing something very similar. They are not rushing to hire the nearest solution or restructure around the first credible answer they find. They are getting curious about what is underneath, and they are willing to sit with that question long enough for it to become useful.
If your organization is navigating a transition right now, whether that is a funding shift, a leadership change, or a model that needs to evolve, treating the next hard problem as an artist would is worth trying. Describe what you are seeing, ask why it is happening, and resist the impulse to name the solution before you have named the question. The answer you need is usually one or two "whys" deeper than the one you started with.
