The rise of "good enough" governance

Perfectionism has long been the silent saboteur of implementation. Organizations pour resources into elegantly designed strategies, then stall at execution because the conditions for flawless rollout never arrive.

This year, we've seen growing appetite for what we might call minimum viable governance—structures intentionally designed to be lightweight, iterative, and responsive. Leaders are asking not "what's the ideal state?" but "what's the smallest functional change we can make, learn from, and build on?"

This isn't lowered standards. It's a recognition that complexity demands humility. That in adaptive systems, the feedback loop matters more than the initial design. That done is often better than perfect, especially when "perfect" means "never."

Backbone fatigue and the limits of collective impact

The collective impact model promised coordination without consolidation—a way for organizations to align efforts while maintaining autonomy. A decade in, we're seeing the strain.

Backbone organizations, tasked with facilitating collaboration across sectors, are burning out. The emotional and administrative labor of holding space for competing priorities, managing up to funders while managing across to partners, has proven unsustainable at the resourcing levels most backbones operate within.

In 2025, several high-profile collaborative tables quietly dissolved or restructured. Others are renegotiating their role entirely—moving from coordination to capacity-building, from consensus-seeking to conflict-holding. The question of who tends the system remains unresolved, but at least it's being asked more honestly.

What we're carrying into next year

If there's a throughline in the work we've done this year, it's this: organizations are less interested in being told what to do and more interested in building the internal capacity to decide for themselves.

That means our role is shifting too. Less deliverable, more scaffolding. Less expert, more facilitator. Less answer, more question held with care.

The sector doesn't need more frameworks. It needs more courage—to name what isn't working, to redistribute power, to build systems that can learn. Strategy, at its best, is simply the discipline of making those choices visible and accountable.

We're honoured to be in that work with you.