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by Jeanne Bell and Dan Tucker, Co-Founders
Image created by JustOrg Design
Blog No. 14 - February 2026
It’s difficult to write “Happy New Year” when we are experiencing such indignity and violence at the hands of the government in our communities right now. You are taking a breath and a moment to read this offering–thank you. We are honored to work alongside you as you protect people, advance movements, and defend democracy.
In this first blog of 2026, we want to share with you excerpts from our brand new article published this week in Nonprofit Quarterly. The article makes the case for organization design as a little known but absolutely critical leadership competency. It walks readers through what organization design is, and how we can apply it in justice-committed nonprofits.
Here are three excerpts from the new article for you:
Leadership Is Harder Than Ever
“The past five years have been the most challenging time to lead that I’ve seen in my lifetime,” Bridgespan cofounder Jeff Bradach wrote in July 2025. And even still, many justice-centered leaders are practicing shared or co-leadership models; many are sustaining virtual or hybrid workforces to promote employee wellbeing; and some are undertaking the arduous work of integrating unions. We posit that the gap between our aspirations and our operations in justice-centered nonprofits is largely due not to a lack of effort, but to the lack of a coherent theory and practice of organization design.”
We Must Define Strategy In Our Organizations
“As a discipline, organization design begins with clear organizational strategy. This is logically impossible to do if staff do not share an understanding of what strategy is and what their organization’s active strategies are. A great source of conflict in justice-centered organizations is the false assumption that shared commitment to a mission and vision will result in shared commitment to how an organization pursues that mission and vision.”
We Can Work Across Silos
“Sending important decisions up and down the pyramid is slow and disempowering to the people doing the work and generating ideas. Moreover, the typical leadership team made up of senior functional leaders from each department is not the optimal mix of knowledge and proximity for every strategic decision. Instead of constantly saying, “That’s an executive leadership team decision,” we should send senior leaders out into the organizational system—especially onto cross-functional tables—where they can bring their expertise, influence and be influenced, and represent executive perspectives.”
Our intent is for this piece to serve as an introduction and a foundation–something you can share with staff, board, and the consultants with whom you partner. We hope it contributes to the discipline of organization design being recognized as essential to what nonprofit leaders do.
By the way, we have completely revamped our website so that it too can serve as a more useful overview of how nonprofits can embrace organization design. We welcome your reactions and questions.
Please stay safe and take good care. We’ll be back with our next Design Notes blog in March.
