When the System is Invisible
The senior director of programs at a professional association of about thirty staff had not slept a full night since February, though she had not said so to anyone, including the executive director, who asked her on a Tuesday how she was holding up and got the answer fine. The conference was on track because she was the one keeping it on track, and she was also the only person in the building who could see how the speaker outreach connected to the registration build connected to the sponsor invoices connected to the program agenda, because other people were doing pieces of it but nobody else could see the whole, and the whole was held in a place no one else could reach, which was her head.
This is not a people problem. The staff were good, the leadership was attentive, the events were respected. What was missing was a system that anyone could see. A system held in heads is still a system. It just cannot be examined, adjusted, or handed off.
The work we did with this team was a two-phase build. The first phase was an on-site sprint, configured and launched in the room, with the people who actually do the work. Asana became the system of record. We built standardized templates, goal structures with leadership roll-ups, ownership definitions that named one person per piece of work, and operating norms tied to how the organization actually moves. Phase two was three months of structured coaching, front-loaded with high-touch support and tapered intentionally as the team’s confidence rose.
The reason the work landed is that the system was designed for adoption from the first day, not for technical correctness alone. A project management tool that no one uses is not a system. It is an expense. The build had to put the people who would live inside the system in the chair while it was being built, and it had to use their actual work, not a sandbox version of it.
The outcome the team can describe now is short and worth the work. They share a language for how work moves, leadership has visibility, and staff has clarity on the three things that were missing: ownership, deadlines, and dependencies. Those three are the load-bearing inputs of every coordination problem in a growing organization, and they were the three the old setup could not consistently produce.
The deeper lesson, the one I keep coming back to, is that most growing organizations are not under-resourced; they are under-edited. The system they need usually already exists, in pieces, held by the people doing the work. The build is mostly the act of making it visible, naming it, and giving everyone the same place to look.
Erin Peshoff is the Chief Curator of Vivia Studios. She has spent thirty years inside nonprofit operations, helped raise over $100 million for institutional missions, and built Vivia around the operating discipline most strategic engagements skip.
