Certainty

Imogen Ward

10th February 2025

“There is one sin which I have come to fear above all else… certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity… the deadly enemy of tolerance.”

Anyone who has enjoyed Robert Harris’s Pope romp, Conclave, will probably remember the line about certainty.

It’s as much about how we navigate our own lives as it is about faith. And it got me thinking about how the role of certainty is key to planning in a strategic context.

Our role as Strategy Consultants is to balance focus and attention on deep diving into  the past, interrogating the present and forecasting the future.

By the very nature of what we do - guiding organisations to make the right strategic and operational choices often at a time of extreme pressure  - consists of a judgement on certainty.

But surely we’d be charlatans of the worst kind if we proposed that everything we advised was based on a concrete belief of…. well… certainty.

Well maybe - because there are some components of our work that we really do need to be fairly clear on. These are my top 3:

The Truth - This is the biggie really and something that we often struggle to land with our clients. This is not for any nefarious reasons, but usually because the position right now - or as is - is often really hard to grasp. My colleague Deniz Hassan speaks about the growing chasm of what any organisation needs to understand in terms of data and insights to motor planning and what is actually assumed to be right.

The Vision - What is it that you want to achieve and over what timeframe? Typically not-for-profits are good at articulating the vision, but struggle then to provide the indicators to prove that impact. Why? Well see above.

The Culture - Perhaps I should clarify here. It’s not the articulation of the culture that is important,  but the appreciation of its impact: is it enabling the organisation to succeed or is it creating a static environment. Or (and we see this far too much) is it tearing it apart. Signs we see: a rock star department that dominates. The Income Generation team plough their course with little regard or attention to the rest of the organisation? Has Compliance moved from something that gives a framework, to something that rules with fear?

But there is some stuff that is less straightforward to be certain on:

The Forecast - we all know that the future cannot be predicted. God knows what next week will bring at this stage let alone any longer than that. So why do Trustees  ask for a 5 year income forecast from the Fundraising Director? And then insist on reassurance that it will be inevitably delivered?

Don’t get me wrong, organisations need some way of planning for the future, working out what sensible investment looks like and what it might bring in. But too often we find Fundraising Directors who have inherited a lovely looking strategy that will double (it always doubles) income in five years based on what exactly? Unless you are really clear about the key risks and assumptions behind the forecast and there’s a robust process to validate these assumptions against real-world outcomes, the result is too often a paper strategy that no one believes in and will never succeed.

The Benchmarks - Trustees looking for certainty will ask for examples of organisations who have been in the same position and whose strategies can be copied. We do a lot of benchmarking for our clients and it’s a useful indicator of what other similar organisations are doing and how you perform against them or what you can learn from them. But charities are so different from each other and report so differently, that an indicator is all it can ever be.  There’s no magic formula for success.

We crave certainty in life - we seek out patterns and trends to prove this or that. As with life, in fundraising, some stuff works, some stuff doesn’t work but you are more likely to make the right choices if you approach it all with a good pinch of honesty.

Cardinal Benitez would be proud.