Why Strategy Needs Recovery Time

Nonprofits are very good at reacting to the roadblocks that get placed on their path, such as a funder changing a requirement or a client crisis. But everyone adjusts.

Then the board suggests that the organization needs to spend more time thinking strategically. Supposedly, everyone will get to that after the emergency meeting, the urgent email, the staffing problem, and the report that's due tomorrow.

We tend to talk about strategic capacity as if it mainly comes down to having enough people, money, or time. Those things matter. But cognitive capacity is another major factor.

Your organization needs people who can pay attention, hold information in mind, consider alternatives, recognize patterns, question assumptions, make decisions, and adjust when new information appears. Those are functions associated with executive control, including working memory, attention, inhibition, planning, and cognitive flexibility. In other words, people need enough mental room to think.

Strategy Requires More Than Time

We often say that people need “time to think strategically.”, which is true, but it’s not the complete picture. Strategic thinking isn't just a task you can squeeze into a 30-minute block. It relies on executive functions such as working memory, attention, cognitive flexibility, planning, and the ability to pause an immediate response long enough to consider another option. Girotti et al. (2018) conducted a study on the prefrontal cortex and executive function and found that stress can interfere with several of these capabilities.

However, the research is more nuanced than the workplace slogan that “stress makes you stupid.” A meta-analysis of acute stress and core executive functions conducted by Shields, Sazma, and Yonelinas, (2016) found that acute stress impaired working memory and cognitive flexibility, while its effects on inhibition were more complicated. The researchers also found that those effects varied depending on factors such as sex and the task being performed. Briefly, stress impairs working memory in women, based on some studies. That matters for strategy.

Strategy isn't particularly useful if everyone is operating in put out the next fire mode. Reactive work demands immediate attention. Strategic work asks you to step back from the immediate problem and consider what's happening across time, systems, stakeholders, resources, and possible futures, which are different cognitive demands. An organization that spends all its time reacting doesn't become strategic just because someone scheduled a strategic planning retreat.

The Problem With Permanent Reactivity

There is a difference between having periods of high demand and operating permanently under high demand. Every nonprofit has busy periods. Some organizations deal with emergencies as a routine part of their mission. A housing organization can't tell a family facing eviction that it is doing strategic thinking will address their problem in a few days. The real issue is what happens when urgency becomes the organization's normal operating condition.

Stress research doesn't support the idea that every form of stress damages cognition. Shields, Sazma, and Yonelinas (2016) also determined that the effects depend on the type, intensity, timing, and context of the stressor, as well as the cognitive task being performed.

Sustained stress presents a different concern. The researchers also concluded that chronic stress can negatively affect working memory, attention, response inhibition, and cognitive flexibility. The authors also emphasize that we still don't fully understand the precise mechanisms involved.

Maybe Your Organization Doesn't Need More Resilience

“Resilience” has become a popular organizational solution. When work gets overwhelming, we tell people to become more resilient. But before we hand everyone another resilience workshop, there's a question worth asking: What if the organization is asking them to operate in reactive mode indefinitely? There is a difference between helping people cope with demanding work and designing work so people have a reasonable opportunity to recover from those demands. The first is an individual intervention. The second is an organizational decision.

That distinction also fits with implementation research, which increasingly treats capacity as something that exists at multiple levels, including individual, organizational, and system levels. The National Implementation Research Network’s implementation guidance, for example, explicitly describes organizational capacity and the structures needed to support implementation rather than treating capacity as simply an individual's knowledge or motivation.

Recovery Is Essential

This is where organizational culture plays a role. Organizations tend to value visible activity: answered emails, attended meetings, completed reports, solved problems. People who are constantly busy can look extremely productive. But strategic thinking often looks different.

It can mean sitting with a problem before deciding what to do. This process might require a lot of mental activity that might include reading an evaluation report or asking, “Why does this keep happening?” and looking for patterns. It could be that three seemingly unrelated problems are actually symptoms of the same organizational issue. None of this necessarily produces a checklist of completed tasks, but the result of these efforts could be significant.

Recovery research by Wendsche and Lohmann-Haislah (2017) gives us another reason to take this condition seriously. A meta-analysis covering 86 publications, 91 independent samples, and 38,124 employees found that psychological detachment from work was associated with better mental health and well-being, less exhaustion, better sleep, and better task performance.

Psychological detachment means you're able to stop mentally working for a while. The research doesn't tell us that every nonprofit leader needs a certain number of hours of downtime before becoming strategically brilliant. It does show that the ability to psychologically disengage from work is part of the recovery process and is associated with several outcomes relevant to sustainable work.

You Can't Solve Every Problem While Standing Inside It

One useful thing about stepping away from a problem is that you can see it differently. If you're constantly responding to incoming demands, your attention stays focused on whatever is directly in front of you.

The research doesn't directly test “strategic thinking during nonprofit recovery periods,” so we shouldn't pretend it does. But the connection is reasonable: if strategic work draws on executive functions that can be affected by stress, then organizational conditions that support recovery deserve consideration when we talk about the capacity for sustained strategic thinking.

Strategy requires leadership to focus on patterns they are seeing and what could be causing them. They could examine assumptions, determine missing information, and work through scenarios that explore what would happen if they changed systems or did nothing at all. Furthermore, they could project into the future. Those questions require mental space.

Your Strategic Plan Can't Create That Space

A strategic plan can identify priorities, establish goals, clarify direction, define measures, and identify actions. But the document itself can't create the organizational conditions required to carry those aspirations out.

Implementation research has highlighted this point. Durlak and DuPre's (2008) review of more than 500 quantitative studies found that implementation quality is associated with program outcomes and identified numerous contextual factors that affect implementation, including organizational functioning, leadership, support, communication, training, and shared decision-making.

If staff spend every day responding to urgent demands, having a strategic priority on paper doesn't magically create the attention required to work on it. That's one reason implementation is so often harder than planning.

For example, if the strategy says: Develop a new community partnership. Reality says: We have three vacancies, a grant report due Friday, two clients in crisis, and nobody has figured out who owns partnership development. This may be a capacity problem, which could also indicate that it is also a cognitive capacity problem.

Recovery Belongs in the Implementation Conversation

We often define implementation capacity in terms of staffing, funding, skills, technology, systems, and infrastructure. But implementation research also points to the broader organizational environment in which new work has to happen. Durlak and DuPre (2008) identified factors such as leadership, administrative support, communication, task formulation, and shared decision-making among the organizational conditions associated with implementation.

So perhaps we should also ask: Does the organization have enough cognitive breathing room to actually implement the strategy? Outgrowths of this priority could be protecting time for planning and reflection, reducing unnecessary meetings, or deciding which existing responsibilities will stop when a new priority begins.

Other implementation safeguards could mean creating regular opportunities to review what's happening instead of waiting for the annual retreat. Organizations could make sure leaders aren't constantly changing priorities and then wondering why staff can't remember which one is supposed to matter this week.

Implementation frameworks make a similar point from another perspective. The National Implementation Research Network describes implementation as an active process that requires organizational supports, leadership, decision-support systems, administrative infrastructure, and ongoing improvement. Announcing a new approach and expecting people to execute it isn't enough.

Research on recovery from work isn't a blueprint for how nonprofits should structure their days. It does, however, give us reason to take the underlying idea seriously: sustained work demands can interfere with psychological detachment, while greater detachment is associated with better well-being and some work outcomes.

Build Recovery Into the Strategy

The point is much different than scheduling mandatory meditation breaks. If your strategy requires people to think, learn, adapt, and make good decisions, your organization has to create conditions in which those things are possible. Organizations should be asking questions that don't usually appear in strategic plans, such as: When do people have time to step back from the immediate work? Or when do we examine patterns instead of individual problems? Then, when do we review what we're learning? More importantly, are we giving people enough space to think about the work, or are we only giving them enough time to do it?

One approach is examining what the organization is doing that creates unnecessary cognitive load. Then figuring out what they can stop doing to make room for the things they've decided matter. Those assessments are key to implementation. A nonprofit can be extremely busy and still not be thinking very well.

Building an Organization that Leaves Room to Think

Strategy needs more than a plan, a budget, and a list of priorities. It needs people who have enough cognitive space to notice what’s happening, question what isn’t working, learn from experience, and make decisions before the next crisis takes over. That means recovery is part of the conditions that allow strategy to work.

If your organization is constantly operating at full cognitive capacity, the answer probably isn’t to ask people to become more resilient. It may be time to ask what the organization is requiring people to carry in the first place. The goal is to build an organization that leaves enough room to think.

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