Don’t Let ‘Buridan’s Ass’ Run Your Nonprofit 

A nonprofit I worked with spent nine months deciding whether to switch from Salesforce to a different, simpler CRM: Nine months of comparing features, using workarounds, taking courses, and reconvening committees.

In the meantime, they simply started using both.

The problem was that two CRM systems meant double data entry, double the training, and double the confusion about which system held the “real” information.

Staff spent hours each week reconciling donor records between systems, and no one could agree on which database to trust before a major grant deadline.

At one point, the development director sent a funder an impact report pulled from the old system — with numbers that contradicted what the program team had been tracking in the new one.

The funder noticed.

That conversation was not easy. The thing the nonprofit hoped would solve their problems — better donor and client management — became the problem itself.

This is Buridan’s Ass in action. You know the old philosophical thought experiment: A donkey standing equidistant between two identical bales of hay, unable to choose between them, starves to death?

This happens more often than it needs to, especially with nonprofit leaders who are trying to navigate genuinely hard choices with limited resources. When you’re dealing with donor money, vulnerable populations, and resources that can’t be wasted, thoroughness feels like good stewardship.

In the nonprofit world, we often view waiting as a neutral act. We think that by not deciding, we are simply staying in place. But in reality, indecision is one of the most expensive line items in your budget; it’s just hidden under “staff burnout” and “missed opportunities.”

Every month you spend debating a new tool or a programmatic shift, you are paying a “decision debt.” This debt accrues interest in the form of staff frustration. Your high performers, who thrive on impact, are the first to lose heart when they have to spend their energy navigating workarounds instead of doing the work.

When the champion of a project leaves, as they did in my CRM example, that is the ultimate interest payment on a debt that should have been settled months prior.

One-Way Doors vs. Two-Way Doors

I’m not advocating recklessness: Decisions such as major capital investments, fundamental mission changes, or irreversible structural commitments do deserve time. But to move faster, we have to stop treating every choice like a life-or-death sentence.

It is helpful to categorize decisions into two buckets, as Jeff Bezos (whom I have mixed feelings about) says:

First, there are “one-way doors.” These are nearly irreversible. If you sign a 10-year lease on a building or decide to merge with another organization, you can’t easily go back. These decisions deserve the deep-dive audits.

However, there is a second category: “Two-way doors.” These are decisions where speed matters more than perfection — such as pilot programs you can test and adjust; technology tools you can switch if they don’t work; and really any decision you can easily reverse or refine.

For example, if the $50-a-month email tool doesn’t work after six months? You cancel the subscription and export your data.

The tragedy of Buridan’s Ass is that the donkey treated a two-way door as if it were a life-altering, irreversible commitment.

The nonprofit did eventually choose to migrate CRMs — 18 months after the conversation first started.

By then, the staff member who had championed the change had moved on, the unrestricted funding earmarked for the migration had been redirected to cover an operational gap, and the new system — when they finally implemented it — still required six weeks of cleanup because the dual-system workaround had created data inconsistencies that nobody had tracked.

If I could go back, I’d have said:

• Stop optimizing for the decision and start optimizing for the learning.
• Run the new system live with your most challenging workflow for 90 days with real data, and deadlines.
• Whatever breaks will tell you more than nine months of feature comparisons.

What we did instead was try to build certainty before we’d earned it, and certainty in that situation can only come from doing, not deciding.

When Everyone Has a Veto, Nothing Moves

Many nonprofits are governed by a consensus culture. While well-intentioned (we want everyone to feel heard), consensus is often where good ideas go to die.

When everyone has a veto, the result is usually the safest, blandest, and slowest possible path.

To break the stalemate, you need clear decision authority.

It helps to define roles early:

• Who is the Driver shepherding the process?
• Who is the Approver holding the pen for the final call?
• Who are the stakeholders being Consulted?
• Who is simply being Informed?

By defining the Approver early on, you prevent a committee from feeling like a democratic assembly where every minor disagreement resets the clock.

If your team has been discussing a decision for more than six weeks without deciding, either you don’t have enough information and need to get it quickly (rapid intel), or you’re delaying an uncomfortable choice.

Naming the Bales of Hay in Your Organization

This six-week rule should be applied to common “bales of hay” across the organization.

Consider the hiring stalemate: You have two good candidates, but neither is perfect, so you keep the position open for another three months while your current staff nears a breakdown.

Choose a bale: Hire the person with the best culture fit and train for the rest.

Or consider the program pilot: You’ve been designing a new curriculum for a year because you want every worksheet to be perfect before any student sees it.

Choose a bale: Launch a beta version with five participants next week. Their feedback will be more valuable than 10 more committee meetings.

Even in branding, don’t let a logo color stall your mission: Pick a shade that is good enough and get back to the work.

Moving quickly requires a specific organizational capacity: Grit. This is the stomach to be wrong and pivot.

In our sector, being wrong often feels like a moral failing. But the thing is, being wrong is often cheaper than being late.

For example, if you choose the wrong CRM and figure it out in three months, you’ve lost three months of fees and setup time. But if you take nine months to choose “correctly,” you’ve lost nine months of productivity and momentum — and you might still be wrong.

Grit is the ability to say, “We are making this choice based on the 80% of information we have now. If it’s the wrong choice, we will pivot quickly, and we will do so without shame.”

Organizations with these capacities can move quickly without being reckless. Organizations without them either move recklessly or don’t move at all.

We must realize that thoroughness is only good stewardship if it leads to action. If thoroughness leads to paralysis, it is a waste of the very resources we are trying to protect.

So, look at your team’s current discussions. Find one decision you’ve been analyzing for more than six weeks, and make the call this week, even if it’s imperfect.

Choose one bale of hay, because you’ll learn more from action than you will from more discussion. You’ll preserve the energy of your team, the relevance of your programs, and the momentum that makes things possible.

Don’t let your mission starve while you’re standing in the middle.

You might also like:

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• The Professional Connection Between Childhood Trauma and Nonprofit Leadership
• The Phone Call No Board Wants to Make
• Never Waste a Good Crisis: Why, When & How to Hire an Interim Executive Director
• Creating A Board That Works

 

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