Nonprofit leadership decision making can suffer when speed, productivity, email, technology, and constant activity leave little room for strategic thought. Evermay founding CEO Kate Goodall joins us to explore a counterintuitive leadership idea: sometimes the smartest way forward is to slow down.
Evermay is creating what Goodall calls an “embassy for the future” in historic Georgetown, a place designed to give thinkers time, physical space, diverse peers, and fewer everyday distractions while they work on ideas with potentially generational impact.
For nonprofit executives, board members, funders, and managers, the larger lesson goes well beyond Evermay. “The productivity and the speed at which it happens doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re heading in the right direction,” Goodall explains.
That distinction matters in organizations where leaders can spend entire days responding, approving, meeting, emailing, and producing without ever getting enough distance to ask whether the organization is actually heading where it intends to go.
Evermay’s Future Fellows model also challenges another familiar organizational habit: surrounding experts with people who think like they do. Fellows come from different disciplines and are deliberately exposed to people who can challenge assumptions. As one applicant described the appeal, “I just really would like to be with people who are different than me, who can spot the holes in my argument.”
The Fellows can stay for three, six, or nine weeks. Their schedules intentionally balance limited programming with substantial independent time, peer discussion, meditation and embodiment work, informal collaboration, and shared dinners. The objective isn’t inactivity. It’s concentrating attention on work that normal routines can squeeze out.
Goodall also describes why some potentially transformative ideas struggle to find support: they may be too early, too cross-sectoral, or not yet structured in a way philanthropy considers fundable or investors consider investable.
Key Takeaways:
Speed and productivity are not substitutes for strategic direction.
Protected thinking time can improve the quality of organizational decisions.
Cross-disciplinary peers can expose weaknesses insiders may overlook.
Not every high-potential idea fits traditional funding structures.
Reducing routine decision friction can preserve attention for higher-value work.
Unprogrammed time can be deliberately designed into leadership and innovation work.