Mind the Gap

For anyone who knows me, you know that I start my day by digging into several word and number puzzles (crossword, sudoku, etc.). One of the reasons I love the word puzzles is that they sometimes increase my vocabulary – giving me a few $10 words to throw around at lunches, cocktail parties, and after yoga classes (while ignoring the eye rolls that I deserve).

One of my favorite puzzles is the New York Times Spelling Bee. Every morning, I face 7 letters, one of which is at the center of a honeycomb shape (hence, the name). I am charged with finding as many words as I can that all include the center letter. The Times makes sure I get my dopamine hits, declaring me ‘amazing’ or ‘genius’ as my points increase. And using all seven letters is a panagram (and double dopamine shot and extra points with my morning caffeine).

One day, I learned something I wish I’d never known – if I find every possible word, I’m awarded ‘queen bee’ status. Oh, the hours I spend in pursuit of the queen bee crown – embarrassing to admit, yet irresistible.

I promise you this story is going somewhere related to nonprofit life. Please stick with me.

When I have not gotten queen bee status, I can look and see which words I missed. Two or three times, the word was 'ecotone’ (the zone where two ecosystems overlap). After my last failure to spot ecotone, I swore I would commit the word to memory.

Following the advice of my middle and high school English teachers, I found ways to use ‘ecotone’ in a sentence several times the following week. That meant learning more about them and pondering how the concept might be related to the work I do now.

Was I refusing to remember ecotone because I was avoiding an issue my coaching clients and their teams face? Was I being haunted by my Spelling Bee failures because there was some deeper message?

And just when my pondering threatened to become navel gazing, I found connections.

For good reasons, our ecologically committed and savvy friends want to protect ecotones – those places where a forest meets a meadow, where a riverbank blurs into wetlands, where a grassland becomes desert.

I love the physical areas and the very concept of ecotones because nature has a way of reminding me of things I often forget – in this case, that the richest spaces are often the messiest. They are a celebration of ambiguity, transitions, and balance.

Where you find these untamed areas

A walk through an org chart is a trip through ecotones – those noisy, unpredictable and fragile zones that present as conflict or tension but are fundamental to a thriving culture.

Where Leadership Brushes Up Against Management. Leaders set vision and direction and manage the many contributors to the mission. Middle managers are charged with meeting deadlines, caring for staff, and making a lot happen with a little.

Where Governance Meets Management. Some issues are clearly governance (bylaws, fiduciary responsibility, strategic oversight). Some issues are obviously management (budgets, programs, and day-to-day operations). Then there are issues that live in the gray area between the two. Trying to make these issues fit neatly into one category or the other is often the greatest stressor on everyone involved.

Where Strategy Collides with Culture. Change plans and new strategic directions bump up against unwritten norms, traditions, and values of staff, Board, communities, and donors. Many a strategic plan has died from leadership underestimating the delicate interaction between these areas.

These edges are where a biodiversity of ideas and perspectives live. They’re also the arena for turf battles, misunderstandings, and survival of the fittest politics.

The smartest leaders don’t avoid the ecotones; they step into them and reap the benefits that come from embracing complexity and understanding the boundary itself.

Why Enter the Ecotone?

In organizations, like in nature, ecotones are inevitable. These rich, but unstable areas of your organization are prone to erosion of trust, floods of emotion, or invasive species that require constant attention. Your leadership decision is whether to cultivate the richness of these areas or risk destroying their value in the pursuit of clarity:

Diversity and Innovation. Competing priorities and perspectives in overlap zones spark new ideas, hybrid solutions, and creative approaches that lead to improved service.

Unmanaged Friction. Without your attention, ecotones turn into battlegrounds with blurred authority, mismatched expectations, and rampant confusion.

Fragility and Vulnerability. A neglected gray area or organizational boundary is a hotbed for disengagement, power struggles, or communication breakdowns.

Leading in the Ecotone

Once you have decided to brave the ecotones – embracing both ecosystems and the place they meet, you can borrow some approaches from ecologists:

Edges are Natural. Don’t waste your time wishing them away or – worse – trying to resolve the conflict.  Every organization has edges – tensions that are better managed than resolved.

Conflict Engenders Resilience. Diversity of perspective makes systems stronger when you disagree productively in service of the mission and your impact.

Stewardship Matters. These areas of your organization won’t self-manage or come to resolution on their own. They need leadership to intentionally tend to and cultivate them.

Disturbance can be Generative. Just as fire can renew a forest edge, great disruption at organizational boundaries can lead to renewal if handled with care and intentionality.

Case in Point

I saw unattended ecotones in full force during a recent coaching session with a board chair and an executive director. They had worked together for years successfully but lived most of the time in very different ecosystems.

This happens to many nonprofit leaders and their chairs. One lives in the world of social services and advocacy; the other knows finance, law, tech, or some other business. Both are committed, competent, and sometimes exhausted by the lack of shared understanding. Add the ever-vague boundary between governance and management, and challenges multiply.

During our session, what became clear was that they were standing in an ecotone without naming it. Each spoke the language of their own ecosystem, but neither translated for the other. They were both understood in their own worlds but less so in the space where their worlds met. Once we named the overlap as an edge space – a learning edge – something shifted. We identified that friction is not failure; it’s the source of richer solutions (and that many of the best solutions live on the boundary of the two worlds, not on one side or the other). We came away with a joint commitment to lean into these conversations, not away – to slow down and listen across the differences.

That’s the work of leaders traversing ecotones – not to impose uniformity, but to help two ecosystems thrive together at their edges.

What You Can Do Now

When you’re embracing organizational edges, your management changes. Here are some ways to regularly tend to the ecotone (not just after havoc has been wreaked).

• Embrace Curiosity over Certainty. Perform regular culture audits and staff and board surveys to catch the early-warning signs of deeper shifts and misalignments. Assume there are things you don’t know and ask before barreling through with your plan.

• Practice Translation and Develop Your Team. Train leaders and managers to act as translators between the worlds of strategy and execution, governance and management, and vision and culture. Convert governance-speak into staff-speak and leadership-speak into management speak intentionally during team meetings.

• Embrace Board and Staff Retreats. Treat them as intentional spaces where different systems can listen, align, and appreciate differences without forcing resolution. Invite multiple voices to contribute, not just the dominant ones.

• Leave time for Open and Safe Conversation. Don’t wait for the annual retreat to air every issue. Leave space for generative discussion at board meetings and regular input during team and staff meetings. Show that you want to understand the obstacles, not just focus on success.

  
  

The next time you’re at an organizational edge ask yourself, Am I tending this ecotone, or letting it erode? With leadership that is curious, intentional, and willing to hold complexity, these boundaries can be the places where new possibilities take root.

Where are the ecotones in your organization — between board and staff, strategy and execution, vision and culture? I’d love to hear how you’re experiencing them.

And if you’d like to dig into this topic with an experienced partner — someone who’s helped boards and leadership teams not just survive their edges but thrive in them — I’d be glad to connect. You can email me at gary@garybagley.com or DM me on LinkedIn.