BCM Advisors

30/06/2026

The Hiring Decision That Costs Organizations Millions

One of the most expensive hiring mistakes we encounter begins by asking the wrong question.

You can't solve a problem you don't understand.

Leadership's first responsibility is to diagnose the problem. Is the problem knowledge, capacity, leadership or governance?

Organizations rarely seek help when things are great. Has growth slowed? Revenue plateaued? Governance drifted? Are stakeholders less engaged? Are the usual efforts producing diminishing returns? The status quo can become more expensive than change.

Many organizations stall as they mature.

The strategy, and programs may still work. What changed is leadership's ability to execute at the level expected of a larger operation.

Other organizations face a different constraint.

Talented executives are constrained by governance, programs or business models that the organization has outgrown or its current position no longer supports.

Is the missing capability temporary or permanent?

When the challenge calls for redesigning governance and programming, a consultant is often the right investment. Edgar Schein argued that meaningful change begins by dismantling assumptions that no longer fit reality. Often, those closest to the problem are the least able to challenge those assumptions.

When the challenge is ex*****on at a new stage of growth, hiring permanent staff is usually the better investment. Chris Argyris found that organizations develop defensive routines that protect assumptions long after they stop producing results. A new executive may be needed to challenge historical assumptions.

Building capability and preserving capability are different disciplines.

Boards carry a different responsibility altogether. Consultants introduce capability. Executives build capability. Boards preserve capability through leadership transitions and oversight.

A consultant can redesign systems, governance and strategy. They cannot reinforce difficult decisions or prevent old habits from returning. That responsibility belongs to leadership.

Finally, is your organization ready for discomfort?

Change agents are welcomed in crisis and dismissed during success, often before the hardest work begins. John Kotter argues urgency begins the process but embedding new behaviours determines whether change survives.

Early success can make yesterday's intervention seem unnecessary. Premature transitions, confusing the momentum of change with the completion of change, can undo months of progress.

Success magnifies bad habits. Once an organization begins performing at a higher level, expectations raise accordingly. Reverting to the status quo does not feel like standing still. It feels like decline because everyone has seen what the organization can become.

Before deciding who to hire, spend more time deciding what problem you're trying to solve.

Those answers can determine the hiring decision long before the first interview begins.

26/06/2026

What About Bob?

For me What About Bob? has always been a remarkable lesson in organizational psychology. It's funny because it's true.

In the film, Bob wanders around with a goldfish hanging on his neck, a harmless object that somehow makes everyone around him uncomfortable. By the end, we discover Bob wasn't the problem. He simply made existing problems impossible to ignore.

Every organizations has its Bobs.

Years ago, I worked with my own Bob. He was internationally respected for his research and unusually effective at explaining complex ideas to journalists and the public. His greatest strength, however, was his refusal to accept assumptions simply because everyone else had.

His questions required colleagues to reconsider ideas they had already adopted as their own. What began as an examination of ideas gradually became an unconscious defence of identity.

His influence steadily diminished. Important conversations proceeded without him because questioning assumptions slowed decisions and forced leaders to justify conclusions in which they had become emotionally invested. Eventually Bob left, convinced his contribution was no longer valued.

The organization became more harmonious but less capable. Research quality declined, policy influence weakened, and capital became harder to attract. Bob's career moved in the opposite direction. Other institutions recruited him into senior leadership roles, transforming the capability one organization had marginalized into a competitive advantage. Some organizations reward agreement. Markets reward competence.

Chris Argyris described this process as defensive routines. The greatest threat to an organization is the moment protecting the leader's judgment becomes more important than discovering the truth. Criticism gradually stops being evaluated on its merits and begins to be judged by the anxiety it creates. Removing the critic feels like progress because the discomfort disappears. Yet the problem remains.

Bob has many names. At NASA, Roger Boisjoly repeatedly warned against launching the Space Shuttle Challenger in freezing temperatures because of concerns about the O-rings. His warnings were overruled before the disaster. Afterward he was increasingly isolated. The evidence only increased resistance.

Organizations rarely fail because they possess too many Bobs. They fail because they gradually redefine them as the problem.

The healthiest institutions resist the temptation by asking three questions before passing judgment: What assumption is being tested? Is there strategic value in testing it? What risk do we create if we ignore it? Those questions redirect the discussion toward the quality of the argument rather than the discomfort of hearing it.

Challenging assumptions is not a personality flaw. It is an organizational function. Institutions that understand the difference retain their Bobs. Those that do not usually spend years watching them strengthen someone else's organization.

25/06/2026

Mission Language. Capital Decisions.

The charitable sector teaches fundraisers to speak the language of mission. That is essential, but once a donor has embraced the mission, the conversation must change because the psychology of capital allocation is fundamentally different from the psychology of moral agreement.

The philanthropic sector often criticizes political fundraisers while quietly envying their access to major capital allocators. If the objective is access to those prospects, it's worth asking whether political fundraisers understand something about high-stakes persuasion that philanthropy overlooks.

What if the reason they get through the door is not political influence but credibility?

Political communicators operate on the premise that persuasion rarely succeeds by asking people to think in our language. It succeeds by communicating in the language of the prospect. Cognitive linguist George Lakoff describes this as framing. Political pollster Frank Luntz spent his life demonstrating that words become persuasive when they reinforce the audience's existing mental model rather than the speaker's preferred vocabulary.

Mission earns agreement. Capital language earns confidence. Transformational gifts require both.

Modern neuroscience goes deeper. Friston's work on predictive processing suggests the brain continuously constructs forecasts about the future and updates those forecasts as new evidence appears. Kahneman and Tversky show that decisions under uncertainty depend as much on perceived risk as expected reward, while Spence demonstrates that credible signals create economic value by reducing information asymmetry.

By the time a transformational donor agrees to meet, the mission has usually earned agreement. The remaining question is whether the institution represents the most credible vehicle for producing the future the prospect seeks.

Most Cases for Support explain the need, the vision, and tell compelling stories yet give comparatively little attention to the evidence sophisticated capital needs to make a major commitment. Governance, leadership depth, financial stewardship, succession planning, independent evaluation, and measurable outcomes are not supporting material. They are the credibility signals that reduce uncertainty and make transformational commitments easier to justify.

Stagnant fundraising is rarely a communications problem. In our experience, it is more often a credibility problem.

Organizations reduce uncertainty by demonstrating institutional credibility in the language sophisticated capital already understands. As institutional confidence grows, conversations with senior decision-makers become easier to earn, while transformational gifts become easier to justify.

Perhaps the highest-yield Case for Support is not the one that tells the most inspiring story.

It may be the one that translates an extraordinary mission into the language through which extraordinary capital makes decisions.
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For those interested in the research behind this idea, the argument draws from several established fields.

Karl Friston's work on predictive processing suggests that the brain continuously updates forecasts about the future as new evidence becomes available. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's work on decision-making under uncertainty demonstrates that perceived risk influences choices as much as expected reward. Michael Spence's signalling theory explains why credible signals reduce information asymmetry, while George Lakoff's research on framing and Frank Luntz's work in political communication illustrate why ideas become more persuasive when expressed in the audience's existing decision-making framework.

This post is not suggesting these scholars were writing about philanthropy. Rather, I am proposing that when taken together with our experience rapidly scaling non-profits that had plateaued, their work offers a useful theoretical foundation for rethinking how transformational donors evaluate institutional credibility and why Cases for Support may be more effective when they reduce uncertainty instead of simply increasing motivation. Increasing motivation is not the same as reducing uncertainty.

24/06/2026

Donors Fund Forecasts: A Lesson From Neuroeconomics

One of the most influential ideas in modern neuroscience is that the human brain is not primarily a recorder of reality but a prediction engine.

Neuroscientist Karl Friston's work on predictive processing suggests that human beings continuously construct forecasts about the future and allocate attention, trust, and resources according to which outcomes they believe are most likely to occur.

That idea may help explain one of philanthropy's enduring puzzles.

If need were the primary determinant of charitable giving, organizations confronting addiction, homelessness, domestic violence, and chronic poverty would consistently attract the largest gifts in Canada. Instead, hospitals, universities, cultural institutions, and established foundations routinely secure transformational capital while many organizations operating closer to society's most difficult problems continue to struggle.
The standard explanation is awareness. If only donors better understood the problem, more money would follow.

That argument becomes harder to sustain when the problem is already visible. Canadians understand homelessness. They understand addiction. They understand poverty. Few social challenges receive more public attention, political debate, or media coverage.

Yet transformational capital continues to flow elsewhere.
Economists have traditionally approached this question from a different direction. Capital does not normally allocate itself according to need. It allocates itself according to expected outcomes.
Investors purchasing shares in a distressed company are not rewarding present difficulties. They are expressing confidence in a future state. The decision is fundamentally predictive.

The same pattern appears throughout philanthropy. Large donors routinely devote extraordinary attention to governance, leadership depth, succession planning, financial controls, stewardship systems, and institutional capacity. Conversations that can feel peripheral to nonprofit executives often sit at the center of a donor's decision-making process.

To management, the mission explains why support is deserved.

To capital, the more pressing question is whether the promised future is likely to occur.

This may explain why some organizations attract transformational gifts while others with equally compelling missions struggle to scale. The larger the gift, the more the discussion shifts away from present need and toward future performance.

Viewed through the lens of predictive processing, philanthropy begins to look less like an exercise in generosity and more like an exercise in capital allocation.

For non-profits in need, that possibility carries an uncomfortable implication.

Many assume capital is being withheld because donors lack information. Yet, what if donors understand the problem perfectly well, but remain unconvinced that the organization can reliably deliver the future it is promising?

They don't doubt the need. They doubt the forecast.

23/06/2026

The Success Paradox in Founder Organizations

We built exactly what the founder asked for. And that is when the trouble started.

Several years ago, I was recruited by an organization whose reputation was considerably larger than the institution itself. Donors took their calls. Influential people attended their events. Talented people wanted to be associated with the mission.

Yet turnover remained unusually high and the institution remained surprisingly small relative to the advantages it possessed.

The brief was straightforward: professionalize the organization and build a national institution.

We developed a case for support, stabilized a major commitment, secured a facility, and created the structure required to support growth. At our first Builders' Dinner, held in an unfinished space, four couples committed $1 million. Within weeks, construction was backstopped by a $3 million guarantee. More importantly, donors could finally see an institution capable of converting reputation into durable capacity.

By every conventional metric, the engagement was succeeding. The founder had asked for greater discipline, structure, and organizational capacity. Yet resistance increased as those results were delivered.

Donors responded, the institution strengthened, and the tension grew alongside performance.

For years, the organization had organized itself around the founder. Decisions, relationships, and uncertainty all flowed through them. Everybody knew where the steering wheel was, but nobody had been allowed to touch it.

The difficulty was that each step toward building the institution moved responsibility outward and converted activities that once required personal intervention into ordinary management functions.

Succession planning isn’t just about finding “the next in line”—it’s about safeguarding your mission, your people, and the trust your organization has built.

22/06/2026

How Is That Working Out For You?

“Coffee is for closers.”

Few lines in business culture have survived as long as Alec Baldwin’s seven-minute monologue in Glengarry Glen Ross.

Most people think the scene is memorable because the speech is harsh. What they miss is the dynamic unfolding in the room.

Every time the clip resurfaces, people begin evaluating Baldwin's character. They debate his arrogance, methods, temperament, and leadership style while paying far less attention to the information being delivered.

How many of you watch that scene and fist-pump when the salespeople fire back?

Freud would have recognized the mechanism immediately. The mind often behaves less like a scientist seeking truth than a defence lawyer protecting a client. When information threatens the image we hold of ourselves, attention shifts toward the messenger because examining the messenger is safer than examining the possibility that the criticism may be correct.

Recent research published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology reached a similar conclusion. When people experience threats to identity, they often protect the identity rather than engage with the information that triggered the threat.

Years ago, I worked with a senior colleague who had a remarkable ability to neutralize constructive criticism without addressing it. When a colleague identified a weakness, the colleague was "self-interested." When an executive raised concerns, the executive "liked to argue." When a supervisor challenged a decision, there was a "conflict of visions." When an employee expressed concern, the employee "lacked experience."

His self-esteem remained fully intact, which was fortunate because his inability to accept constructive criticism created no end of institutional turbulence.

Drucker would have looked immediately at the performance consequence. Knowledge workers are paid for judgment, and judgment deteriorates when learning stops. The person who rejects useful information because he dislikes the source has reduced the quality of his future decisions.

Organizations rarely fail because information is unavailable. More often, the information arrives from a person the individual has already decided not to hear. A difficult client sees the weakness before management does. A disliked employee understands the risk before the executive team does. A competitor exposes the flaw before the board does.

Ken Wilber observed that nobody is smart enough to be wrong one hundred percent of the time. Even an unpleasant critic may identify a weakness that improves the decision.

The pathology begins when people become attached not merely to ideas but to the reputations, identities, and status invested in defending them. At that point, correction no longer feels like learning. It feels like humiliation.

Once that happens, evidence becomes offensive. Criticism becomes disloyalty. Disagreement becomes a personality problem.

Nietzsche warned that convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies. The most dangerous conclusion any individual can hold is the one that has become part of their identity.

The most expensive mistakes in our work lives are rarely caused by ignorance. They are caused by information that was available, understood, and rejected because accepting it would have required someone to admit they were wrong.

19/06/2026

Political money is like water.

It never disappears. It simply finds another route.

I was reminded of that while reading a recent Guardian article by George Monbiot describing what he proposed as an "easy antidote" to political donations which he described as a poison to democracy.

Like most simple solutions, it was interesting, common theory, and oh so terribly misdirected.

What caught my attention wasn't the proposal itself but the assumption that changing how money enters politics changes the underlying relationship between money and politics.

It reminded me of a debate from twenty years ago.

Economists have a useful concept called Goodhart's Law. When policymakers target a measure rather than the behaviour they are trying to change, people adapt. The measure changes while the behaviour survives.

The restriction of corporate political gifts is a perfect case study.

It was early 2000 and government was considering both an end to anonymous charitable donations and an end to corporate political giving.

The Conservatives believed restricting corporate money would reduce Liberal buying power during elections.

The Liberals, facing corruption allegations, believed replacing corporate donations with taxpayer-funded grants would appease voters who assumed that if the funding mechanism changed, the relationship between business and politics would change with it.

From where I sat, it was obvious that relationships would outlast the legislation.

My concern was that restricting one mechanism would simply encourage donors to pursue it through different channels.

As restrictions inevitably tightened, I became involved in moving much of the high-net Political Dinner model into the think tank world. What had once been partisan fundraising evolved into award dinners and high-net speaking events.

The format changed, but the participants didn’t.

Business leaders still sponsored tables. Politicians, ministers, and policy influencers still received their invitation. Public policy continued to be discussed and relationships continued to be built. The only change was the name on the cheque.

The latest fiscal returns from some of Canada's largest policy institutions suggest something I don't think government expected when these reforms were introduced.

The Fraser Institute reported more than $16 million in revenue in 2024, roughly $6 million more than a decade earlier. The C.D. Howe Institute reported more than $8 million, also substantially higher than a decade ago. Many other policy organizations report similar results. Add to this the explosion of advocacy organizations and third party advertisers.

I’ve worked with many think tanks and they make an important contribution to public debate. That is not the issue.

The better question is what, really was achieved? If direct political giving is considered problematic because it could influence public policy, why are we so comfortable when much of the same money flows to institutions pursuing many of the same objectives?

Twenty years ago, the debate focused on who could write a cheque.

Today, we should be asking whether it really makes a difference.

19/06/2026

Political money is like water.

It never disappears. It simply finds another route.

I was reminded of that while reading a recent Guardian article on political donations.

What caught my attention wasn't the proposal itself but the assumption that changing how money enters politics changes the underlying relationship between money and politics.

It reminded me of a debate from twenty years ago.

Economists have a useful concept called Goodhart's Law. When policymakers target a measure rather than the behaviour they are trying to change, people adapt. The measure changes while the behaviour survives.

The restriction of corporate political gifts is a perfect case study.

It was early 2000 and government was considering both an end to anonymous charitable donations and an end to corporate political giving.

The Conservatives believed restricting corporate money would reduce Liberal buying power during elections.

The Liberals, facing corruption allegations, believed replacing corporate donations with taxpayer-funded grants would appease voters who assumed that if the funding mechanism changed, the relationship between business and politics would change with it.

From where I sat, it was obvious that relationships would outlast the legislation.

My concern was that restricting one mechanism would simply encourage donors to pursue it through different channels.

As restrictions inevitably tightened, I became involved in moving much of the high-net Political Dinner model into the think tank world. What had once been partisan fundraising evolved into award dinners and high-net speaking events.

The format changed, but the participants didn’t.

Business leaders still sponsored tables. Politicians, ministers, and policy influencers still received their invitation. Public policy continued to be discussed and relationships continued to be built. The only change was the name on the cheque.

The latest fiscal returns from some of Canada's largest policy institutions suggest something I don't think government expected when these reforms were introduced.

The Fraser Institute reported more than $16 million in revenue in 2024, roughly $6 million more than a decade earlier. The C.D. Howe Institute reported more than $8 million, also substantially higher than a decade ago. Many other policy organizations report similar results. Add to this the explosion of advocacy organizations and third party advertisers.

I’ve worked with many think tanks and they make an important contribution to public debate. That is not the issue.

The better question is what, really was achieved? If direct political giving is considered problematic because it could influence public policy, why are we so comfortable when much of the same money flows to institutions pursuing many of the same objectives?

Twenty years ago, the debate focused on who could write a cheque.

Today, we should be asking whether it really makes a difference.

As revelations about Reform UK’s donors emerge, it’s clear that increasingly complex forms of patronage can’t be regulated effectively. We need a clean sweep, says columnist George Monbiot

19/06/2026

Political money is like water.

It never disappears. It simply finds another route.

I was reminded of that while reading a recent Guardian article on political donations.

What caught my attention wasn't the proposal itself but the assumption that changing how money enters politics changes the underlying relationship between money and politics.

It reminded me of a debate from twenty years ago.

Economists have a useful concept called Goodhart's Law. When policymakers target a measure rather than the behaviour they are trying to change, people adapt. The measure changes while the behaviour survives.

The restriction of corporate political gifts is a perfect case study.

It was early 2000 and government was considering both an end to anonymous charitable donations and an end to corporate political giving.

The Conservatives believed restricting corporate money would reduce Liberal buying power during elections.

The Liberals, facing corruption allegations, believed replacing corporate donations with taxpayer-funded grants would appease voters who assumed that if the funding mechanism changed, the relationship between business and politics would change with it.

From where I sat, it was obvious that relationships would outlast the legislation.

My concern was that restricting one mechanism would simply encourage donors to pursue it through different channels.

As restrictions inevitably tightened, I became involved in moving much of the high-net Political Dinner model into the think tank world. What had once been partisan fundraising evolved into award dinners and high-net speaking events.

The format changed, but the participants didn’t.

Business leaders still sponsored tables. Politicians, ministers, and policy influencers still received their invitation. Public policy continued to be discussed and relationships continued to be built. The only change was the name on the cheque.

The latest fiscal returns from some of Canada's largest policy institutions suggest something I don't think government expected when these reforms were introduced.

The Fraser Institute reported more than $16 million in revenue in 2024, roughly $6 million more than a decade earlier. The C.D. Howe Institute reported more than $8 million, also substantially higher than a decade ago. Many other policy organizations report similar results. Add to this the explosion of advocacy organizations and third party advertisers.

I’ve worked with many think tanks and they make an important contribution to public debate. That is not the issue.

The better question is what, really was achieved? If direct political giving is considered problematic because it could influence public policy, why are we so comfortable when much of the same money flows to institutions pursuing many of the same objectives?

Twenty years ago, the debate focused on who could write a cheque.

Today, we should be asking whether it really makes a difference.

Letters: Readers respond to George Monbiot’s article on party funding

19/06/2026

Canada's Looming Ownership Shortage

Canada has spent the last half century teaching citizens that social problems belong to government.

That may become a serious problem for Canadian charities.

Stanford Social Innovation Review recently published an article called Beyond the Mega-Gift. The article examines a troubling trend. Americans continue to donate billions of dollars to charity, but an increasing share of those dollars now comes from a relatively small number of major donors while participation among grassroots donors continues to decline.

Most observers see a fundraising problem.

For Canada, the larger concern may be cultural.

In The Greater Good, the late Dr. Claire Gaudiani argued that America's charitable strength emerged from a tradition of citizens creating and sustaining institutions that stood between the individual and the state. Hospitals, universities, churches, museums, shelters, and community organizations were not viewed as somebody else's responsibility. Citizens supported them because they believed those institutions belonged to them.

Canada evolved differently through British tradition like Elizabethan Charity Laws which mandated tithes to the Church. Church gave way to governments. And for much of the last century, Canadians were encouraged to look increasingly toward governments to solve social problems, fund social infrastructure, and provide community services.

The result was not a less compassionate society. It was a society built upon different assumptions.

Americans built institutions because they assumed responsibility.

Canadians increasingly turn to governments because they assume responsibility has been delegated.

The difficulty for Canada is that governments have limits.

Today, governments face growing fiscal pressure while charities face rising demand. At the same time, donor participation is weakening. Statistics Canada reports that the share of Canadians making charitable donations fell from 68% in 2018 to 54% in 2023.

The Canadian charitable sector spends enormous energy discussing major gifts, planned gifts, campaign strategy, and fundraising performance.

Far less attention is paid to a simpler question- Who sustains civil society when citizens stop seeing themselves as owners?

For Canadian charities, that may be the defining question of the next generation.

Large donors can fund institutions, but only broad participation can sustain them over time.

A healthy charitable sector depends upon more than capital.

It depends upon citizens who believe they share responsibility for the institutions that shape their communities.

For Canada, the warning contained in Beyond the Mega-Gift is not ultimately about money.

The long-term risk is that charities will run out of citizens who see these institutions as their own.

A society can survive a shortage of money. They cannot survive a shortage of owners.

For four years, small donations have declined across the nonprofit sector, threatening the future of social innovation. But with the right strategies, some organizations are bucking the trend and winning them back.