The Ending Avengers
Who do you need to deliver a good ending for your organisation? If you’re considering or designing or a closure or ending of any sort in your civil society organisation, here are a few roles you might want to consider building into your plan.
At Stewarding Loss we believe that harnessing the power of a collective and community-wide approach to ending is an essential foundation of any good ending (you might want to check out our 7 Principles For Better Endings for more on this). When we say ‘collective and community-wide’ we mean very simply that a better ending happens when teams share tasks, co-design the ending and assign leadership of the practical and emotional components of an ending across teams and communities. It’s also about looking beyond your organisation and calling on the support of other organisations to help you steward your ending.
Like any team, a team to deliver an ending needs a healthy balance of people with different perspectives: people who know the organisation well and are close to the detail, people who are further away and can see the bigger picture more easily and ask good questions.
So if you’re turning towards an organisational closure or merger, or perhaps an ending of a programme, team or leadership chapter, we’ve developed a few profiles for the sorts of roles we’ve seen other organisations allocate in order to achieve a good, powerful ending.
The Logistician
This is the person ultimately in charge of overseeing the complex project of closing an organisation down. From balancing the books to selling off the printer, from overseeing TUPE and redundancy processes through to closing the legal entity. This person will ensure that everything is delivered at the right time as well as on time. They might be supported by staff and / or trustees to actually deliver this work. This person is likely to be the ‘last person standing’ on the organisation’s final day.
The Narrator
All organisations have a past, present and future and the narrator is the person who will capture for posterity the story of the organisation in ways that celebrate its success, share its learning and lay out the challenges ahead for those who may be picking up on the legacy of the organisation. This person will listen carefully to a range of perceptions and stories for the organisation and work with key stakeholders to land on a story that the organisation wants to share in ways that will reach the intended audience — perhaps allied organisations, funders, communities or the wider sector.
The Emotional Steward
On top of the complex logistical, legal and financial considerations, endings are also marked by different experiences and emotions by all those involved within and outside of the staff, trustees and beneficiary groups and wider communities. Anger, despair, relief, shame, guilt and grief are just a few of the countless experiences that come up time and again as people share their personal stories of organisational endings. It’s essential that in designing better endings the practical, technical and emotional elements of the ending are planned for and stewarded throughout. So finding ways to appropriately distribute the emotional load is important — perhaps this person should be an external coach or counsellor available to everyone involved in the ending?
The Ritual Holder
Using rituals to mark moments can support the emotional journey of everyone involved in an ending. Relief, grief, shame, pride, guilt and acceptance are just a few of the emotions people might experience. Depending on redundancies and other factors, people will be on different timelines and different emotional journeys. Making space for those variations at these critical transition moments is crucial . Done well, rituals can support a healthy mourning process. If you mourn well, you have a chance to start again. The ending moment is a transition point at which organisations and their people can find agency to move towards and embrace new beginnings.
Who would you add in order to deliver a careful, compassionate and legacy focused ending for your civil society organisation? We’d love to hear what you think of this — find out how to contact us here.
And if you are interested in the wider approach we’ve developed to better endings in the Sensing An Ending Toolkit and other tools and guides.
About Stewarding Loss: Since 2019, we have been exploring organisational endings. Our work is rooted in the belief that endings and new beginnings are a part of the natural cycle of growth, change, renewal and innovation within the nonprofit sector — and a signifier of necessary systemic shifts. We are committed to supporting and enabling better endings in civil society — and by better we mean endings that are designed proactively, intelligently, responsibly and compassionately.
