Project Thinking Is Slowly Killing Institutional Strategy

There's a pattern I've watched repeat itself across dozens of organizations over the past several years. A nonprofit secures a significant grant - eighteen months, maybe two years of funding for digital capacity building or community engagement or research infrastructure. The leadership is energized. Staff are mobilized. New tools are procured, new workflows designed, training sessions scheduled. Six months in, the work is humming. Twelve months in, reports are being written. Eighteen months in, everyone is applying for the next grant. And when that next grant comes - as it sometimes does - it arrives with its own logic, its own platforms, its own reporting templates, its own theory of change.

The previous system, the one that was just beginning to settle into organizational muscle memory, is quietly set aside.

This isn't a story about failure. The organizations I work with in East Africa are led by deeply committed, strategically sophisticated people. They're navigating impossible tradeoffs with limited resources. But somewhere in the gap between what donors fund and what institutions need to survive, something essential is being lost. Not dramatically. Not all at once. But steadily, almost invisibly, the capacity to think and act institutionally is being eroded by the structural logic of project-based funding.

The Seductive Clarity of Projects

Projects make sense. They have beginnings and endings, deliverables and milestones. They can be evaluated, reported on, photographed for newsletters. When a foundation's board asks, "What did we accomplish this year?" a project offers an answer. We trained 200 civil society leaders in AI literacy. We built a digital archive of community testimonies.

These are real accomplishments. But they are accomplishments of a particular kind-discrete, bounded, completable. The more organizations orient themselves toward producing these kinds of accomplishments, the more they shape themselves into project-executing entities rather than learning institutions.

The problem isn't that projects exist. It's that they've become the dominant-often the only-way organizations can access resources, quietly replacing institutional development as the central organizing principle of organizational life.

The Cycle That Never Compounds

I've sat in enough planning meetings to recognize the pattern. An organization finishes a successful digital capacity program. Staff have been trained. Systems are in place. There's genuine momentum. Then the funding cycle ends.

The next grant that comes through might be for community research or advocacy campaigns. Important work. But it has its own timeline, deliverables, required tools. Maybe it's a different donor with different reporting requirements. Maybe it uses a different project management system, a different cloud storage solution, a different monitoring framework.

The digital capacity that was built? It doesn't disappear entirely. But it stops being what the organization is organized around. The staff member who became the in-house expert? They're now focused on the research project. The workflows that were just becoming habitual? They're not incompatible with the new work, but they're not required by it either. And without the forcing function of project deliverables, without dedicated time and attention, they quietly fade.

This is the cycle that never compounds. Each project builds something real, but it builds it on sand. By the time the next wave comes, the foundation hasn't hardened into bedrock.

The Illusion of Capacity Building

Capacity building has become one of those terms that everyone uses but few examine closely. In practice, what it often means is training. Staff are trained in new software, new methodologies, new frameworks. Knowledge is transferred. Skills are demonstrated.

But capacity isn't just the sum of what individuals know. It's what an organization can do consistently, what it can do without heroic effort, what it can do when key people are sick or leave or get pulled in different directions. Real capacity is organizational. It lives in systems, in routines, in the accumulated decisions about how work gets done.

Project-based funding treats capacity as an input. You build capacity so you can execute the project. But institutional capacity is actually an output - it's what emerges when the same systems get used repeatedly, when workflows become so familiar they're almost invisible. It requires time. It requires repetition. It requires the kind of stability that project cycles systematically prevent.

I've watched organizations train staff on the same kinds of tools three times because each project brought a different platform. I've seen sophisticated data systems abandoned not because they didn't work, but because the next project didn't require them and there was no time to maintain things not immediately tied to deliverables.

This isn't a failure of organizational leadership. It's a structural problem created by the mismatch between how projects work and how institutions develop.

The Strategy That Can't Stabilize

The most insidious effect of project thinking isn't what it prevents organizations from doing. It's what it prevents them from becoming.

Strategic planning happens constantly in these organizations. There are annual retreats, theory of change workshops, multi-year strategic plans. The documents are thoughtful, the vision compelling. But strategy isn't just about choosing direction. It's about building the organizational capabilities that make certain kinds of work possible.

When every twelve to twenty-four months the organization is reshaping itself around a new project, strategic direction becomes almost theoretical. Yes, we're focused on climate justice-but are we building research capacity or advocacy capacity or network coordination capacity? The answer is: whichever one is currently funded.

This creates a strange relationship to institutional identity. Organizations know what they care about - the issues, the communities, the change they're trying to create. But they struggle to stabilize who they are operationally. The answer keeps shifting based on what's currently fundable.

I've heard this described as flexibility, as being responsive. And there's truth in that. But there's a difference between strategic adaptation and perpetual reconfiguration. One builds on accumulated capability. The other prevents it from accumulating.

The Knowledge That Disappears

One of the most painful aspects of project cycles is watching organizational learning evaporate.

A program ends. The staff member who developed expertise moves to a different role or organization. Documentation exists - reports, lessons learned documents, evaluations. But documentation isn't knowledge. Knowledge is contextual, tacit, embedded in relationships and habits. It's knowing who to call when something breaks. It's understanding why certain approaches work in certain communities.

When projects end and people move on, this knowledge disperses. The next time the organization does similar work - which might be years later, under a different grant - they're not building from accumulated expertise. They're building from documents and distant memories.

I've watched this happen with technology especially. An organization invests in digital infrastructure, trains staff, develops workflows. Then the funding ends. Two years later, they're starting over with a new platform, new tools, new training. The previous investment doesn't compound.

This creates a peculiar relationship to time. Organizations are always looking forward to the next opportunity, always planning the next project. But they're not building a past in any robust sense. They're not developing institutional memory that gets richer with each year. They're just moving from one present to another, each largely disconnected from what came before.

The Leadership Trap

For executive directors and senior leadership, project-based funding creates an exhausting dynamic. You spend your time fundraising - scanning for project opportunities, tailoring proposals, managing donor relationships. When you're successful, you manage projects-ensuring deliverables are met, reports submitted, evaluations conducted.

What you're not spending time on is building the institution. Not in the sense of asking: What capabilities do we need to develop over the next five years? What systems need to deepen? What workflows need to become second nature?

Those questions feel like luxuries when you're not sure what your funding will look like eighteen months from now. So leadership becomes reactive, opportunistic - constantly looking for opportunities because there's no stable foundation from which to operate strategically.

I've sat with executive directors who are brilliant strategists but who describe feeling like they're always fundraising, always adapting, never quite able to stabilize their organizations. The exhaustion isn't just personal. It's structural.

What Donors Fund vs. What Organizations Need

The disconnect isn't mysterious. Donors need to fund things that fit their own organizational logic - boards to report to, program officers to justify, strategies to implement. Projects make this possible. They create clear boundaries around investment and impact. They make philanthropy manageable.

Organizations need something different. They need the kind of unrestricted, long-term support that allows capabilities to accumulate. They need to be able to say: We're building research capacity, and that will take years, and some of what we try won't work, and the outputs won't always be immediately legible as impact. They need to be able to maintain systems even when they're not tied to current deliverables. They need to be able to keep staff beyond the length of any single project.

These are not exotic needs. They're the basic requirements of institutional development. But they're largely unfundable through project-based grants.

The result is that organizations shape themselves to fit what's fundable. They become good at executing projects. They become excellent at adapting quickly, at pivoting, at making do. These aren't bad capabilities to have. But they're not the same as institutional depth.

The Question We're Not Asking

Here's what troubles me most: I'm not sure we're collectively asking whether this is the kind of civil society we want to build.

The organizations doing the most important work on governance, climate, human rights, civic technology - they're sophisticated, committed, innovative. And they're also fragile in a particular way. They're dependent on project funding that prevents them from stabilizing. They're perpetually in motion, perpetually adapting, perpetually starting over.

Is this what strong civil society looks like? Organizations that can execute projects brilliantly but struggle to build institutional memory? Leaders who are strategic thinkers but spend most of their time fundraising? Systems that get built and rebuilt every few years?

Or have we created a funding structure that produces a particular kind of organizational life - one that's responsive and flexible but also shallow, that's always beginning but never quite deepening?

The Space Between Projects

There's a particular kind of organizational time that's become almost impossible: the space between projects. The time when you're not racing toward deliverables but consolidating what you've learned. When you're not adapting to new requirements but letting current systems settle into habit. When you're not planning the next thing but reflecting on whether what you've built is actually working.

This is the time when capacity actually becomes institutional. When training becomes expertise. When systems become culture. When strategy becomes identity.

But project cycles leave almost no room for this kind of time. There's the rush of the current project, the anxiety of the funding gap, the excitement and disruption of the next project. The organization is always in motion.

But institutions aren't built through constant motion. They're built through patterns that repeat, through capabilities that deepen, through knowledge that accumulates. They're built when the same work gets done over and over until it's just how things are done here.

What Gets Lost

I think often about what gets lost in this pattern. Not just the obvious things - the systems abandoned, the expertise that disperses, the strategic plans that never quite manifest. But something more fundamental: the possibility of organizational maturity.

There's a particular kind of confidence that comes from institutional depth. It's the confidence of knowing not just what you stand for but what you're actually capable of. Of understanding your limitations not as moral failings but as boundaries you've actually tested.

Project-based organizations rarely develop this kind of maturity. They're always doing something for the first or second time. They're always adapting to new circumstances, new requirements, new opportunities. This creates a kind of perpetual organizational adolescence - energetic, flexible, constantly growing, but never quite settling into depth.

When I look at the challenges these organizations are trying to address - climate change, democratic backsliding, technological transformation, systemic inequality - these aren't problems that yield to projects. They're problems that require institutions. Not in the bureaucratic sense, but in the deeper sense: organizations with accumulated capability, with depth of expertise, with the kind of stability that makes sustained, sophisticated work possible.

An Uncomfortable Thought

The uncomfortable thought that emerges from all this is that we may have built a funding ecosystem that systematically prevents the development of the very organizational capacity it claims to support.

This isn't anyone's fault exactly. It's emergent - the result of reasonable constraints, legitimate accountability needs, and the structural logic of how philanthropy works. But the outcome is real: a civil society sector that's highly professionalized in project execution but increasingly unable to build institutional depth.

I don't have a clear solution to offer. The funding structures are deeply entrenched. The incentives are real. The constraints are genuine. Both donors and organizations are doing the best they can within systems that no one individually controls.

But I think we need to be honest about what we're building - and what we're preventing from being built. Because the cost of project thinking isn't just inefficiency or duplication. It's the slow erosion of the institutional foundation that makes sustained, sophisticated civil society work possible.

And that erosion happens so gradually, so quietly, that we might not notice until it's too late.