I Spent 25 Years Photographing Other People’s Turning Points
There is a moment I have photographed more times than I can count, in more countries than I can list, and I did not understand what I was looking at until fairly recently.
It is not the dramatic moment. It is quieter than that. It is the moment an organization stops being merely good at the work in front of it and starts becoming something the world actually needs.
I have seen it in clinics in Liberia. In a boardroom in Atlanta. On a bad road somewhere in East Africa with a CEO who had not slept in a while. It looks like nothing from the outside. But there it was: somebody decides what they have built is not yet what it could be, and then they go and do something about it.
What I noticed after watching it enough times is that it almost never happens once. The organizations that move through one of those moments move through the next one faster. The first turn is the expensive one. After that the thing starts to turn on its own. I photographed that moment for 25 years and thought I was documenting other people. I wasn’t.
The book took ten years because I was not ready to write it
Journey sat unfinished for a long time. I kept telling myself it was not good enough. Or not finished. Or not worthy. Those were valid but not true.
Then I went to Afghanistan, and something shifted. I came home and realized I had been standing in the middle of the same story I had been photographing all along. The classic hero’s journey, the monomyth, the thing every one of us is walking through whether we notice it or not. You leave. It costs you something. You come back different.
I had been aiming my camera at other people’s version of it for two decades without recognizing my own. That is when the book became possible to finish and send out to the world. What surprised me was what came after. Finishing that one thing made the next one lighter, and the one after that lighter still.
This last stretch, I have spent settling my father’s estate and helping manage my ill mother-in-law’s affairs. There have been some incredibly hard decisions in that time for me, some that had life or death outcomes. It’s work that does not leave much room for anything else. Anyone who has done it knows.
It also does something useful, if you let it. For me, it stripped out everything that was not essential and left me looking at a short list of what I actually want the next chapter to be.
Mine turned out to be simple. I have been in the room while dozens of organizations wrestled with becoming something more. I have watched their leaders do it well, and I have watched them do it badly. I know what it looks like from the inside, and I have never once been asked to help with the deciding. Only with the documenting. That is changing, and fast.
What I have noticed
A few years ago I wrote down what separated the nonprofit CEOs I most admired. Three things, and they held up every time.
- They were willing to lead when leading cost them something. They understood that change would be their legacy, not a fat bank account.
- They made the hard call and then carried it. They kept the vision in front of them, because without it the wheels come off.
- And they actually cared about people. You can tell, because they get emotional talking about the work. They just care. Period.
Here is what I did not say in that piece. Those three do not sit side by side. They feed each other. Willingness gets you to a decision. The decision produces something real. What it produces is the reason people follow you into the next decision, and that one costs less than the first did.
That is also what separates the organizations that arrive at an inflection point and move through it from the ones that arrive and stall out. Willingness. Decision. Love. It is not a strategy problem most of the time. It is a nerve problem. And nerve compounds.
A word about whose idea this is
The flywheel is Jim Collins. Good to Great, chapter eight, back in 2001, and then a whole short book about it in 2019. If you have spent any time around organizational strategy you already knew that, and I would rather say it out loud than leave you wondering whether I did.
What Collins found, he found in the numbers. Fifteen years of cumulative stock returns on either side of the moment a company turned, across a lot of companies. His unit of study is the company. The question he answers is where to push.
Mine is smaller and it comes from somewhere else. Twenty-five years of standing close to people while they decided hard things. My unit is the leader, and the nerve in the room on the day. And the question I keep running into is not where to push. It is why very few people are pushing.
Collins tells you where to push. This tells you why you haven’t. Nerve does not show up in a stock-return series. It shows up when you are in the truck.
So
I am doing more of that work alongside the leaders and AS a leader now. Clarifying the vision, building the relationships, sharpening the brand, and creating the partnerships and major-gift growth that get a good organization moving again. The ones I am most useful to are already good at what they do. They just know they could be more.
I am creating a flywheel for myself and for others. Get the first turn out of the way and the second one takes less to move. I am not putting the camera down. I made two feature documentaries this last year and a half and loved every day of both. But I lead with the executive now, and that is a deliberate decision rather than a drift.
I know I can make the hard call. I’ve done it. So, if you are standing at one of those moments, good at what you do and less certain about what comes next, I have been in that room a few hundred times. Usually with a camera. I now get to sit in the other chair, and I have a seat for you.
