Wisdom Institute
Finding Focus Through a Strategic Pause: A Coaching Engagement
Summary: Foresight provided six months of leadership coaching to help the Wisdom Institute's Co-Executive Directors pause, reprioritize, and create a more focused and sustainable organization.
Services: Leadership coaching, organizational strategy.
The Challenge
The Wisdom Institute, a grassroots organization that has spent over two decades supporting African American women and girls through advocacy, education, spirit-centered healing, and art-driven activism, came to Foresight Collective wanting a conventional three-to-five-year strategic plan to guide operations, focus staff priorities, support board recruitment, and anchor communications. But as we listened, a different picture emerged: the absence of a plan wasn't what had the organization's Co-Executive Directors stuck on a hamster wheel of constant doing, overwhelmed and further from their intended impact rather than closer to it.
Our Approach
Rather than moving directly into strategic planning, we recommended a six-month coaching engagement designed to:
Ask guiding questions and reflect back observations rather than prescribing solutions, helping the Co-EDs see themselves and their organization from a new vantage point.
Examine each leader's individual relationship to busyness and to saying “yes”, surfacing how a genuine desire to help was quietly driving burnout.
Assess which programs aligned with Wisdom Institute's core mission, which distracted from it, and where staff capacity truly lived.
Clarify how the Co-EDs divided responsibilities and led together.
The engagement centered on a counterintuitive recommendation: a pause. A few months to stop saying yes to everything and focus on prioritizing and reorienting, rather than planning ahead.
The Outcome
The Co-EDs used the clarity created by the pause to act. They began by narrowing their focus, making deliberate decisions about which programs to keep, let go of, or set aside, and getting honest about long-term sustainability and organizational identity. The work extended to how each of them showed up individually and how they led together, resulting in a clearer, more intentional division of responsibilities as co-leaders. As one Co-ED put it: "We slowed down and got real."
The Result
As the Wisdom Institute's purpose came into sharper focus, new funding and partnership opportunities began to emerge. The Co-EDs credit this outcome to the clarity gained during the pause: a reminder that greater impact can start with doing less rather than more.