WRAP Decision Process

2. A decision process in practice

People care about the process behind decisions that affect them. They want relevant information to be considered and their concerns to receive a fair hearing. A careful process cannot guarantee a good outcome, but it can help people examine options, test assumptions, and respond when a choice does not work.

To see how a process can help, even with a deeply personal decision, consider Matt D’Arrigo, a nonprofit leader. D’Arrigo’s story begins with a time when his family was battered by heartbreaking news.

In 1991, during the spring semester of his freshman year at Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama, D’Arrigo learned that his mother had been diagnosed with stomach cancer. His dad brought the family—D’Arrigo and his four sisters—together to discuss the situation. The doctors were hopeful that his mom’s cancer might be manageable, so D’Arrigo returned to school, worried but optimistic.

During the same semester, his older sister Kate started complaining about pain in her shoulder. The pain continued through the summer, when doctors did an MRI and found a tumor. She had lymphoma. During the late summer and early fall, D’Arrigo’s mother and sister went through chemotherapy together. “Our whole world was turned upside down,” he said.

D’Arrigo decided not to return to school in the fall, choosing to stay with his family in Boston. During that difficult time, what kept him sane was art. He painted, finding it therapeutic—a way of quieting his anxieties. As the year went on, his sister got better and his mother got worse. In early December, doctors found that his mother’s cancer had spread again, and a few weeks after Christmas, she passed away.

D’Arrigo, distraught, continued to paint every day. One day, it dawned on him that what art did for him it could do for others. Suddenly he knew: This is what I’m supposed to do. I’m supposed to help kids through art.

He never shared this epiphany with anyone. He was self-conscious about it, worrying that people would think it was a “stupid idea.” Eventually he went back to his life—he completed school, took a few jobs, and after a few moves landed in San Diego. Almost 10 years after he’d had his epiphany, he found that he couldn’t ignore it anymore. He talked to his dad about the idea, and his dad offered him $5,000 in seed money. His sister Kate sent him books about how to start a nonprofit.

He founded ARTS—A Reason To Survive—in 2001, with a mission to comfort sick kids with art. He volunteered to help at the Ronald McDonald House, a place where families stayed while their kids were treated at the children’s hospital across the street. Two of the first kids he helped were Riley, a three-year-old boy going through chemotherapy, and his sister Alexis. For a few precious hours, the sessions helped Riley and his family forget his condition. D’Arrigo taught them how to paint with watercolors, how to do simple drawings. They made get-well cards for other kids at the hospital. One day he put on Beach Boys music, and as they bobbed to the music, they painted a big beach-themed mural.

At the end of 2001, Riley died. D’Arrigo drove four hours to be at the boy’s funeral, and the family asked him to say a few words. D’Arrigo was devastated by Riley’s death, but he knew that he was doing what he was meant to do. “I wanted to be a bright light for kids in a very dark time,” he said.

In the early years, ARTS was just him and a crew of volunteer artists. They learned to design art projects that kids could complete in one sitting, because, as D’Arrigo said, “they were either homeless, abused, or in hospitals, and you weren’t sure if you’d see them again the next week or not.”

Over time, the organization grew, attracting more volunteers and more donations, and ARTS went from serving dozens of kids to serving hundreds. By 2007, D’Arrigo had raised enough money to open the Arts Center—the first time the organization had a permanent space designed specifically to inspire kids. “It was light, bright, and colorful,” he said. “As soon as the kids walk through the door, they feel different.”

At the Arts Center, you might see a kid from juvenile court working on a project with a kid from a homeless shelter and a kid with Down syndrome. It served as a home away from home for many of them. One girl told D’Arrigo, “School and home is where you have to keep secrets, and the Arts Center is where you can let your secrets out.”

In 2011, ARTS celebrated its tenth anniversary, but the celebrations sparked some internal turmoil in D’Arrigo. For the previous year or two, he’d been feeling a bit unsettled. He’d always dreamed that ARTS would spread its work nationally, but so far it had operated only in San Diego. When he brought up his ideas for growth with some board members, they’d usually counsel him to stay focused on the local work.

He began to think about leaving ARTS, perhaps to start his own consulting practice—he thought maybe he could counsel like-minded nonprofits in other cities. But it was hard to contemplate leaving the organization he’d founded and led for a decade. He agonized about the decision for months: Should he stay or leave?

At a decision-making workshop (led by Chip), D’Arrigo described his dilemma, and he was asked point-blank: “Imagine that 10 years from now, ARTS has been hugely successful in San Diego, serving many more kids than it’s serving today. It’s a pillar of the local community. But it has no presence anywhere else. Would you be happy?” D’Arrigo shook his head. “No, I wouldn’t,” he said.

His response shook him up a bit—it made it clear to him that he had to act. He began to consult with peers and funders and a few board members, asking for their advice. One conversation in particular proved pivotal. He met with a woman who was the CEO of a children’s social-service agency in San Diego, and he described agonizing over whether to continue expanding ARTS’s local work or leave it to pursue the national agenda. She said, “Matt, why can’t you do all of that?” She challenged him to come up with a plan that would keep ARTS strong in San Diego while still allowing him to pursue the idea of spreading the program nationally.

He realized she was right; there was no natural barrier to doing both. So he stopped thinking about leaving the organization and started thinking about how to push the ambitions of ARTS. His first move, in the summer of 2011, was to sound out the board about the new direction.

D’Arrigo asked the board members what would make them comfortable with the expanded focus. Their concerns were understandable: They worried about losing focus and spreading the organization’s resources too thin.

D’Arrigo felt that these were solvable problems. He gave himself a one-year deadline to begin the new work: By the June 30, 2012, board meeting, I will have a plan in place and the approval of the board to move forward on the national expansion of the ARTS strategy. He knew his San Diego team would need more funding and more staff to make the strategic shift possible, so he hired a new development officer who could lead a more aggressive fund-raising campaign. Then he began to beef up his San Diego program staff, freeing himself up to turn his attention nationally.

To test his ideas about expansion, he pursued a partnership with a group called La Maestra Community Health Centers, which served recent immigrants from more than 60 countries. D’Arrigo knew that La Maestra was serving kids who needed what ARTS offered. (Imagine the daughter of immigrants, struggling with a new language and culture, who has a parent battling a medical problem.) D’Arrigo’s idea was to train La Maestra’s staff on how to lead ARTS’s therapeutic programs. If he succeeded, and the staffers could carry forward his work without his ongoing involvement, it would be solid evidence that he could expand ARTS’s reach nationally without requiring a giant expansion in staff.

Meanwhile, ARTS’s impact in San Diego continued to snowball. ARTS seized a great opportunity to take over a facility in the low-income National City neighborhood. The building was an old library that had been renovated by the local government. Now the people in the community were excited about transforming it into an art center. For ARTS, it was a perfect situation: The building was three times the size of their current center at one quarter of the rent. Within walking distance of the building were a junior high and high school that served kids from impoverished families, as well as several homeless and domestic-violence shelters. There were countless neighborhood kids who needed ARTS.

In March 2012, three months before his self-imposed deadline, D’Arrigo won approval from his board for the new strategic direction. He felt relieved—and hopeful. His enthusiasm was palpable. “I’m reenergized. Excited. I feel my creativity rising again.”

When we wrote this account, we did not know whether the new direction for ARTS and D’Arrigo would succeed. And that’s okay; it’s the way every decision works. We can’t know when we make a choice whether it will be successful. Success emerges from the quality of the decisions we make and the quantity of luck we receive. We can’t control luck. But we can control the way we make choices.

D’Arrigo used a thoughtful decision process.

He avoided framing his situation too narrowly. Instead of thinking, “Should I leave the organization to pursue national expansion or stay at ARTS?” he found a way to do both. He embraced “AND not OR.”

He reality-tested his assumptions, talking with friends and board members and other nonprofit leaders. One of them gave him a crucial piece of advice that helped him break out of a narrow frame: “Matt, why can’t you do all of that?”

He ooched into his ideas: he tried a small test before committing to a large expansion. By working with La Maestra, he could experiment with his new ideas about expansion without taking too much risk.

Struggling with a tough choice, he attained some distance on the decision. Confronted with a question about how he’d feel 10 years in the future if his organization didn’t grow beyond San Diego, he realized that he craved more reach. His core priorities demanded that he expand his work.

Together with his board, he tried to bookend the future, exploring the reasons why the new direction might fail. That analysis helped them prepare for the worst: Knowing that fund-raising might suffer in San Diego as D’Arrigo’s attention turned outward, ARTS hired a bright, aggressive new development officer. Worried that he might get distracted by the day-to-day firefighting that is a part of every growing organization, he beefed up his program staff and, perhaps most important, set a tripwire: I’ll have a plan in place by the June 2012 board meeting.

That’s what a good decision process looks like.

It’s not a spreadsheet that spits out “the answer” when we plug in the numbers. It’s not a tallied list of pros and cons. It’s a guardrail that guides us in the right direction.

D’Arrigo is not a man who gravitates toward “process.” His career has never been driven by decision trees. What his experience demonstrates is that passion and process can work hand in glove. It was a thoughtful process that allowed him to honor his abiding passion—the desire to use art to comfort children in desperate times, the same way that it once comforted him.