Building from zero requires knowing what you are before you build

I was the chair of the board when we made a decision that most organizations never have the courage to make: we stopped. After ten years of operations, I pulled the handbrake on the entire organization. No active programs for a full year, because I could see that we were at risk of rushing into yet another year of moving in the wrong direction.

The pause was not comfortable, but it was necessary. Before rebuilding, we needed to understand what we were actually building toward. I was not willing to restart without that clarity.

When the reflection period ended, I stepped in as Managing Director to lead the rebuild from near zero.

What I had seen as chair, and what the pause confirmed, was that the organization had been operating without a clear enough answer to its most fundamental question: how do we actually make impact, and how do we communicate that in a way that resonates?

The mission was right. Advancing diversity in engineering addresses a real and persistent structural problem in the industry. But mission alone does not build membership, secure partnerships, or attract funding. The organization needed to know not just what it stood for, but how to make that visible and compelling to the people it needed to reach.

I also saw, from the chair position, that restarting without resolving this would simply reproduce the same friction in a new year. That was the friction I had stopped us from compounding further.

When I stepped in as MD, the diagnosis was already clear to me. I had done much of the thinking during the pause. The gap was between what the organization genuinely was and how it was packaging itself to the outside world.

I knew that partnerships, funding, and membership would only follow if we resolved that gap first. So that was where I started: building internal clarity about the mission and the model before building outward.

The order mattered. Most organizations in a rebuild situation jump straight to activity. I held back until the foundation was right. My intention was to grow deliberately and at a pace that quality could keep up with.

I built the organization from the ground up across multiple cities: recruiting, establishing operations, and developing the social presence in parallel. I used the newly articulated mission to open partnership conversations that had previously stalled, and secured national-level partnerships that brought both credibility and funding.

What I had not fully anticipated was how much those external partnerships and opportunities would accelerate the pace. The momentum that came with securing national backing created pressure to move faster than I had planned. We grew faster than intended, and it showed internally. The quality and coherence I had wanted to protect got harder to maintain as the pace picked up.

I held the line where I could. But some of the friction that emerged in this phase came directly from growing at a speed the organization was not fully ready for.

Within a year of restarting, the organization had established operations across multiple cities, built a substantial national membership base, and secured a significant number of national-level partnerships. Member satisfaction was exceptionally high.

The foundation was strong. The growth was real. But I carry the honest reflection that some of the internal strain during this period was the cost of a pace that external circumstances pushed beyond what I had intended.

The engagement concluded when the organization's leadership priorities shifted. The foundation built during this period remains.

The hardest leadership decision is often the one to stop. Not to pivot, not to restructure. To fully stop and ask whether what you are doing is actually right. I made that call as chair, and it was the right one. Organizations that cannot make that decision keep compounding the friction they already have.

Clarity of mission is not a communications problem. It is a strategic one. Until an organization can answer, honestly and precisely, how it creates value and for whom, everything built on top of that is unstable. I have learned to treat that question as the first piece of work, not something to sort out later.

You cannot always control the pace. External forces — partnerships, funding timelines, market windows — will sometimes push growth faster than you planned. The lesson is not that you can always hold the line. It is that having a considered view of the right speed means you know when you have been forced off it, and you can make conscious decisions about what to protect and what to let go.