150 CEOs. One Promise.

Hey,

I was looking at Goodwill recently, and something about the way the organization is structured caught my attention.

Not the stores.

Not the donations.

The system behind all of it.

There are around 150 locally led Goodwill organizations across the network. They have their own leadership. Their own boards. They serve different communities with different needs. Goodwill itself explains that local organizations develop programs around the needs of the communities they serve.

So, in a way, imagine trying to keep one promise with 150 CEOs.

That got me thinking.

Because when an organization gets this distributed, the obvious answer is usually standardization.

Create the process.

Make everybody follow it.

Put everybody in the same system.

Build the dashboard.

Problem solved.

Except I'm not sure that's actually the problem you need to solve.

Because the more I looked at Goodwill, the more interesting question became:

What actually has to be the same?

What I can see from the outside

Let me say this before we go any further.

I don't work inside Goodwill.

I haven't interviewed their leadership or sat with the people operating these programs every day.

So this isn't an audit of Goodwill.

I'm looking at what's publicly visible and asking the same questions I would ask if I were trying to understand the system from the inside.

And from the outside, one thing Goodwill appears to be doing particularly well is choosing where consistency matters.

Take the Goodwill Opportunity Accelerator.

It's a workforce-development framework designed to help people move toward employment and career advancement.

There are common actions in the model.

Assess someone's needs and interests.

Build a personalized plan.

Address barriers.

Build skills.

Connect them to employment opportunities.

Evaluate what happened.

Continue supporting them.

There's a structure to the movement.

But notice what's not standardized.

The person.

Their barriers.

Their goals.

Their community.

The employment opportunities available where they live.

The exact support they'll need.

That's an important distinction.

The framework can be consistent without requiring the experience to be identical.

And I think a lot of organizations miss that.

Consistency isn't the same thing as sameness.

You can standardize something so tightly that the people doing the work no longer have room to use judgment.

You can also give people so much freedom that two teams working under the same company name are essentially delivering two different promises.

Neither extreme is particularly useful.

What Goodwill appears to be building sits somewhere between those two.

There are locally led organizations responding to local conditions.

But above that, there are common mission activities and a shared information layer.

Local Goodwill organizations submit recurring financial, HR and mission-operations data. There are submission deadlines. There are network dashboards. There are membership-compliance requirements.

And one tiny detail caught my attention.

Some information can be submitted through automated or manual uploads.

That may sound like a technical detail.

I don't think it is.

Because it suggests something about where the standard lives.

The requirement isn't necessarily:

You must use exactly the same tool to do your work.

The requirement can instead become:

Here is the information the network needs. Here is what it needs to mean. Here is when we need it.

Those are two very different approaches to standardization.

One standardizes the tool.

The other standardizes the promise the tool has to support.

And that's where I started getting really interested.

Follow one number backward.

Goodwill reported that more than 142,000 people secured employment with Goodwill support in 2025.

That's an impressive number.

But when I see a number like that, my systems brain does something annoying.

I want to walk backward.

Not because I think the number is wrong.

Because I want to understand everything that has to be right for that number to mean something.

Think about it.

One hundred fifty locally led organizations.

Different communities.

Different programs.

Different people doing the work.

And eventually all of that becomes:

142,000 people secured employment.

So where does that number actually begin?

With the person who got the job?

A career navigator?

An employer confirmation?

A record inside a local system?

What exactly qualifies as “secured employment”?

Who confirms it?

What evidence closes the outcome?

When does it get reported?

What happens if someone's employment status changes?

What happens when information is incomplete?

How are duplicates handled?

What happens when a local program doesn't fit neatly into the national framework?

I went looking for public documentation that would answer all of those questions.

I couldn't find enough to confidently tell you exactly how Goodwill handles each one.

And I'm not going to make up the missing pieces.

But those missing pieces are actually where I would want to look next.

Because that's where the system becomes real.

Where I'd push the thinking further

If I were sitting inside an organization like this, one of the first things I'd want to understand is the chain of trust behind the national number.

I'd pick one important outcome.

Maybe it's employment secured.

Then I'd follow it all the way backward.

National claim → report → data → evidence → action → person.

At every point I'd ask:

What has to be true before this can move forward?

Who owns that?

What does "done" mean here?

What proof travels with it?

How long can it wait?

What happens when normal doesn't happen?

And, maybe most importantly:

Where are we intentionally allowing people to use judgment?

Because I wouldn't want to eliminate all the differences.

Some of those differences are probably exactly why the model works.

Someone in Detroit may need something different from someone in rural Georgia.

One local organization may have employer relationships another doesn't.

One community may have transportation barriers.

Another may have childcare problems.

Another may have jobs available but a skills gap.

You want the people closest to those realities to be able to respond to them.

So I wouldn't start with:

How do we make everyone work the same way?

I'd start with:

What has to be the same for us to confidently say we delivered the same promise?

That's a very different systems question.

There's another question I'd ask.

How much does maintaining the standard cost the people underneath it?

This is easy to miss from the top.

Every field somebody has to complete.

Every report.

Every status update.

Every required document.

Every additional proof point.

Individually, each one can make perfect sense.

But every requirement created at the top becomes work somewhere below.

So for every piece of information I asked 150 organizations to provide, I'd want somebody to be able to answer:

What decision does this information help us make?

If we can't answer that anymore, I'd start questioning why we're collecting it.

Because there's a point where proving the work can start taking time away from doing the work.

And better software doesn't automatically fix that.

Sometimes it just helps you collect unnecessary information faster.

You probably don't have 150 CEOs.

Maybe you have four project managers.

Three locations.

Eight account managers.

A couple technicians.

Or maybe you're still small enough that everybody sits in the same building.

This still applies.

Imagine asking every project manager in your company:

When is a project complete?

One says:

"When we send the deliverables."

Another says:

"When the customer approves everything."

Another says:

"When we've invoiced."

Another says:

"When the customer has actually gotten the result we promised."

Everybody could be doing good work.

Everybody could be entering Complete into the same software.

Your dashboard could be calculating everything correctly.

And you could still have four different definitions of your promise.

That's not really a software problem.

It's not necessarily a people problem either.

It's a system question.

Where does consistency actually matter?

Because your people don't need to become robots.

Your best project manager probably does some things differently from everybody else.

Your best salesperson probably does too.

So does your best technician.

Good.

I wouldn't rush to standardize that away.

I'd want to understand what they're doing and why it works.

Then I'd ask:

Which parts make our promise reliable regardless of who's doing the work?

That's what I'd standardize.

The outcome.

The definition.

The evidence.

The important handoffs.

The clock where timing matters.

The boundaries around judgment.

What happens when something goes outside those boundaries.

And then I'd give good people room to do good work inside them.

That's the part I think Goodwill makes interesting.

You can have 150 locally led organizations without pretending they're all the same organization.

You can have a common framework without pretending every person needs the same path.

You can create shared information without assuming every underlying workflow has to look identical.

There is a layer where consistency matters.

The hard part isn't standardizing everything.

It's figuring out where the rules should stop.

So here's something worth trying in your own organization.

Pick one outcome your business talks about all the time.

Complete.

Resolved.

Qualified.

Delivered.

Successful.

Ask three people responsible for producing that outcome what it means.

Don't correct them.

Don't explain what they're supposed to say.

Just listen.

If you get three different answers, don't start shopping for software yet.

You may have just found the system behind the system.

— Touré

P.S. P.S. You don't need 150 CEOs for this problem to show up. Sometimes it only takes three teams with three different definitions of “done.” If you're curious where that may be happening inside your organization, let's map it → Apply to Work With Ecrof​