We Are Always Part of Something Bigger

Saturday was the first football game of the season.

My son is a first-year student and football player at Tennessee State University. He didn't play — not surprising for a first-year player — but you couldn't have kept me away.

It was the John Merritt Classic: Tennessee State and Jackson State, two Historically Black Colleges and Universities, opening the season in Nashville.

And yes, there was football.

But if you've ever been to an HBCU football game, you know football is only part of what is happening.

The bands. The dancers. The music. The colors. The alumni. The families. The traditions.

It is a spectacular musical and cultural experience that happens to have a football game running through the middle of it.

If you've never been, I recommend going at least once — whether you care about football or not.

Sitting there Saturday, though, I kept noticing something else.

I was surrounded by an ecosystem.

Actually, multiple ecosystems.

These were two universities, certainly. But they were also part of higher education. Part of the histories and communities of Nashville and Jackson. Part of the history of HBCUs and the generations of people whose lives have been changed by them.

There were current students and faculty and families.

There were young children dressed head to toe in school colors who already seemed to understand: This is part of who we are.

Some of them will grow up and attend Tennessee State or Jackson State. Some will attend another HBCU. Some won't attend an HBCU at all. But their families were giving them something already — an experience of connection, history, possibility, and belonging.

And then there were alumni in their eighties, some using wheelchairs and walkers, proudly accompanied by children, grandchildren, maybe great-grandchildren.

Think about that span for a minute.

In the same stadium, there were people encountering this community near the beginning of their lives and people who had carried it with them for most of theirs.

Politicians came and reminded us to vote.

The bands played music that took some of us back decades and then, without missing a beat, played something the students knew better than we did.

Thousands of people recognized the same songs.

Different ages. Different cities. Different professions. Different experiences.

And still, there was this unmistakable sense of us.

I've been thinking about that ever since.

Because none of what I experienced Saturday exists because everyone belongs to the same organization.

They don't.

It exists because people, institutions, histories, communities, and generations are connected across boundaries by something larger than any one of them.

That's how most consequential things actually get done.

We draw boxes around organizations. Then we draw more boxes inside them: divisions, departments, teams, roles, reporting lines.

Those boundaries matter. They establish ownership and accountability.

But the work rarely stays neatly inside them.

We depend on people we don't manage. Information held somewhere else. Resources controlled by another department. Decisions that require multiple perspectives. Relationships that stretch beyond the organization entirely.

We operate inside ecosystems. And those ecosystems are rarely ideal.

Resources are constrained. Priorities compete. Interests collide. People disagree about what matters most. Information doesn't always travel where it needs to go. Some parts of the system have more power than others.

And yet, somehow, we still have to get important things done together.

That ability is what I mean when I talk about organizational capacity.

Organizational capacity is the infrastructure that allows people to work across all those boundaries in service of something they cannot accomplish alone.

It's how we prioritize when everything feels important. How we make decisions people can understand and act on. How information moves. How resources move. How we coordinate work that crosses clear lines of ownership. How we learn and adjust as conditions change.

It is the connective infrastructure underneath the work.

And I think we sometimes miss it because we're looking so intently at the individual pieces.

Saturday, you could have looked at the field and seen two football teams.

You could have looked at the stands and seen spectators.

You could have looked at the bands and seen performers.

You could have looked at the universities and seen two institutions.

All of those things were true.

But they weren't the whole truth. The whole thing was in the connections.

The eight-year-old in school colors. The eighty-year-old alum. The student on the field. The parent in the stands. The professor. The politician. The band playing a song thousands of people somehow knew together.

Each was distinct. Each had a different role. And each was part of something that could only exist because the others were there too.

Organizations are not families, and I don't think we should pretend they are. But they are human systems.

We come together around shared purpose and the belief that, collectively, we can create something none of us can create alone.

The org chart tells us where the pieces sit.

Organizational capacity is what allows the pieces to work together.

And increasingly, I think that's where our attention needs to be.

-DeEtta

A Sounding will show you where your organization's decision-making stands today. Our courses are where you build capacity with your team.

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