Solutions in the In-Between

David Whyte reminds us in Crossing the Unknown Sea:

“What you can plan is too small for you to live.”

It’s a line worth carrying into the last quarter of the year, when every organization is staring down the same mix of ambition and anxiety: goals not yet met, budgets that feel too tight, and the big headaches that keep people up at night.

The temptation is to double down on a single benchmark—chase the number, finish the project, hit the deadline. But the truth is, real solutions don’t come from one goal alone. Had a leader I respect say "We aren't addressing health inequity without also elevating community leaders. We don't have the luxury of just doing one thing at a time." The better solutions emerge in the in-between spaces, where competing needs press against each other, and where progress demands holding multiple goods at once.

The Only Path Forward Is Discomfort

This is uncomfortable work. Efficiency will argue against equity. Urgency will push back on sustainability. Simplicity will beg to be chosen over depth. But if we only pick one, we trade short-term relief for long-term imbalance.

Discomfort, then, isn’t something to avoid—it’s the only path forward. It’s the signal that we’re standing in the right place: the overlap, the tension, the shaded space on the Venn diagram where new ways of working wait to be found.

Multiple Paths to Yes

Wouldn’t it be something if more councils, boards, and teams asked not “which path do we choose?” but “what would it take to build multiple paths to yes?”

Yes to sustainability and profitability.Yes to efficiency and dignity.Yes to finishing the year strong and starting next year wiser.

This isn’t naïve optimism. It’s disciplined imagination—the kind that creates win-win scenarios instead of compromise that leaves everyone half-satisfied.

Forward Into the Unknown

Whyte also writes:

“The core act of leadership must be the act of making conversations real. The conversations that create the real world.”

In these final months of the year, the most important conversations will not be about one metric or one victory. They’ll be about how to stand inside the discomfort of competing priorities, how to refuse the easy either/or, and how to believe that the unknown—though uncertain—has a forward momentum all its own.

As this year closes, the challenge is not simply to measure improvement, but to build in the overlaps, to search for solutions that don’t force us into false choices. The future isn’t in one circle of the diagram. It’s in the shaded space between.