There was a stretch of my career when I was delivering and meeting expectations but could not have told you what I enjoyed about the job. Nothing was going wrong. In fact, I was being asked to take on more.
Every time the role expanded, something small had to go to make space for it. Each call made sense at the time. Each change interacted with the ones that came before. I did not see the cumulative effect until later. By then, the job had become something I could neither recognise nor connect with.
I see the same pattern in good operators across my network: purpose-driven people in complex environments, so caught up in doing what is needed and expected that they start shaving away the bits that make work both enjoyable and meaningful. And in health and human services, the organisations they lead are doing the same thing, program by program.
One call at a time
With the organisations I work with, choices like this rarely arrive as a strategy. They’re responses to signals that land one at a time. Each response has its own good reason, and each is defensible on its own. A service paused here. A team not replaced there. Every one of them the responsible call in the moment.
The contracted core is protected. What goes is the extras that deliver on the mission. The add-ons that fill the gaps in programs only partly designed around what each client needs in practice. The programs an organisation runs because of who it is, not only what their core contracts fund.
What gets cut to keep the doors open
On 26 June, the ORCA program ran for the last time. For eight years it had prepared young people with disability for work as they left school. Last year, more than 90 of them, through over 300 work placements, got experience and a reference. The first evidence that shows they can hold down a job.
Wesley Mission Queensland ran ORCA, and Wesley Mission is not in trouble. They described it as a difficult decision, driven by rising costs and changes to funding models, compliance and regulation. Somewhere in that, a decision was made: stop this one service, so the rest could keep going.
Ships’ crews have a word for this. When the weather turns and the ship is at risk, cargo goes over the side. Jettison. Each throw is the right call, because the ship has to stay afloat. The danger is arriving in port safe, with the hold empty, having thrown over the thing the voyage was for. Crews that do it well decide before they sail what goes over last.
For the families, Wesley Mission Queensland’s decision means fewer providers to choose from, and the money they spent with ORCA will now buy a fraction of the support. One of the families shared with the ABC that the funding that had bought their child support for two days a week for two years would now buy one day a week for less than six months. Another parent put it more plainly. “What are we supposed to do now?”
What I’m seeing happening this year across NGOs is not something you wait out.
In Queensland, state funding for many community organisations rose 3.31 per cent while award wages rose 4.75 per cent. Other states set their own numbers, but funding trailing wages is the prevailing pattern. From July 2026, superannuation is paid every payday instead of every quarter, so cash goes out sooner too.
The types of pressures that stopped ORCA are likely to increase rather than go away.
“Each pressure influences the others. Over time, this interaction creates something different from a series of problems. It creates a convergence effect.”
— Susanne Le Boutillier, The Convergence Trap
Seeing the sum
Every board in health and human services will face a version of the choice Wesley Mission faced, and most will make it as carefully. The single call is rarely where it goes wrong. The harder part is seeing the sum of them while there is still room to choose a direction and make the necessary changes.
The deeper trap is that the squeeze you’re feeling starts doing the thinking.
When attention narrows, every response starts to look like subtraction, and ideas that might once have been explored get set aside as too hard. Experiencing constraint also allows sacred cows to finally be questioned. So, before the next cut is agreed, ask two questions first.
What are we assuming cannot change about how this is delivered? What could we test, small, to find out? And what must still be true about this organisation when the pressure passes?
They are the questions I eventually had to ask about my own job. Sometimes the answer will still be the cut. Then it is a choice rather than a default.
That is what the Convergence Trap field guide is for. It gives a board the questions that surface the pattern while it is still a set of choices, before a sequence of sensible decisions becomes a direction no one chose.
If your board is starting to face these choices, reach out and I will send you the field guide. I work with boards and executive teams on exactly these calls: what has to be protected, what could be redesigned, and what to test before the next cut is made.
