Is This A Feature Or a bug?

Feature or Bug? The Question That Changes Everything.

On his first visit to the church I was leading, RL Brown pulled me aside and told me something I smiled at and promptly ignored.

He and his wife Joann had just found our church. RL was 69 years old, the founder of rlbrownreports.com, and the premier economist in Arizona's housing market. Sharp, direct, rugged and about as low-maintenance as a man of his stature could be. He told me if they called Journey home, he would never want me to ask him to be an elder.

Within a year he became the first chairman of the board our new church ever had.

We led that church together for years. He taught me things about leadership, business, and life that I carry to this day. He was a gift I did not deserve and did not take for granted.

On Sunday, May 17th, at 3:15 in the afternoon, I held RL's hand as he was promoted to the next life. I cheered him for a life well lived. A few days later I oversaw his funeral. Then we hopped in the car and made the long drive back to Oklahoma City and grieved the loss of a friend.

Windshield Musings

Somewhere on that drive a thought settled in on me.

If you want to love well and be loved, you have to be willing to be hurt deeply when you lose the people who are close to you. One requires the other. The grief is not a bug to resolve. It is a feature of love itself.

That idea stayed with me all the way home. And it connected to something I had been thinking about in Mexico just days before.

Between RL’s promotion and his funeral, I was in Sonora, Mexioc meeting with the leadership of SIPINNA. SIPINNA is a state body responsible for coordinating children's rights policy across every level and agency of the Sonoran government. We were talking about one of the most consistent challenges in our work.

Foster care in Mexico sits under the Procuradorea department. That position is appointed by the governor. And the governor changes every six years.

Every six years, the entire administrative team largely turns over. Every six years, the progress we have made becomes history from the last administration. A new party might not want to continue what the old party started. Even if the same party wins, new people are in charge who lack the experience and context to know what worked and why. It all feels so fragile because of this.

SIPINNA sees this clearly. So do we. Our team asked for advice on how to be better leaders in this reality.

For a long time this felt like a problem to solve. It is not. You cannot remove the foster care program structurally from the governor's office right now. That is where it lives. That is the arena. And if we want to see children get out of government-run orphanages and into the arms of loving families, we are required to work within that system.

This is a feature, not a bug.

The bug would be if we could not build strong relationships with new government leaders. That is fixable. The feature is the turnover itself. So we get better and better at working with incoming administrations, at convincing new leaders of the validity of the program, at building momentum that carries across political transitions. We suit up and get on the field. Every time.

This is the question I find myself asking more and more as a leader:

Is this a feature or a bug?

A bug is an error. Fix it. A feature is a condition of the work. Manage it well.

A Few Examples From The Nonprofit World

Your cause will never be fully solved. Feature. Using that as an excuse not to measure progress. Bug.

Fundraising will always take the leader's time. Feature. Being the only person in the organization who can close a gift. Bug.

Board members will always be busy. Feature. Board members not knowing what is expected of them. Bug.

Staff will have hard days. Feature. Having no culture that absorbs hard seasons. Bug.

Change being slow in the communities you serve. Feature. Your program model never being evaluated. Bug.

Knowing the difference changes how you approach the solution and saves you from trying to fix what just needs to be managed well.

Is It Worth It?

RL Brown knew this. He built a decades-long business in one of the most volatile markets in the country. He did not try to fix the housing cycle. He understood it, gather all the data, worked within it, and became the person everyone called when they needed to make sense of it.

I do not regret one second of the time and investment I made in that friendship with RL. The grief is real. The loss is significant. And it was worth every single second.

The feature of love is that it costs something. The question is whether what you are building as a leader is worth the cost.

For the children in Mexico, it is.

For RL, it was.

I wouldn’t change either.

I am cheering for you.