Starting with the End in Mind: The Decelerator’s Approach

The Decelerator helps organisations confidently and critically explore their organisation's lifespan and purpose. So how are we applying these ideas to our own journey?

Some people assume conversations about endings have to feel like being pushed off a cliff—dramatic, overwhelming, and terrifying. We’re here to prove they don’t have to be. Photo by Philip Veater on Unsplash

The Decelerator’s journey began with a simple question: What if organisational endings weren’t feared or avoided but embraced as opportunities for growth, learning, and renewal?

After five years of exploration and an 18-month pilot, The Decelerator now provides practical support, research, training, and advocacy—working towards a future where all civil society organisations have the guidance, resources, and funding they need to navigate endings with purpose, compassion, and impact. Creating the conditions for regeneration, innovation, resilience and deep growth.

We aim to shift perceptions and culture, dismantle policy and regulatory barriers, and ensure endings are properly resourced. Our goal is for organisations to approach endings as intentionally as time and circumstance allow—driven by impact rather than crisis or circumstance alone.

At The Decelerator, we believe that embracing both growth and endings—acceleration and deceleration—isn’t about avoiding failure or clinging to survival at all costs. It’s about clarity, conviction, and an unwavering focus on what truly matters.

It’s often assumed that The Decelerator’s work is all about closure - that endings only matter at the very end. But as John Hitchin, a member of our Council of Elders, aptly put it earlier this month: "A good gardener knows that a fruitful orchard needs regular pruning."

So, how are we applying these principles to our own work? We offer the following reflections not as a universal blueprint but as an honest account of how we’re navigating these questions within our mission in real-time. We believe that an organisation’s structure, lifecycle, and approach should be shaped by its mission and purpose—there is no one-size-fits-all model. What works for us may not work for others, and that’s exactly the point.

Civil society is at a crossroads, facing both immense pressures and transformative opportunities. We’d love to hear from you: How are you shaping your own cycles of growth and change, expansion and contraction, to stay focused on purpose and impact?

1. Time-Bound by Design: A 5–10 Year Horizon

For us, existing in perpetuity would feel not just impractical—but contradictory to our purpose.

Instead, we have set a 10-year lifespan, giving us enough time to catalyse shifts in mindset and infrastructure while ensuring we don’t become just another fixture in civil society, detached from systemic change.

Our ultimate goal is for deceleration to become a widely understood and integrated practice—coexisting in healthy tension with innovation, acceleration, and new beginnings.

This defined timeframe shapes everything:

• Strategy & partnerships – prioritising open-sourcing, knowledge-sharing and replication so others can carry the work forward.

• Sustainability – ensuring that others, not just us, are equipped to take up the mantle of this work.

• Pragmatism – recognising the funding realities of civil society, avoiding overextending ourselves in an increasingly precarious landscape, and avoiding spending disproportionate amounts of valuable human and financial resources chasing funding.

2. Choosing the Right Legal Form for Our Mission

Many organisations default to becoming charities, often as a means of accessing funding. We nearly took this route—twice.

In 2021 and 2022, we considered setting up a charity, tempted by funding that was contingent on a particular legal structure. But ultimately, we chose a different path.

Instead of becoming a charity, we were hosted by New Constellations for one year before formally establishing ourselves as a Company Limited by Guarantee with an asset lock—ensuring that all income we raise or earn remains dedicated to our mission.

This structure gives us flexibility while maintaining integrity, avoiding the constraints of charity status while remaining true to course and mission-driven.

Our biggest takeaway? Let your purpose dictate your structure, not the other way around.

By taking the time to choose a model that aligned with our work, we avoided the trap of shaping our mission around funders’ priorities rather than the real needs of our work.

3. Rethinking Governance: A Council of Elders

We are committed to being accountable to the sector we serve. Transparency builds trust in our intentions, legitimacy in our actions, and credibility in our insights and recommendations.

Because we’re not a charity, we don’t require a formal board of trustees. Instead, we’ve established a Council of Elders—a group of experienced, well-networked advisors who serve as critical friends, strategic guides, and champions of our work.

Unlike trustees, they have no legal governance role, but they provide:

• Strategic oversight – helping us stay mission-aligned.

• Accountability to the sector – ensuring our work remains relevant and impactful.

• Mentorship for our team – offering guidance and perspective.

We’re trialling this model for two years, embracing the spirit of experimentation to see how it serves us and whether it strengthens our impact.

4. Working with Feeling: Embedding Supervision

Endings are complex, emotionally charged, and deeply human. That’s why we built supervision into our core practices from day one. Supervision at The Decelerator serves two key purposes:

1. Reflective Practice – It allows staff to examine their approach, unpack challenges, and refine their thinking, ensuring continuous development.

2. Staff Wellbeing – Supporting people through difficult endings can be emotionally taxing, sometimes resonating with personal experiences. Supervision provides a space to process these challenges and maintain resilience.

For us, supervision includes:

• 1:1 professional supervision for core team members.

• Peer-to-peer supervision for the whole team.

• Guidance from our Supervisor, Max St John, drawing on Nonviolent Communication, clinical supervision models, and other reflective practices.

This helps us move beyond a focus on pure productivity—it’s about creating space for reflection, growth, and shared learning. Supervision ensures we stay adaptive, compassionate, and focused on what truly matters. Supervision is part of what gives us the confidence this work is sustainable.

5. Supporting Leadership: Avoiding Burnout & Isolation

Leadership can be lonely. In our work, we see first-hand how isolation weakens organisations and drains their resilience. As a result, CEO and leadership tenures in the sector are, on average, getting shorter, with some sources estimating that CEOs are in their roles for an average of 3-5 years. This is unlikely to help us serve our mission

With an intentionally time-bound lifespan and a lean team, we’re acutely aware of the risk of burnout. Here’s how we’re mitigating it:

• Shared leadership – Iona leads day-to-day work; Louise maintains a panoramic view.

• Supervision – ensuring our leaders’ needs are taken seriously.

• Peer networks – creating informal spaces for leadership support.

If we are to sustain this work during and beyond The Decelerator’s lifetime, we must also sustain ourselves.

6. Designing a Hotline with Finite Resources and Focused on Systemic Impact

The Decelerator Hotline was never meant to be an infinite, catch-all service. Instead, it’s a proof of concept—demonstrating that alternative approaches to endings are possible.

To balance demand with capacity, we’re experimenting with a “chapter” model:

• Three months of delivery - the Hotline is open for calls from people across civil society. They sign up by completing a simple form after which we connect them to one of our team with the skills and availability to suit the caller’s needs.

• One month of deceleration - every four months we close the Hotline to new calls and take a month to slow down and really think about our work—looking back at what’s gone well and where we can improve, then planning what to do next. Taking a breather to make sure we’re on the right track.

This rhythm allows us to:

✔ Encourage other organisations to step into this space to meet demand when the Hotline is closed.

✔ Learn from demand patterns to refine our approach.

✔ Ensure insights from the Hotline feed into broader systemic change.

7. Embodying Deceleration: Practicing What We Preach

If we advocate for intentional endings, we must apply these principles to ourselves.

We do this by:

• Pausing when needed – e.g., temporarily halting the hotline when demand outstripped our capacity in late 2024.

• Structured review points – integrating relationship health checks into our partnerships.

• Deceleration months – planned pauses in April, August, and December to prevent burnout and reflect on our work.

Deceleration isn’t just a concept—it’s a practice we endeavour to embody and live with through our everyday behaviours, practices and interactions.

What’s Next? Experimentation & Learning in Real Time

This is all a work in progress. Some of these approaches are proving invaluable. Others will evolve.

What matters to us most is our willingness to experiment, challenge assumptions, and share our learnings openly—so that others can build, grow, and navigate endings with intention.

👉 We’d love to hear from you. What resonates with you? What are you testing in your work? What else could we experiment with at The Decelerator if we’re serious about progressing with our end in mind? Respond below or drop us an email: hello@decelerator.org.uk.

Endings don’t have to mean falling off a cliff—sometimes, they’re a chance to grab a telescope, see what’s next, whilst gracefully let go of what no longer serves an organisation’s work or purpose. Photo by Dinu J Nair on Unsplash