The Sacred Work of Spreadsheets
🎧 Prefer to listen? Click the audio below to listen to me narrate this post. Bear with me as I venture into the world of audio recording.
I’m shifting gears a bit this month to talk about one of the most mundane parts of our human existence: budgets.
My full-time job is in higher education. Like all areas, we’re being asked to do more with less. Universities are competing against each other for shrinking resources and a smaller student population. It’s stressful and uncertain.
The perfect opportunity for Ignatian discernment.
Rooted in St. Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, Ignatian discernment offers a powerful framework for leaders navigating financial crises. Rather than defaulting to conventional cost-cutting measures, this 500-year-old practice invites us to examine our attachments, challenge our assumptions, and remain open to unexpected possibilities.
Ignatian discernment doesn't guarantee easy answers, perfection, or problem-free futures. Rather, it invites us into a deeper quality of decision-making that acknowledges our humanity, challenges our partiality, and opens us to courage we didn't know we had.
Our institutions need effective, not efficient, processes. They need leaders who can discern the difference between what we're comfortable with and who we’re called to be.
I know this all too well. I was on a high-level committee responsible for reducing and reinvesting our university budget by $31 million. Nothing about this work was easy, including accepting the invitation to serve on it. Looking back, I can see how it honed my ability to support others in their discernment process in the workplace.
Institutions of all kinds are facing similar situations with budget cuts and impossible financial decisions. So, in that spirit, I’m sharing a list of discernment-based questions that guided our committee’s work and questions I wish we would have wrestled with.
Green leaves sprouting in a cup of coins. Photo credit: @micheile
Discernment Questions for Financial Decisions
Examine Attachments:
What do I resist most? What am I most afraid to cut? What does this fear reveal about my values and about what and who I'm protecting?
Which programs or initiatives am I defending because they truly serve our mission, and which am I protecting because of personal legacy or my own personal comfort?
If I were advising another institution facing this exact situation, what would I recommend? What changes when it’s my own context?
Interrogate Assumptions:
What stories am I telling myself about what’s “impossible” to change? Where did these stories come from?
Which stakeholders’ voices are missing from my decision-making process? Whose perspective would most challenge my current thinking? Am I open to being challenged? If not, why?
What would it look like to make decisions from abundance rather than scarcity, even in a moment of constraint?
Open to Innovation:
What if this crisis is an invitation rather than just a threat? What has this institution been too comfortable to change until now?
Where am I choosing incremental cuts to avoid transformational change? What am I delaying that could actually strengthen our mission?
If we could only keep three signature programs or initiatives, which would they be? What does this reveal about who we value?
Test for Consolation and Desolation:
When I imagine implementing this decision in five years, does it bring a sense of deep peace (consolation) or lingering unease (desolation)? Does this decision move us toward greater service to others (consolation), or does it serve my personal self-interest (desolation)?
Am I rushing this decision to relieve my own anxiety, or am I moving with thoughtful urgency?
Does this path lead toward greater alignment with our mission, or are we compromising our core identity to preserve our own personal comfort?
Seek Freedom:
What would I decide if I knew I couldn’t fail? What would I decide if I knew I would be criticized no matter what I chose?
Am I making this decision to serve students, staff, and faculty or to manage my own reputation and relationships?
Can I hold this decision loosely enough to be corrected, yet firmly enough to lead with conviction?
Two people talking at a desk with laptops. Photo credit: @charlesdeluvio
How to Use Discernment Questions
These questions aren’t a one-time exercise; they're meant to be revisited throughout the budget process as committees gather more data. Discernment requires both qualitative and quantitative information, including lived experience, feelings, anecdotes, and gut instincts. As new data emerge, our answers may shift. These questions need to be woven into the decision-making process, not added as an afterthought.
Here are some ways to integrate discernment into decision-making:
Level set. Do not assume a shared understanding of mission. Give committee members time to reflect on their understanding of the institution’s mission. Invite members to define key words in the mission in their own words. Then, ask members to share their definitions, noting areas of convergence and divergence in answers. Aim to bring everyone on the same page so the committee is working from shared definitions from the beginning. Ground future conversations and decisions in that shared understanding of mission.
Center. Open meetings with 3 minutes for committee members to reflect on one of the discernment questions individually in silence. Invite someone to read a discernment question aloud. Set a timer for 3 minutes for people to write or think about their responses. Then, go around the room and have each person offer one word that captures their response. This opening gives committee members time to reflect and equal time to share.
Recombobulate (if you’re a Milwaukeean like me, you know what that means). Break up longer meetings and reorient challenging meetings with recombobulation time. Provide members with 3-5 questions to reflect on for up to 10 minutes. Then, have members share their responses in pairs or triads. Have each group report out to the large group. Pay attention to patterns in responses; use that to inform future discussions and decisions.
Ground. Close meetings with 3 minutes for committee members to reflect on the day's decisions. Like “Center,” invite someone to read one of the discernment questions aloud. Set a timer for 3 minutes for people to write or think about their responses. Then, go around the room and have each person offer one word that captures the essence of their reflection. This closing gives committee members time to process what happened and equal space to name their experience before leaving.
Expand. Ask all members, “What questions should we have asked today that we didn’t?” This can be done anonymously through writing or through discussion. This question broadens the scope of inquiry beyond what was already addressed, opening up new lines of thinking.
Is discernment work easy? No. But it can lighten the heaviness that comes with financial decisions and open us up to new ways of engaging our creative problem-solving skills.
