World Resources Institute: Decision-Making Across Continents

Jared Messinger manages a matrix team of 150 people scattered across three continents.

It would give any leader nightmares. Each day, he confronts something most would find incredibly daunting: a complex team whose mission is to restore millions of hectares of degraded land to deliver durable benefits for nature, climate, water, and people over time.

The World Resources Institute Restoration Program has grown dramatically over the past decade. From 20 people mostly based in D.C, it grew to encompass staff across offices in Kenya, Rwanda, Ghana, Brazil, Colombia, India, Indonesia, and beyond. As they scaled, Jared noticed, their decision-making infrastructure couldn't keep pace.

"There was a lot of tension and lack of clarity around how decisions were getting made and who was having a chance to weigh in," Jared explains. To begin organizing the chaos, the team created a detailed RACI matrix. This spreadsheet mapped who was Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed for each decision. A project management standard, it looked impressive on paper. "But people would kind of glaze over when you showed it to them," he admits.

The real problem wasn't the RACI. Static documentation doesn't automatically change human behavior. Decisions were happening in email threads where the right people weren't always copied. Important conversations vanished into SharePoint's labyrinth of folders. When 150 people are saving files across time zones, organizational memory can become organizational archaeology.

The catalyst came from an unrelated project. Sean, Jared's supervisor, had been quietly using Loomio for years with a small nonprofit in northern Maine. With six volunteers coordinating a town revitalization project across complicated schedules who have full-time jobs elsewhere, Loomio provided an asynchronous way to maintain a transparent record of board decisions.

Sean had advocated for Loomio internally at WRI, but there was always hesitation. How would something that works for six people translate to 150? Then finally, as Jared puts it, Sean made the call: "We're doing it. This one's [Loomio's] worth it. It will make things easier, not more complicated."

The timing was right. The team was already experiencing tool fatigue. Asana, SharePoint, Teams, Slack, WhatsApp. Messages could reach someone six different ways. Loomio filled a gap none of those tools addressed: a transparent system of record for consequential decisions.

Starting Small

Rather than rolling out organization-wide, the WRI Restoration Program started out small with their Loomio implementation. They decided to pilot it first with their Africa program, where they felt the most pressure to get distributed decision-making right. Teams in Nairobi, Kigali, and Accra were growing. Decisions were happening in parallel without proper coordination.

They began with big program-wide decisions like budget approvals and work plan revisions. It was a relief to give everyone visibility into processes that had previously felt opaque. "Loomio is a really great way to bring our relationships to life," Jared discovered. "You can create a subgroup of who you want to be consulted, they all get tagged, everyone gets informed."

The team created a two-stage process: managers weigh in first with recommendations, then senior leadership provides final approval. They developed a visual flowchart showing how ideas move from conception through discussion to official decision. Everything relevant was posted on Mondays. Managers gave input by Wednesday. Leadership approved by Friday. Nothing would take more than a week.

In theory.

The Human Side

The reality of behavior change quickly surfaced. WRI had included a "request a meeting" option in their voting templates. It was meant to be a safety valve for when things weren't clear. People defaulted to it constantly. "It feels like giving them a way out of making a decision," Jared notes. Instead of deciding asynchronously, meetings got scheduled, discussions dragged, and the process that should have taken a week stretched much longer.

There were other hiccups too. Junior staff felt nervous sharing feedback when 150 people could see it, worried they might contradict someone in leadership. The team also realized that engagement skyrocketed when people could actually vote in polls. Having real agency mattered. Those who could only comment, but not vote, participated far less.

These weren't failures of the tool. They were the organizational culture revealing itself. The real work wasn't technical. It was about building accountability around decision-making. With this accountability, with Sean and other leaders visibly using the tool themselves, they modelled the behavior they wanted to see.

Noticing What Works

With their Africa pilot showing promise, WRI is preparing to bring Loomio to their Latin America program. Offices in Brazil and Colombia work on entirely different projects with different team dynamics and need their own processes. The vision is clear: deeper implementation in Africa, expansion to Latin America, and eventually a global program-level instance for decisions that cross geographic boundaries.

"Our hope is that the broader institute sees: 'hey, it's working for this team,'" Jared reflects. Part of their proof-of-concept approach is to let the results speak. Keep doing good work. Let people peer around the corner and see something that's working.

When asked what advice he'd give other large distributed nonprofits, Jared emphasised two things. First: "The record is really the key thing. Separating these consequential decisions from the noise. From email, from chat. Having a place where you can easily reference what was decided and why." Second, whether using Loomio or not, create an inclusive process where all staff have a chance to weigh in on decisions. "Our org structure tends to be quite flat, so this inclusivity has been important for us," he notes. "It's been immensely helpful."

Nearly a year into their journey with Loomio, WRI isn't claiming perfection. They're claiming progress. In a matrixed remote organization spanning three continents and five time zones, that progress looks like transparency, accountability, and democracy of voices.

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