Most leaders spend their entire careers chasing certainty.
They build contingency plans. Create predictability frameworks. Design organizational structures that eliminate ambiguity.
Todd White built five multimillion-dollar businesses doing the opposite.
“I celebrate uncertainty, strive for growth, never stop learning, am always curious, ask the tough questions and thoroughly enjoy solving complex problems.”
That single principle transformed him from a CPA at a small firm to CEO of Rescue Mission Alliance, with stops as President, COO, and CFO of Barna Group and co-founder of AdChek along the way.
When Certainty Becomes Your Competitor
During my conversation with Todd, CEO of Rescue Mission Alliance, we explored something most leadership books won’t tell you: the pursuit of certainty is killing organizational agility.
“When everyone else is looking for certainty and stability, what are you looking for instead?” I asked him.
His answer reframes everything you think you know about leadership.
Most leaders build organizations that need stability to function. Todd builds organizations that use uncertainty as fuel. The difference isn’t just philosophical – it’s structural.
Consider how most companies respond when markets shift. They freeze. Call emergency meetings. Wait for clarity before acting.
Todd’s organizations? They accelerate.
Want to learn how I help leaders like Todd capture insights and turn them into systematic frameworks? Discover the Masterclass now.
The Problem With High Performers
Here’s a truth most leadership consultants dance around: brilliant people are difficult to direct.
They resist authority. Question decisions. Push back on structure.
Yet Todd has spent 30+ years “directing highly skilled teams that collaborate as focused units to achieve aggressive business goals.”
How?
The secret is in that phrase: “collaborate as focused units.”
Most leaders try to control high performers. Todd aligns them.
When he walked into Barna Group as President, COO, and CFO, he inherited a research organization full of brilliant analysts who’d built their careers on independent thinking. The kind of people who’d rather debate methodology than execute strategy.
Standard leadership playbook says: establish clear hierarchy, define roles, create accountability structures.
Todd did something different. He treated organizational alignment like a systems problem, not a people problem.
The framework has three interdependent layers:
→ Leverage key relationships (the people system)
→ Optimize process improvements (the operational system)
→ Maximize performance (the outcome system)
But here’s the insight that changed everything for me during our conversation: you can’t optimize these in isolation.
From Startup Founder to Fortune 500 to Non-Profit CEO
Todd’s career trajectory reveals something fascinating about transferable leadership principles.
He co-founded AdChek, an innovative marketing and media company. Entrepreneur mode – building from nothing, rapid iteration, survival thinking.
Then Gospel Light Publications as CFO and VP of Finance. Established company mode – optimization, efficiency, protecting margins.
Then Barna Group for over a decade as President, COO, and CFO. Transformation mode – taking something good and making it exceptional.
Now Rescue Mission Alliance as CEO. Mission-driven mode – faith-based leadership where profit isn’t the primary metric.
Four completely different contexts. Same fundamental approach.
“Looking across your 30+ years, what’s the common thread?” I asked.
His answer: “I apply operational and financial know-how to solve problems, reduce cost, and grow the enterprise in a profitable manner.”
Notice what he didn’t say. He didn’t mention strategy. Vision. Culture.
Those are outputs of solving the right problems correctly.
The Faith-Business Integration Question
This is where most business leaders get uncomfortable.
Todd operates at the intersection of authentic purpose and aggressive business goals. Faith-based organizations and Fortune 500 operational excellence.
For most leaders, these feel mutually exclusive. You’re either mission-driven or profit-driven. Purpose-focused or performance-focused.
“How do you integrate authentic purpose with aggressive business goals without compromising either?” I asked.
His framework is surprisingly simple but deeply challenging to execute.
Most organizations treat values as decorative. They’re on the website, mentioned in onboarding, forgotten in execution.
Todd embeds them structurally. Not through slogans but through decision-making frameworks.
When Barna Group analyzed trends affecting faith and culture, they weren’t just collecting data. They were providing insights that helped organizations make better decisions aligned with their values.
That’s not research. That’s integration.
At RMA, he’s not just running a social services organization. He’s building an organization that outlasts him – where the thinking becomes embedded in the DNA.
“How do you embed this kind of thinking into an organization so it becomes part of the DNA, not just dependent on one leader?” I asked.
The answer involves what I call “organized genius.”
This is exactly what I teach in The Models Method Masterclass – how to capture intuitive genius and make it transferable, scalable, and valuable. Watch it here.
From Intuitive Genius to Organized Genius
Most entrepreneurial leaders operate on intuition. They see patterns others miss. Make connections that seem obvious in retrospect but were invisible in the moment.
That intuitive genius is what builds companies.
But it’s also what limits them.
Because when the founder leaves, the genius leaves with them. The sales team doesn’t know why the pitch worked. The operations team doesn’t understand why certain processes mattered. The culture deteriorates because no one captures what made it special.
Todd’s approach is different. He codifies the thinking.
Not through policy manuals. Not through standard operating procedures.
Through frameworks that capture the strategic thinking behind the decisions.
During our conversation, I built a visual model that maps his entire leadership philosophy. Not because I’m clever at drawing, but because visual models are the system for thinking and influence.
Written documents are the system for records. They capture information.
Visual models sponsor deep thinking. They make the invisible visible. They turn intuitive genius into organized genius that can scale through multiple generations of teams.
Watch the full episode to see this live visual framework being built in real-time.
The Speed Advantage of Small
Here’s where Todd’s story gets counterintuitive again.
When he talks to large organizations about partnership, he often hears: “That’s interesting, but we work with big companies.”
His response isn’t to pretend to be bigger. It’s to use his size as a weapon.
“We were small, we were agile, we didn’t have resources. But that was also our advantage.”
Big companies take a year and 150K to build a simple feature. Multiple approvals, complex integrations, bureaucratic delays.
Todd’s teams? Two weeks and 2K.
That’s not just efficiency. That’s a completely different operating model.
Most small companies try to compete with large organizations by acting like them. Professional branding, enterprise pricing, complex processes.
Todd embraced being small. Moved faster. Iterated quicker. Stayed closer to customers.
At AdChek, this meant out-maneuvering competitors who had more resources but less agility.
At Barna Group, this meant responding to cultural shifts before larger research firms even noticed them.
At RMA, this means addressing complex social challenges with entrepreneurial thinking, not bureaucratic solutions.
The Uncertainty Advantage
Let’s return to where we started: celebrating uncertainty.
Most leadership advice tells you to reduce uncertainty for your team. Provide clarity. Establish direction. Create predictability.
Todd does the opposite. He teaches his teams to find opportunity in ambiguity.
“How do you help your team make this shift?” I asked.
The answer involves reframing what uncertainty represents.
For most organizations, uncertainty means risk. Potential downside. Things that could go wrong.
For Todd’s organizations, uncertainty means optionality. Potential upside. Things that haven’t been figured out yet.
That shift – from uncertainty as threat to uncertainty as opportunity – changes everything.
It changes who you hire. Risk-averse people flee uncertainty. Entrepreneurial people hunt for it.
It changes how you plan. Traditional planning assumes the future is predictable. Entrepreneurial planning assumes it’s not – and builds flexibility into the model.
It changes what you measure. Traditional metrics track variance from plan. Entrepreneurial metrics track learning velocity and adaptation speed.
The framework Todd uses involves three questions:
What are we learning that others aren’t seeing?
How can we move faster than our size would suggest?
Where is complexity creating opportunity?
These aren’t theoretical questions. They’re operational disciplines.
At Barna Group, they didn’t just track faith trends. They identified the patterns before they became obvious, giving clients a decision-making advantage.
At RMA, they don’t just provide social services. They solve systemic problems in ways that create sustainable impact.
Ready to learn how to build frameworks like this for your own organization? Join The Models Method Masterclass.
The Wisdom That Transfers
Near the end of our conversation, I asked Todd: “What’s the most important thing you’ve learned about leadership that you want to make sure gets passed on to the next generation?”
His answer surprised me.
Not strategy. Not tactics. Not even frameworks.
“The ability to ask tough questions and thoroughly enjoy solving complex problems.”
Most leaders want simple answers. Clean solutions. Predictable outcomes.
Todd has built his career on the opposite. Embracing complexity. Asking questions that make people uncomfortable. Solving problems everyone else considers too difficult.
That’s not a skill. That’s a mindset.
And mindsets, unlike skills, can’t be taught through a manual. They have to be modeled. Demonstrated. Lived.
Which brings us back to organized genius. The visual framework I created during our conversation doesn’t just capture Todd’s thinking. It models it. Makes it visible. Turns intuition into something others can see, understand, and apply.
That’s the difference between leaders who scale their impact and leaders who don’t.
Todd isn’t building organizations that need him. He’s building organizations that embody the thinking that made them successful – so they can continue long after he’s gone.
What You Can Apply Tomorrow
If you’re leading an organization and want to embrace uncertainty rather than fight it:
Start by reframing uncertainty in your next team meeting. Instead of “here’s what we don’t know and why that’s concerning,” try “here’s what we don’t know and what opportunity that creates.”
The language shift matters. It changes how people think.
Second, identify where you’re trying to control high performers instead of aligning them. Control creates compliance. Alignment creates commitment.
Ask yourself: are your brilliant people pulling in the same direction because they have to, or because they want to?
Third, audit where your organizational genius lives. Is it documented in your founder’s head? Captured in tribal knowledge? Or codified in frameworks that can scale?
Most companies discover their genius dies with the people who built it. Don’t let that be your story.
Want to learn the exact system I use to help leaders codify their genius?
The Models Method Masterclass shows you how.
And watch the full conversation with Todd White to see this methodology in action.
