Member since August 2025
Elizabeth Scott, PhD, is a visionary thought leader and organizational development consultant, and founder of Brighter Strategies. With a passion for empowering impact-driven organizations to expand their influence, Dr. Scott brings over 20 years of experience to the table. She has provided training and consulting services in strategic planning, process improvement, and human capital/workforce development to hundreds of organizations.
Dr. Scott is adept at leading strategic impact initiatives and managing change, ensuring organizations achieve their goals through effective change management. A certified Standard of Excellence consultant and a Baldrige examiner for the Commonwealth of Virginia, she is trained in a variety of strategic and organizational tools, including Grove Consultants' Strategic Visioning, the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument, and Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team.
A respected and sought-after speaker on strategic and operational planning, board governance, and capacity building, Dr. Scott published her first book, "Lessons in Leadership," in November 2015. Until recently, she held faculty positions at The Chicago School and George Mason University, where she taught graduate-level courses in organizational diagnosis & assessment, change management, culture, statistics, data collection, and evaluation design.
Dr. Scott holds an undergraduate degree in Sociology and a master’s degree in Organizational Sciences from The George Washington University, as well as a second master’s and Ph.D. in Human and Organizational Systems from Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara, California. She resides in Falls Church, Virginia, with her husband, two dogs, and two cats. To learn more, please visit www.brighterstrategies.com.
The moment when I see someone's eyes light up as they realize that the person across from them—whether it's a colleague from a different department, a community partner, or someone from another culture entirely—isn't just a contact in their network, but a genuine connection that can amplify their impact. Whether I'm working with leaders who discover how trust-based relationships can transform their organizations from the inside out, or I'm traveling and witnessing how authentic curiosity about someone's story can bridge cultural divides, it's that spark of human connection that energizes me. There's something magical about watching barriers dissolve when people move from transactional interactions to authentic relationships—it's where real change begins, both in organizations and across cultures.
Picture this: A membership organization serving thousands of people across 14 offices was hemorrhaging members and drowning in complaints about poor service. Staff were frustrated, leadership was baffled, and nobody could figure out why everything moved at a glacial pace.
When they called us in desperation, they described the usual suspects—communication breakdowns, duplicated efforts, the right hand not knowing what the left was doing. But when we mapped their actual communication networks, the visual was shocking: instead of the collaborative web you'd expect, we saw something that looked like a massive spider with all 14 offices as tiny satellites orbiting around headquarters.
Then we discovered the culprit.
Buried in our interviews was a stunning revelation: One person in headquarters had created the ultimate bottleneck. Every single outbound email from all 14 offices—every member communication, every program update, every routine correspondence—had to cross his desk for personal approval before it could be sent.
Imagine being a program director in Seattle, needing to send a simple training reminder to local members, but first having to wait for a guy in headquarters to read it, approve it, and send it back. Meanwhile, your colleagues in Atlanta had developed an identical training program, but because everything flowed through this single gatekeeper who wasn't connecting anyone, you had no idea it existed.
The result? Fourteen offices reinventing the wheel, every single day.
When we finally connected the offices directly through cross-functional working groups, the transformation was immediate. Ideas flowed, resources were shared, and the organization went from bureaucratic nightmare to collaborative powerhouse. But the real lesson? Sometimes the biggest barrier to organizational success isn't what's missing—it's what one person thinks they need to control.
After eight years working in the nonprofit sector, I had a revelation that would change my career trajectory forever. I was witnessing something that broke my heart: organizations doing incredible mission work in our communities were organizationally starved on the inside.
Think about your own life—you're probably touched by multiple nonprofits. An art center, a church or synagogue, a community center. These organizations are the social fabric of our nation, providing crucial support to people who need it most. Yet having worked at several nonprofits, I realized there wasn't the same level of care and feeding for their internal practices as there was for their mission work.
The problem was clear: nonprofits weren't investing in their own organizational development, strategy, or internal structures. They were so focused on serving others that they were neglecting themselves.
I wanted to change that. I decided to find a job at a consulting firm doing nonprofit capacity building work. But when I started putting my resume out there in Washington, D.C., there weren't many takers. Most consulting firms here were focused on federal government work and federal dollars.
The response I kept hearing was devastating: "Yeah, nonprofit work would be a great marketing piece for us, a nice social responsibility project. You could do that on the side." Nobody saw it as a viable full-time endeavor worthy of serious investment.
That's when I realized the problem was even bigger than I thought. The consulting industry itself was treating nonprofits as afterthoughts—exactly what I was trying to fix.
When I shared my frustration with my entrepreneur husband, he said something that changed everything: "Why don't you start your own business and do it yourself?" I looked at him like he was crazy—I was 28 with zero entrepreneurial experience. Then he said what might be the most supportive (and financially risky) thing a spouse can say: "I can cover the mortgage for the next six months if you want to try this."
That's how Brighter Strategies was born—from a deep conviction that nonprofits deserve the same high-quality organizational support that any Fortune 500 company would receive, because their missions are too important to be undermined by organizational dysfunction.
Picture this: A membership organization serving thousands of people across 14 offices was hemorrhaging members and drowning in complaints about poor service. Staff were frustrated, leadership was baffled, and nobody could figure out why everything moved at a glacial pace.
When they called us in desperation, they described the usual suspects—communication breakdowns, duplicated efforts, the right hand not knowing what the left was doing. But when we mapped their actual communication networks, the visual was shocking: instead of the collaborative web you'd expect, we saw something that looked like a massive spider with all 14 offices as tiny satellites orbiting around headquarters.
Then we discovered the culprit.
Buried in our interviews was a stunning revelation: One person in headquarters had created the ultimate bottleneck. Every single outbound email from all 14 offices—every member communication, every program update, every routine correspondence—had to cross his desk for personal approval before it could be sent.
Imagine being a program director in Seattle, needing to send a simple training reminder to local members, but first having to wait for a guy in headquarters to read it, approve it, and send it back. Meanwhile, your colleagues in Atlanta had developed an identical training program, but because everything flowed through this single gatekeeper who wasn't connecting anyone, you had no idea it existed.
The result? Fourteen offices reinventing the wheel, every single day.
When we finally connected the offices directly through cross-functional working groups, the transformation was immediate. Ideas flowed, resources were shared, and the organization went from bureaucratic nightmare to collaborative powerhouse. But the real lesson? Sometimes the biggest barrier to organizational success isn't what's missing—it's what one person thinks they need to control.
After eight years working in the nonprofit sector, I had a revelation that would change my career trajectory forever. I was witnessing something that broke my heart: organizations doing incredible mission work in our communities were organizationally starved on the inside.
Think about your own life—you're probably touched by multiple nonprofits. An art center, a church or synagogue, a community center. These organizations are the social fabric of our nation, providing crucial support to people who need it most. Yet having worked at several nonprofits, I realized there wasn't the same level of care and feeding for their internal practices as there was for their mission work.
The problem was clear: nonprofits weren't investing in their own organizational development, strategy, or internal structures. They were so focused on serving others that they were neglecting themselves.
I wanted to change that. I decided to find a job at a consulting firm doing nonprofit capacity building work. But when I started putting my resume out there in Washington, D.C., there weren't many takers. Most consulting firms here were focused on federal government work and federal dollars.
The response I kept hearing was devastating: "Yeah, nonprofit work would be a great marketing piece for us, a nice social responsibility project. You could do that on the side." Nobody saw it as a viable full-time endeavor worthy of serious investment.
That's when I realized the problem was even bigger than I thought. The consulting industry itself was treating nonprofits as afterthoughts—exactly what I was trying to fix.
When I shared my frustration with my entrepreneur husband, he said something that changed everything: "Why don't you start your own business and do it yourself?" I looked at him like he was crazy—I was 28 with zero entrepreneurial experience. Then he said what might be the most supportive (and financially risky) thing a spouse can say: "I can cover the mortgage for the next six months if you want to try this."
That's how Brighter Strategies was born—from a deep conviction that nonprofits deserve the same high-quality organizational support that any Fortune 500 company would receive, because their missions are too important to be undermined by organizational dysfunction.