Coping with change effects organizational performance the way exercise contributes to personal fitness. It begets organizational strength, stamina, and agility and leads to enhanced results. Nonprofit management practitioners have begun to recognize that an organization's ability to challenge its own established ways of thinking and doing things and to successively craft and adopt more effective means is a distinct form of performance-enhancing organizational capacity: Adaptive capacity.

The evolution of nonprofit capacity building has followed an arc. For many years, maximizing programmatic effort was the most straightforward metric of charitable results. Hence, the nonprofit sector managed and minimized administrative overhead expenditures to avoid any appearance of waste. The legacy of administrative parsimoniousness survives in the culture of many nonprofit organizations and in the rantmaking practices of some foundations.

More recently institutional philanthropists and academics have recognized that organizations are themselves important contributors to the process of generating social value: Starve the organization by under-investing in core organizational functions and you sacrifice productivity and undermine the grantee's long-term stability. This recognition has influenced the growth of management support organizations and a wide variety of management capacity-building initiatives.