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Questions Worth Asking

Five questions about AI, leadership and organizational change.

AI is influencing everyday work, expectations and decisions across nonprofits. Some changes are visible and deliberate. 

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But others are happening through everyday decisions, individual experimentation and shifting expectations, often before organizations have had a chance to discuss the implications, weigh the trade-offs or establish shared expectations.

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These five questions can help you look beyond the tools, explore what's happening across your organization and consider where more intentional, values-led choices are needed.​

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AI can help your team work faster, create more content and automate tasks. But are those changes producing results that matter?

  • Is AI improving fundraising outcomes, donor relationships or your organization's capacity to deliver its mission?

  • How are you distinguishing productivity gains from meaningful results?

  • What are the trade-offs, including costs, quality, staff time and environmental impacts?

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Your organization's credibility depends on the relationships you build and the choices you make. AI introduces new questions about authenticity, transparency and accountability.

  • How might AI use affect the trust of donors, funders, partners and the communities you serve?

  • Are you prepared for donors or funders who expect greater AI use, as well as those who question or oppose it?

  • Could you explain and defend your organization's approach to AI, including where you choose not to use it?​​​

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AI is changing tasks, expectations and potentially entire roles. Those changes deserve deliberate attention, even when no formal restructuring is planned.

  • How might AI reshape staff roles, workloads, professional judgment and job security?

  • What knowledge, expertise and institutional memory could be lost or weakened as work changes?

  • Are staff able to raise fears, uncertainties and concerns openly, without being dismissed as resistant to change?

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Decisions about AI affect people differently. The people making those decisions may not be the people most affected by them.

  • Who is in the room when consequential AI decisions are made? Whose perspectives are missing?

  • Where could AI create or reinforce bias, exclusion, inequity or harm, including for people your organization exists to serve?

  • How are you facilitating differences in values, perspectives and comfort with AI, rather than allowing the loudest or most enthusiastic voices to set the direction?

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AI is already influencing how work gets done. The question is whether your organization's practices are developing deliberately or simply emerging by default.

  • Do people have clear expectations about appropriate AI use, accountability and when human oversight is necessary?

  • Are there opportunities to test ideas, share learning, raise concerns and evaluate results across teams?

  • Do you have practical ways to revisit decisions and adapt as technology, evidence and organizational needs change?​​

01. What's actually improving, and for whom?
02. What is AI changing about trust and credibility?
03. What is changing for your people and their work?
04. Whose voices, values and interests are shaping your decisions?
05. Are your organizational practices keeping pace?

​​You don't need all the answers. But these questions are worth asking.

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Your organization may already be experimenting with AI without a shared understanding of its implications. Leadership may be looking for greater productivity while staff are worried about changing task expectations. Teams may be making reasonable individual choices that add up to inconsistent or invisible organizational practices.

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Even when leaders recognize these issues, it isn't always clear what to address first or how to move forward.​​

I help nonprofit leaders make sense of what's changing, identify what matters and build shared practices to put priorities into action.

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Through leadership advising, facilitated conversations, strategy and practical workshops, I help organizations:

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  • Establish clearer priorities: Identify where AI creates meaningful opportunities, risks and trade-offs.

  • Create shared direction: Align leadership and teams around expectations, responsibilities and values.

  • Build practical organizational guidance: Establish ways to experiment, make decisions, share learning and manage risks.

  • Put decisions into practice: Move from uncertainty and disconnected efforts toward more intentional, coordinated action.

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The goal? An organization better equipped to shape how AI affects its work, people, relationships and mission, rather than letting those changes happen by default.

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Not Sure Where to Start?

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If these questions have surfaced something you're grappling with, or something your organization hasn't yet had the chance to explore, I'd welcome a conversation.

 

Email me here. 

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I'm Linkedin, phone and WhatsApp responsive too.​​​​

 

Guiding values-led AI strategy. So you can shape how AI changes your organization.

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Spark and Signal operates on sacred and traditional land that has been a site of human activity for over 15,000 years. We’re grateful to be on this land, and we struggle with the injustice of how we came to be here, striving to deepen our understanding and solidarity with Indigenous peoples. We are on the traditional territory of many nations including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples and is now home to many diverse First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples.

 

This territory is part of the 'Dish With One Spoon’ Wampum, a Treaty made between the Anishinaabe, Mississaugas, and Haudenosaunee, where nations entered into an agreement to protect the land, and responsibly care for its resources in harmony. Toronto, a Mohawk word meaning ‘where there are trees standing in water’, is covered under the Toronto Treaty 13 of the Upper Canada Land Surrenders, and the Williams Treaties. We have all been invited into this treaty in the spirit of peace, friendship, and respect. We are also mindful of broken treaties that persist across Turtle Island today and recognize our responsibilities as Treaty people to engage in a meaningful, continuous process of truth and reconciliation with all our relations. 

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