Don’t Automate Broken Systems

There is a lot of excitement about what artificial intelligence and new technology can do for nonprofits, and much of that excitement is justified.

Technology can help organizations communicate with donors, analyze information, automate administrative work and make better use of limited resources. For organizations that are already stretched thin, those opportunities are significant.

But I have also learned to be cautious about technology that promises to solve an organizational problem without first understanding what the problem actually is.

One line from a recent Forbes article about operational leadership captures the idea perfectly: “Don’t automate a broken process.” (Forbes Communications Council, October 1, 2026, online article; pagination not provided.)

That advice applies to nonprofits just as much as it applies to any other organization.

Understand the work before changing it

Before introducing another software platform or automation tool, I want to understand what people are actually doing.

Who owns the process?

What is supposed to happen?

Where does the process slow down?

Where do people have to work around the system?

What information is missing?

What decisions require human judgment?

Those questions may not sound particularly exciting, but they are often where the real opportunity lies.

If a donor-management process is confusing, moving it into a new CRM will not necessarily make it better.

If nobody knows who is responsible for following up with a prospective donor, automation will not solve the problem.

If meetings are unfocused, putting them on a better calendar system will not suddenly make them strategic.

Technology can improve a good process.

It can also make a bad process faster.

Spend time where the work happens

One of the ideas in the Forbes article that especially caught my attention was the concept of operational empathy: understanding what people actually experience while doing the work rather than relying entirely on reports and measurements.

I think nonprofit executives could benefit from practicing this more deliberately.

It is easy to spend a day reviewing financial reports, dashboards and board materials and still have very little sense of what employees are experiencing.

The development professional may be spending hours entering information that could be captured more efficiently.

A program employee may be navigating a frustrating approval process.

A volunteer may not know who to contact when something goes wrong.

A board member may be attending meetings that do not connect clearly to the decisions the organization actually needs to make.

From the executive level, everything can look reasonably healthy.

From the perspective of the person doing the work, it may feel very different.

That is why I believe leaders need to get close to the work.

Talk to people.

Watch the process.

Ask where they lose time.

Ask what frustrates them.

Ask what they would change if they had the authority to change one thing.

Then compare what you hear with the data.

Sometimes the problem isn’t the person

One of the easiest management mistakes is to assume that poor performance is a people problem.

Sometimes it is.

But sometimes the system is making good performance unnecessarily difficult.

An employee may be missing deadlines because a process contains unnecessary steps. A development officer may be struggling with donor stewardship because information is spread across several systems. A program manager may be overwhelmed because priorities keep changing.

Before asking someone to work harder, I want to understand whether we have created an environment in which good work is reasonably possible.

That is not an excuse for poor performance.

It is a recognition that leaders are responsible for the systems they create.

Listen before you automate

The people closest to the work often know about problems long before leadership sees them in a report.

They know which process is frustrating.

They know where people are getting stuck.

They know which communication isn’t working.

They often know when a new initiative is likely to create problems.

The difficulty is that people eventually stop offering that information when nothing happens after they speak up.

That means listening has to be more than a leadership exercise. It has to lead to a response.

Sometimes the response is, “You’re right. Let’s fix it.”

Sometimes it is, “I understand the concern, but after considering it, we’re going in a different direction.”

Either answer is better than silence because people know that their perspective was actually heard.

That is where authenticity and integrity matter.

Let technology create capacity

The best technology does more than automate tasks. It gives people more time to do the work that requires judgment, creativity and relationships.

If a system reduces administrative work for a development professional, that person can spend more time cultivating donors.

If better data allows an executive to identify a problem earlier, the organization can respond before it becomes a crisis.

If AI can help someone prepare a first draft or organize information, that person can spend more time thinking about what the information actually means.

That is where technology becomes genuinely valuable.

The goal should not be to automate people out of nonprofit work.

It should be to remove unnecessary friction so people can spend more of their time doing the work only people can do.

Nonprofits are built around relationships, trust and human needs.

Technology should strengthen those things rather than replace them.

Before asking what AI can do for your organization, I think there is a more important question:

What is making your people work harder than they need to?

Start there.