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Your team has good software and the work still feels heavy. Nobody wants to say it out loud, because the tool was approved, paid for and announced.
Mike Toguchi has spent 25 years inside that exact room, in universities, nonprofits, foundations and corporates, and he has a blunt diagnosis: the technology is rarely what broke. He walks through a nonprofit scholarship programme that put AI on top of a convoluted review process and got "continued mess, faster mess", and he explains why a team that cannot say what is working has no feedback loop, only a sign-off.
By the end you will be able to spot survival mode in a team whose tools are running fine, test whether you have approval or alignment before a project goes sideways, and run a readiness check before you sign the next renewal.
Listen before your next software renewal lands on your desk, because the cheapest version of this lesson is the one you get secondhand.
1. A tool amplifies the workflow it lands on. Mike: "a lot of times the technology ends up being the thing that exposes the fissures in your workflow as opposed to fixing them."
2. Survival mode looks like smooth technology and overwhelmed staff. The signs are unclear ownership, incentives pointing in different directions and no line back to the mission.
3. Automating a convoluted review process gave one nonprofit richer summaries and worse decisions. Mike: "It's not making the process cleaner."
4. Approval is a signature. Alignment is a shared understanding of the problem, the success criteria and the tradeoffs, held together by a feedback loop people can actually use.
5. Every organisation runs two processes: the documented one and the real one. Mike calls them prescriptive and descriptive, and the gap between them is where the workarounds live.
6. Low adoption tells you something about leadership. Mike: "I think adoption is a leadership issue."
7. Readiness takes three things and none of them takes a year: strategic discovery, stakeholders bought in, due diligence done. Then hit the gas.
8. AI gives time back only when leadership decides what the time is for. Otherwise it scales the same busywork at higher volume.
Mike Toguchi on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/miketoguchi/
Tectonic: https://www.teamtectonic.com/
Orchestrate: https://onlineapplications.net
Orchestrate AMS: https://www.orchestrateams.com/
Mentioned in the episode: Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville (Mike's book pick), Slack, HubSpot.
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Free Productivity Test: https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/Productivity-Assessment
Productive, Not Busy (live cohort on Maven): https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/productive-not-busy
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