13 Oct 2026 11:00
Leveraging AI Micro Series Part 1: Why AI Still Sounds Generic — Even When Your Prompts Are Good
Two nonprofit leaders open the same tool on the same day. One of them hands it a pile of notes and gets back an SOP she can use, and a task that used to take two hours takes twenty minutes. The other corrects the draft, re-explains the context, tries another prompt, and quietly concludes the whole thing is more trouble than it's worth. The difference between them is almost never the prompt. In this episode, Brooke Richie-Babbage makes the case that the second leader is sitting on an onboarding gap, not a skills gap — and that the gap predates AI by years. She walks through the brilliant-new-hire frame, explains why the knowledge that runs most organizations lives in people rather than in structure, and leaves listeners with one exercise to do this week. Part one of a two-part micro-series.
What You'll Learn:
- Why generic AI output is an onboarding failure, not a capability failure — and what a brilliant new hire with no onboarding and a one-line instruction would produce in exactly the same situation.
- Where your organization actually keeps its knowledge — the layer underneath the SOPs that governs judgment calls, funder framing, and what "good" looks like, and why it is the last thing to get documented.
- A one-week exercise that turns the friction into a document — pick one recurring piece of work, and brain dump what you'd have to tell someone brilliant for them to do it the way you want.
Key Takeaways:
- The difference between leaders who get value from AI and leaders who don't is rarely the prompt. Brooke Richie-Babbage argues it comes down to how much of the organization's context was already written down before the leader started. That is a structural head start, and it can be built.
- Generic AI output is a predictable result of no onboarding. An extremely capable new hire given a task, one line of instruction, and no background will produce something competent that doesn't sound like your organization and misses the judgment calls you'd make without thinking. Nobody would call that a bad hire.
- The friction is diagnostic information, not evidence of failure. Every time a leader finds herself re-explaining something, she has located a piece of her organization's know-how that lives in a person rather than in a system.
- This is a design deficit arriving through a new door. A design deficit is the gap between what an organization is being asked to carry and what its structure was actually built to absorb. Organizations that grow faster than their structures end up running on knowledge that was never institutionalized, and AI makes that visible faster than anything else.
- Writing it down pays a bigger dividend than better AI output. The same document that lets a tool act on the organization's behalf is the document that stops the organization from depending on any one person's memory.
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