Triple Creeks Consulting, 316 Murphy Branch Road Burnsville, Asheville, NC (2026)

10/07/2026

This showed up in my feed this week, and it connects to something we've been saying for a while, so we want to use it as a case study to reiterate. Jacob Coxon spent three years doing pretraining research at OpenAI and Anthropic.

Then he quit and posted seven tweets that racked up over 100 million views.
His words: neither company is acting responsibly. Both are racing toward self improving AI without the guardrails in place to control it.

What made it bigger: Anthropic's own alignment lead publicly agreed with him. He put the odds of AI causing human extinction this decade above 10%.
We wrote about a version of this same pattern a few weeks ago, just at a smaller scale.

In our piece on intentional AI use, we talked about the environmental cost most "responsible AI" conversations skip entirely. The real issue wasn't any one person's choice to generate X thing with ChatGPT, but it’s the gap between how much AI we all use and how little we understand about what it actually costs.

Coxon's resignation is that gap, magnified. People inside these companies understand the stakes but they keep building, because the pressure to move first is stronger than any individual's better judgment.

Most of us running a small org or nonprofit can't fix that dynamic because we can't set global AI policy. What we can do: Decide what data leaves our business. Decide which decisions still require a human. Decide what we want to keep AI out of.

Contact your representatives. Push for coordinated international AI standards with real accountability. The same way we regulate pharmaceuticals and aviation, AI deserves that level of oversight and that pressure has to come from somewhere.

This is a page, maybe 2, of thought out policy.

If you don't have one yet, now is a good time to write it.

09/30/2026

If you work at a nonprofit and you're exhausted but can't quite say why, I think I know part of it.

Hustle culture is more dangerous in mission-driven work than almost anywhere else, because nobody calls it hustle culture. They call it caring about the work.

Mission-driven work attracts people who genuinely want to make a difference in the world. That's a beautiful thing about this sector, and it's also exactly what makes it so easy for hustle culture to hide.

There's this narrative running underneath a lot of mission-driven jobs: you get to do something meaningful, so you shouldn't need to be paid as much, and you probably shouldn't complain about the hours either.

In corporate USA, people expect the grind. Everyone kind of agrees it's a problem, so there's language for it, and permission to push back on it.

But in mission-driven work, the same overwork happens, and it gets called commitment instead. And once it's called commitment, naming it feels like you're questioning how much you care.

But caring about the work and being able to sustain it are two different things, and I think we conflate them way too often in this sector.

Curious if this lands for anyone else. What's something you've stayed quiet about because saying it out loud felt like saying you didn't care?

09/23/2026

The overhead ratio is one of the most widely used and misleading metrics in the nonprofit sector.

Swipe through to see what a low overhead ratio actually signals and what sustainable mission delivery really requires. 👉

What's one investment in your organization's infrastructure that you know would make a real difference?

09/16/2026

There was a time where I genuinely believed everything would fall apart if I stepped away for a day.

Here’s a photo of how my desk used to look when I was working in 9-5 non-profit hustle culture.

Not "busy-productive" messy. Messy in the way that tells you something is wrong. Papers from three weeks ago. Half-finished tasks. A running list of things only I could handle, or so I told myself.

The truth I hadn't admitted yet: I had become the bottleneck in my own work.

Every decision circled back to me. Every question landed in my inbox. I was responsive, reliable, thorough and completely exhausted. I kept thinking: if I can just get through this day/week/month, things will slow down.

But they didn't slow down. They grew.

The turning point where I abandoned that life was a quiet realization during an engagement with a client who was describing exactly what I was living. She was running what should have been a 30-person organization by herself. From a spreadsheet. And she couldn’t scale from there.

I started by writing down every task that came to her in a single week — every question, every decision, everything she touched. Then I asked, what of these things could be addressed, documented, and passed off?

From there, I worked with her to document things only in her head, giving them a home outside of her brain. Defined what each person on her team was actually empowered to decide and the team members she needed to feel supported as a result. And defined what she actually wanted to be doing in her organization in 5 years.

If your desk (or your inbox) looks anything like this photo right now — I see you. And I'd gently ask: is this a capacity problem, or a delegation problem?

Because those need very different solutions.

What's one thing you're still holding onto that your team could probably own — if the structure was there?

09/09/2026

I've been reading a whitepaper by Derek Miller, "Becoming the New Adapting Worker", and the concept of adaptive capacity has stuck with me.

The world of work is changing faster than most organizations were built to handle.
Miller draws on the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report which found that analytical and creative thinking are now the most critical skills for workers. Not far behind are resilience, self-awareness, and curiosity.

His argument is that we're living in what former Xerox Chief Scientist John Seely Brown calls a "whitewater world of work" — volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, and in that environment the workers and organizations that thrive are the ones who can learn, unlearn, and relearn quickly. That's adaptive capacity.

What I find most compelling is how Miller frames this not as an individual failing but as a systemic gap. Because most people were never taught how to adapt, they were handed jobs and expected to figure it out. The organizations tasked with developing workers have largely not kept pace with how fast the world is actually changing.

This resonates deeply with the work we do at Triple Creeks Consulting.

The founders and executive directors we work alongside are navigating their own version of whitewater every day. With the general chaos of shifting funding landscapes, evolving team structures, and generally, constant change with limited capacity to absorb it. The ones who move through it most effectively are the ones who have built the internal and organizational structures that allow them to flex without breaking (and a diversified budget to float them.)

Adaptive capacity isn’t an innate trait, but something that can be built with the right support, the right systems, and the right foundation underneath the work.

If you work in or lead a mission-driven organization right now I'd love to know: what does adaptive capacity look like for you in practice? 👇

Credit: Adapted from "Becoming the New Adapting Worker" by Derek Miller, drawing on research from the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2023 and the work of John Seely Brown.

09/02/2026

Most founders hire their first operations person too late.

By the time it feels urgent, the cost is already showing up everywhere. Missed deadlines. Dropped balls. A founder doing everything and advancing nothing.

Here's what that moment looks like before it becomes a crisis:

You're making the same decisions repeatedly. Those decisions need a home that isn't you.

Your team is capable but directionless. Good people who don't know what to prioritize default to ‘busy’ but not necessarily ‘productive’.

Growth has created more coordination than you can hold. What worked with three people stops working at seven.

You're doing work someone else could own. If you can name three things you did this week that didn't require your specific expertise — you're already past the point where this hire makes sense.

I'll be honest, I sat with these signs longer than I should have — until I hired one myself!

Hazel has been our Client Success Manager at Triple Creeks Consulting for four years now. And looking back, one of the best decisions I made as a founder was recognizing early enough that client success needed a dedicated home — someone whose full attention could live there consistently.

What that created was better quality of care for our clients, more consistent follow-through,more open time on my calendar.

An operations hire builds the conditions that keep things from landing on your plate in the first place.

That's a different kind of value. And it compounds.

If any of these signs sound familiar — it's probably time.

Which of these did you recognize too late in your own organization? 👇

08/26/2026

Here's something most nonprofit leaders won't say out loud: your team is already using AI.

Someone's using ChatGPT to draft donor emails. Another person is running reports through an AI tool to pull key stats faster. Maybe your communications lead is generating social captions to save an hour each week.

The problem isn't that it's happening, but it’s that 92% of nonprofits now use AI in some form, but 47% have zero governance policy in place.

That gap between usage and guidance? That's where most small nonprofits are living right now.

This is what happens when you're moving fast with limited capacity and nobody has created a shared understanding of what's appropriate.

So here's what I recommend instead of trying to lock it all down:
→ Start with curiosity, not control
Ask your team what they're already using and why. You need the truth before you can build something that actually works.
→ Define what ethical use means for your organization
A simple framework that answers: What data are we comfortable sharing? What tasks are in scope? What's off-limits?
→ Identify low-risk tasks to hand off

Meeting notes. Public-facing content. Research synthesis. Things that don't involve sensitive client data but eat up hours of your team's week.

The goal is to protect your team's time for the work that actually requires them. The relationship-building. The adaptive thinking. The things no tool can replicate.

If you're leading a small nonprofit right now, you need honest conversations and a starting point that reflects your values.

What's one task your team spends time on every week that could be handed off without compromising trust?

08/19/2026

Triple Creeks has always been bigger than me. Even back when it was a one-human show.

Before I started this consulting practice I spent years managing and directing nonprofits and small businesses. And the pattern I kept seeing was the same regardless of the organization, the mission, or the size of the team.

Everyone in the room wanted the same thing, and somehow operational barriers were always quietly standing between them and the work they actually wanted to do.

What struck me most was how rarely the fix required something dramatic. More often it was the simple things. Documenting a workflow that had only ever lived in someone's head. Clarifying who owned a decision. Getting everyone aligned on how work moved through the team.

Small structural changes that transformed how the work felt and what became possible because of it.

That's what I built Triple Creeks around. The belief that when you get the foundation right inside your own organization you create ripple effects that reach far beyond it. That doing this work well is its own form of showing up for something bigger.

I'd love to hear from you — what's one simple change that made a real difference in how your organization operates? 👇

08/12/2026

Hiring an extra pair of hands when everything is overwhelming isn't always the solution.

And most of the time the overwhelm has nothing to do with how many people are on the team.

Swipe through to see what usually happens when you hire into disorganization and what to do instead. 👉

08/05/2026

Nobody talks about the general chaos in mission driven orgs. The brilliant people doing too many jobs at once. The meetings that could've been a clear process. The founder who is somehow still the person who knows where everything is.

I've sat with Executive Directors who haven't taken a real vacation in three years. I've watched teams of dedicated, capable people grind to a halt because nobody wrote down how something was supposed to work.

And the thing that gets me every time is that NONE of these organizations are failing from lack of heart. They're struggling from lack of structure.

That's what I want to talk about in this series.

Real observations. No polished case studies. No "here's what the research says" detachment. Just honest things I've seen from the inside of organizations that care deeply and are working hard to get it right.

Starting next week, I'll be sharing one at a time.

If you lead a nonprofit or a small business and you've ever thought "how are we still doing it this way?" — this series is for you.

What's one thing you'd want someone to say out loud about how these organizations actually operate? Drop it in the comments. I might just make it the next post.

Triple Creeks Consulting

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