INSIGHTS

Most organizations don't fail because they lack a plan. They fail because the plan skips step one.

In the T3 Framework, Truth always comes before Trust — and that order matters more than people expect. It's tempting to jump straight to alignment: get the board on the same page, get the team excited, get everyone rowing in the same direction. But if that alignment is built on a version of reality nobody's actually confirmed — budget numbers nobody's stress-tested, program outcomes nobody's honestly evaluated, a leadership gap nobody's named out loud — it collapses the first time it's tested.

I've seen this most clearly in nonprofit boardrooms and ECE program reviews. A board approves a budget everyone privately doubts. A program director inherits metrics no one has questioned in three years. Everyone nods. Nothing changes.

Truth-telling in an organization isn't about being harsh. It's about being accurate — naming what's actually happening, even when it's uncomfortable, before anyone tries to build agreement on top of it. That's the diagnostic step of every engagement I run: before we talk strategy, we talk about what's real.

Once truth is on the table, trust becomes possible — because people aren't being asked to align around a fiction. And once trust is real, transparency keeps it that way as the organization grows.

Skipping step one doesn't save time. It just moves the reckoning further down the road, usually to a more expensive moment.

If you work in Michigan's early childhood education ecosystem, you've likely heard "Tri-Share" mentioned — but the mechanics of how it actually works, and what it means at the provider level, often get lost in the policy language.

Tri-Share is a cost-sharing model where the price of child care is split three ways — between the employer, the employee, and the state — instead of falling entirely on a family's budget. For providers, that structure matters because it changes who's actually paying, how reliably, and what documentation is required to keep the arrangement running smoothly.

For a provider deciding whether to participate, the real questions are usually operational, not philosophical: How does enrollment and billing change when a family's tuition is split three ways? What's the reporting burden on staff who are already stretched? How does this interact with existing subsidy relationships a program may already be managing?

These are exactly the kinds of questions that get missed when a program adopts a funding model because it sounds good on paper, without mapping out what it requires day to day. Before bringing a new funding stream into your program, it's worth running the diagnostic: what does this actually change about how your front desk, your budget, and your board reporting will work next quarter — not just next year.tion text goes here

Every nonprofit board eventually runs into the same quiet problem: approval thresholds that made sense five years ago no longer match the organization's current size or risk.

A budget control that was reasonable for a $200,000 operating budget can become either a bottleneck or a blind spot once that budget triples. Boards rarely revisit these thresholds proactively — usually because no one wants to be the person who suggests the current process isn't working. That silence is exactly where risk accumulates.

The fix isn't complicated, but it does require someone to ask the uncomfortable question out loud: does our current approval structure match our current size, and does everyone on this board actually understand it the same way?

In practice, this looks like a straightforward governance review — walking through who can approve what, at what dollar threshold, with what documentation, and confirming the board and staff are operating from the same understanding. It's a short conversation. Most organizations just haven't had it yet.

If it's been a while since your board revisited its budget controls and approval thresholds, that's usually a sign it's time — not because something has gone wrong, but because the organization has grown past the process that was built for an earlier version of it.