What working together looks like
Four to six weeks. This isn't a six-month strategic planning process, and it isn't a week-long retreat. It's the thing you need when the plan you have has stopped fitting and you can't wait six months to say so.
Most organizations I meet already have eighty percent of what they need — board input, program data, a half-finished plan from two years ago, notes from a retreat nobody has opened since. What's missing isn't more material. It's someone from outside who can read all of it, hear what your team actually thinks, and tell you which parts matter.
Why it hasn’t moved
The work means something to them
People take these jobs because the work matters to them, and doing it well is a good part of how they know they're good at this. So when you ask for something to change, you're rarely asking for a process adjustment. Which is why the answer is so often that it only takes an hour, when you both know it's closer to ten.
Everyone is somewhere different
Some people need something repaired before they can move. Others don't yet understand what the change means for their own work. And some are ready, but stay quiet out of respect for the colleagues who are struggling — so the room sounds more stuck than it is. Knowing who's where comes before anything else.
Clarity doesn't hold on its own
You've said it clearly already, more than once, in a meeting where people nodded. Then the urgent things come back and everyone returns to the work they know how to do well. Nobody disagreed and nothing changed. Clarity decays unless someone keeps putting it back in front of people.
What we'd do
Before we start
A conversation, no charge. You tell me what's going on. I ask the questions I'd ask anyway. By the end we both know whether this is a fit, and you'll have gotten something out of it either way.
Then we get it on the table
One working session, whole team. Nothing that surfaces is a surprise to the person who said it. Then you have the conversation you've been circling for months, and I keep it productive rather than personal.
And then you have it
A plan the team wrote, with owners and a sequence, in language they'd recognize as theirs. And a slightly different way of working: how you get the real version said out loud, and how you decide what comes first next time. The plan will stop fitting eventually. That doesn't.
A month later
I check back in. No charge. Plans drift, and the drift is worth naming out loud.