The Intensive
A three month organizational design intensive for mission-driven CEOs and executive directors, built on a century of Montessori environmental science. Organizations do not fail from lack of talent. They fail because the environment was never designed.
The framework
The Intensive works through the five components of The Prepared Organization, in sequence, applied to your organization as it actually is. Each component is a structure you either build deliberately or inherit by accident.
Clarity of Purpose and Role
Every person in the organization can say what the work is for and which part of it is theirs. Decisions have named owners, and authority actually matches responsibility. Where this is absent, roles blur at the edges, ownership floats, and the most conscientious people quietly absorb whatever falls between the boxes until they cannot anymore.
Freedom Within Structure
Boundaries honest enough that people can run hard inside them. Autonomy that is built into the system rather than announced at retreats. Where this is missing, leaders swing between micromanagement and abdication, and staff learn that the safest professional move is to stop deciding anything at all.
The Prepared Adult
The environment is shaped most by the person leading it. This component is the leader’s own work: what you control that you should release, what you avoid that you should face, what you model whether you mean to or not. An organization inherits its leader’s unexamined habits, and no restructure can outrun them.
Coherence
What the organization says, what it rewards, and how it behaves all tell the same story. People do not experience your values statement. They experience your calendar, your budget, and your promotions, and when those diverge from the stated mission, everyone believes the behavior. Incoherence reads as hypocrisy, and trust erodes without a single conversation about it.
Justice as Infrastructure
This is load-bearing structure, not a value statement. Fair process is built into how compensation is set, how decision rights are distributed, how performance is judged, and how conflict is handled. Where justice lives on a poster instead of inside the systems, the people doing the heaviest work are the first to see it and the first to leave.
Who this is for
The Intensive is built for leaders of organizations between five and fifty staff. Large enough that your presence no longer reaches every room. Small enough that there is no layer of management to absorb what the structure leaves undone. At this size, culture is either designed intentionally or it is eating everything alive, and there is no third option.
You already know the felt experience. Roles blur at the edges and nobody can say exactly where. Authority floats, so decisions travel to your desk that should never arrive there. And your most mission-driven people burn out first, because they are the ones covering every gap the structure leaves open. None of that is a talent problem. It is a design problem, and design problems can be solved.
Two ways through
Same arc. Different room.
Both tracks move through the same twelve week curriculum across the five components. The difference is who is in the room with you.
The Cohort Intensive
Twelve weeks through the five components alongside a maximum of four leaders. The peer dimension is built in: leaders at the same scale, working the same structural problems, seeing their own organization more clearly in each other’s.
Two cohorts run each year.
Investment
$18,000
Full attention
The Private Intensive
Twelve weeks, one to one. The full weight of the practice on a single organization, at a pace set by your calendar rather than a cohort’s. The work goes deeper because nothing is generalized: every session is about your structure, your people, your decisions.
Includes one working session with your board, because the structure you build only holds if governance holds it with you.
Investment
$38,000
The path in
The first step is a ninety minute Diagnostic Session. We map where authority actually lives in your organization, where decisions bottleneck, and which of the five components is under the most strain. You leave with a clearer read on your own structure than most leaders ever get, whether or not we work together further.
The session is $500, and it applies in full toward either track if you enroll. It is diagnosis first, on purpose. Neither of us should commit to twelve weeks before we have looked at the actual structure.
Who leads it
Hannah Richardson
Hannah has spent twenty-five years inside hundreds of schools and mission-driven organizations: founder-led and board-led, public and private, thriving and quietly coming apart. She has led them, advised them, served on their boards, and sat in the rooms where structure is actually decided, rooms most consultants never access. The Intensive is that pattern knowledge applied to one organization at a time. Yours.