Curious where your organization's map and territory have drifted apart?
Find Your First Gap, FreeBoard Reviews
You’re reviewing your executive director, or weighing a leadership change, and you need someone with no stake in the outcome.
Organizational Narrative Assessment
This is the framework my popular Map vs. Territory workshops and new self-paced courses are based on, but instead of your team doing the heavy lifting, it’s me in-situ. Here, you’re hiring me directly: two decades of documentary interviewing, fifteen-plus years of operational management experience, and my own background as a startup founder and executive director, all pointed at your organization for six weeks. I’m the one asking the questions, reading the patterns, and bringing you the answer.
This is built for growth-stage nonprofits, startups, and platforms holding a good strategy on paper, with real friction living underneath it. Together we’ll find exactly where your story, your systems, and what’s happening day to day have pulled apart, and what to do about it.
New Leadership
You just stepped into a new role and want to understand the terrain before you start making changes to it.
Something feels off
Something is off and you can’t quite name it. Tension nobody will address directly, turnover that doesn’t add up, friction with no obvious source.
Strategic shifts
You’re about to make a big change and want a real read on where things stand before you act.
Scaling up
What got you here won’t get you there, and it’s time to build real structure without flattening what made this place work in the first place.
Post-merger
Two cultures just got pushed into one organization after a merger, acquisition, or major restructuring, and nobody’s fully agreed on whose way of doing things wins.
Why Me
Two decades of documentary interviewing means I know how to get past the answer someone gives a facilitator and toward the one they’d only say off the record.
Fifteen-plus years of operational management means I know what to do with what I find, not just name the gap but tell you which fixes are real and which ones will fail in six months. And having been a founder and an executive director myself means the people I’m interviewing generally believe I’ve sat where they’re sitting.
How We Map It
Week 1-2
Deep Listening
I sit down with your stakeholders, founders, and team, drawing on two decades of documentary interviewing and fifteen-plus years of management experience to ask the honest questions people don’t usually get asked at work. This is where the real, unofficial version of your organization starts to surface.
Week 3-4
Systems, Product, and Program Auditing
Then I look at how things run day to day. We audit your core workflows, check whether your public story lines up with what’s happening behind the scenes operationally, and trace exactly where communication and systems are leaking time and trust.
Week 5
Story Forward
I put it all together and map exactly where your official strategy and your daily execution are clashing, where silos are quietly blocking the flow of work, and where your systems have fallen behind how fast you’ve grown.
Week 6
A New Map
We sit down together and go through it. You leave with a real, specific plan, the immediate fixes, the realignments, and the communication structure your team needs to close the gap going forward.
WHAT YOU GET
An Ecosystem Assessment
A clear diagnostic of exactly why your current workflows, whether that’s product, supply chain, or communication, are stalling out.
An Adjustment Map
A set of concrete adjustments so what you promise publicly matches what your organization can deliver.
A Comms and Operations Blueprint
A lean communication and operations framework, built for your team to run on their own once I’m gone, not something that depends on me to keep working.
A “Next Right Move” Matrix
A prioritized, step-by-step plan for what to do next, so your leadership team walks into the next transition with a real plan instead of a gut feeling.
Not Ready for the Full Assessment?
If you want to start finding your own gaps before bringing in an outside read, try Map vs. Territory: Finding Ground Truth, a self-guided course that walks you, or your team, through the same core diagnostic on your own schedule.
“The goal isn’t perfection. It’s alignment. When your organizational narrative is coherent, when what leadership says matches what staff experiences, everything else gets easier.”