A small, facilitated space where leaders explore what's really holding their systems together — and discover things along the way that none of us could see alone.
A Bearing gives your organization a picture of itself it's never quite had before. The cohort is where that picture becomes something you can work with — alongside other organizations willing to do the same kind of looking.
Three organizations. Four sessions.
Each session is built around a question worth sitting with.
Your reading.
What happens when several people in the same organization each describe what's holding it together? Sometimes they see the same thing. Sometimes they see something quite different. Both are revealing, and the conversation about what shows up between those perspectives is where some of the richest discoveries happen.
What holds and what shifts.
Is the force that organizes your best work the same one that shows up when things get hard? This is one of those questions that sounds simple until you actually look — and what you find often makes sense of patterns you've been living with for a long time.
Where coherence lives.
Does your organization's stability live in your structures, your culture, your shared practices — or does it travel with certain people? Especially for organizations navigating growth, transitions, or succession, this is one of the most worthwhile things you can explore together.
Your next move.
After three sessions of looking courageously at how your system works, something usually becomes clear: there's a move available that wasn't visible before. Not a strategic plan. One grounded step, matched to where you actually are.
Most organizations never look underneath how they work — not because they don't want to, but because it takes courage, it can be disorienting, and there hasn't been a way to do it that feels safe. The cohort is that space. It's built for curiosity, not correction. You're here to see your own system more clearly — and to find that having other organizations alongside you doing the same kind of courageous looking creates something you simply can't get on your own.
There's something that happens when leaders from different organizations sit together with this kind of willingness. Other people's patterns illuminate your own. A question someone else is wrestling with turns out to be the one you didn't know you had. The learning moves in directions no one planned.
You'll leave each session with something specific — not just a new way of seeing, but a concrete understanding of what's operating and what you want to do about it. And over the course of four sessions, something accumulates: a way of reading your own system that stays with you long after the cohort ends.
I want to be transparent: this is the first round of something I've been building for a while. The Madrona Collective is a young practice, and this cohort is where the work meets real organizations for the first time. Because of that, the pilot is complimentary — what we discover together is shaping what this becomes.
What I'd ask in return is simple: permission to share what we learn (anonymized, always) as part of how I talk about this work going forward, and your genuine sense of what landed and what didn't. I don't think of this as something I'm delivering to you. I think of it as something we're finding out together — and I believe it's going to be genuinely valuable for everyone in the room, including me.
Space is limited to three organizations per cohort. If the first round is full, you're welcome to join the waitlist for the next.