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PLANARA LEADERS · OUR APPROACH

We don’t ship generic curriculum.

Before we finalize a single session, we interview 3–5 members of your team. The curriculum we send you is built on what they told us — not on what we assumed they needed.

Why we built it this way.

Most executive education fails in the same place: the curriculum was written for a generic audience, and delivered to a specific one. The examples don’t match. The exercises feel academic. The team goes through the motions and the organization gets a certificate and not much else.

We designed our engagement model specifically to close that gap. Every cohort is shaped by direct conversations with the people who will attend it. The work they bring into the program is the work we build the curriculum around.

The four steps, in depth.

  1. The intro call

    30 minutes

    A conversation between your team and ours. We ask about the work you’re trying to do, the capability gaps you’re already aware of, and what a successful program looks like from your side. You ask us whatever you want to ask. At the end, if there’s a fit, we scope the next step.

  2. Team interviews

    within one week

    We speak with 3–5 members of the team that would attend the cohort. Twenty to thirty minutes each. We ask about the work they’re actually doing, the decisions they’re having to make, and the places they feel under-equipped. These conversations are confidential — we synthesize the themes, not the quotes.

  3. Tailored proposal

    We send you a curriculum outline built specifically around what we heard — which modules to prioritize, which examples to use, which exercises to anchor the cohort in your real work. We also send a clear pricing proposal. No hidden scope. No “and also…”

  4. You decide

    If it’s right, we set a kickoff date and begin. If it’s not, you keep the capability assessment as a free outside perspective. We’ve done the work either way.

Curious what the final product looks like? See a sample 8-week program.

Tailoring, not customization.

We tailor three things: the examples used in sessions, the exercises the cohort works through, and the weighting of the curriculum modules. We do not tailor the underlying methodology — it is the same human-centered design framework Matt Kressy has been refining for three decades at MIT. Changing that would defeat the purpose of teaching it.

You get a cohort experience that feels specific to your organization, built on a foundation that has been pressure-tested across thousands of executives and hundreds of programs.

What you’re actually buying.

You’re not buying a course. You’re buying the MIT IDM methodology, applied to your specific team’s real work, over six to eight weeks, with two faculty members who have built and shipped the things you’re asking your team to build and ship.

The certificate is a byproduct. The capability is the product.

Let’s see if there’s a fit.

A 30-minute call. No prepared deck. No sales pitch. Just a conversation about your team and what you’re trying to build.

Start the conversation