Stronger Leaders.
Healthier Culture.
Strategy That Sticks.
Launch Industries is a Seattle-headquartered organization development (OD) practice for small and mid-sized organizations. Our work is led by Monica Colgan, who holds a Master of Science in Organization Development from Central Washington University, with 15+ years of facilitation, coaching, and culture work across private, nonprofit, and government-adjacent organizations.
OD is not generic leadership coaching, not an HR function, and not a workshop in a box. It's a graduate-level discipline focused on how organizations actually function: structure, culture, change, strategy, and the human systems that decide whether a plan survives contact with reality. We bring that discipline at small-business scale.
What Our OD Practice Covers
Nine focus areas inside the discipline of organization development. Pick the engagement that fits, or layer them into a longer change program.
Organizational Design
Structure, roles, and accountability mapped to where the business is actually going. We rebuild org charts that reflect how decisions get made, who owns what, and how authority flows when leadership is in the room and when it isn't.
Strategic Planning Facilitation
Three- and five-year plans built with the team that has to deliver them. We facilitate the offsite, structure the work between sessions, and translate priorities into a quarterly cadence your leadership will actually maintain.
Culture Diagnosis & Change
Surveys, focus groups, and stakeholder interviews to surface what your culture actually rewards versus what your values poster says. Then a real intervention plan, not a pizza party.
Executive Coaching
One-on-one coaching for founders, executives, and senior leaders navigating growth, transition, or stuck patterns. Confidential, structured, and grounded in ICF coaching standards.
Leadership Development Cohorts
Multi-session leadership cohorts for mid-level managers and emerging leaders. Action learning projects, peer coaching, and skill-building tied to your real business challenges.
Team Effectiveness & Chartering
Team charters, role clarity work, and intentional norming for new teams, post-reorg teams, or teams stuck in Tuckman's storming phase longer than is healthy. Built to survive after we leave.
Conflict Resolution & Mediation
Facilitated conflict work between leaders, co-founders, or board factions. Distinct from HR investigations, which we don't run: this is forward-looking, interest-based, and confidential.
Change Management
Structured change management for software rollouts, M&A integration, restructuring, leadership transitions, and policy shifts. We use Kotter, ADKAR, and Bridges, calibrated to your size and stakes.
Succession Planning
Honest assessment of leadership bench strength, written succession plans for key roles, and development paths for the next layer down. Especially relevant for founder-led and family-held businesses.
How We Approach OD Engagements
A four-phase methodology grounded in the OD discipline: diagnose with evidence, design with theory, implement with care, sustain past the consultant.
Diagnose
Stakeholder interviews, surveys, document review, and observation. We map the current state with evidence, not assumptions: what the data says, what leaders say, what the front line says, and where those three diverge.
Design
A written intervention plan grounded in a theory of change. You see what we recommend, why we recommend it, what frameworks we're applying, and what success looks like, before any workshop gets scheduled.
Implement
Workshops, coaching engagements, leadership cohorts, and embedded support. We facilitate the hard conversations, coach the leaders carrying the change, and stay close enough to catch the inevitable wobble at week six.
Sustain
Measurement against the metrics we set in step one, knowledge transfer to internal champions, and documentation so the learning doesn't leave when we do. OD that doesn't outlast the consultant is OD that failed.
Frameworks We Work With
OD has a body of theory behind it. These are the frameworks we lean on, calibrated to your situation. We don't apply them as a sales prop, and we don't apply all of them at once.
Common OD Use Cases
Eight scenarios we see repeatedly. If you recognize your organization here, you're not the first.
Founder-Led Company Hitting Scaling Pain
Fifteen to thirty employees, founder still in every decision, hiring senior people who quit within a year. Time to build out a leadership layer, redesign decision rights, and coach the founder through letting go.
Nonprofit Board Governance Refresh
Board roles unclear, board-versus-staff line blurry, committee structure inherited from a different era. We rebuild the governance model, charter the board's role, and align board work to strategic priorities.
Leadership Transition (Founder Stepping Back)
Founder is moving to a board chair or advisor role and the next executive is stepping in. We coach both, design the handoff, document the founder's tacit knowledge, and keep culture intact through the transition.
Post-Merger Culture Integration
Two organizations on paper, three cultures in practice. We diagnose the integration risks, facilitate the leadership team alignment, and design a 12-month integration roadmap with named owners.
Strategic Plan Refresh
Last strategic plan is in a binder no one's opened since the offsite. We facilitate a new plan participatively, ground it in evidence, and put a quarterly review cadence in place so the document stays alive.
Building a Leadership Pipeline
Mid-level managers promoted into roles they were never trained for. We run a leadership cohort, build internal coaching capacity, and create development paths people can actually see themselves on.
Addressing Toxic Culture Signals
Engagement scores dropping, turnover concentrated in one team, exit interviews telling a consistent story. We diagnose the root cause (often a leader, sometimes a system) and design the intervention.
Executive Offsite Facilitation
One- or two-day offsite designed and facilitated, with pre-work, structured exercises, decisions captured in writing, and a 30-60-90 plan that doesn't dissolve on the flight home.
Industries Where OD Lands
Four verticals where Launch has shipped meaningful OD work, with the context and edge cases that come with each.
Nonprofits & Mission-Driven
Where mission is everything and culture is fragile. We've supported governance refreshes, leadership transitions, and strategic plans for nonprofits across the Pacific Northwest. High stakes, high care.
Cannabis Operators
A regulated industry with constant culture pressure: rapid growth, talent scarcity, generational mix, and rules that change yearly. OD work here has to handle both compliance reality and human reality.
Professional Services
Law firms, agencies, consultancies, and accounting practices, where the people are the product. Partner alignment, succession planning, and culture work that holds up under utilization pressure.
Government-Adjacent Programs
Technical assistance programs we run on behalf of public agencies: Seattle ABC, Sacramento CORE, and the Sound Transit TAP cohort. Facilitation, leadership development, and capacity-building at scale.
Our Approach to Strategic Planning
Strategic planning the OD way is participatory, not consultant-imposed. The people who have to deliver the plan need to help shape it, or you'll have a binder and not a strategy. We design the process so the right voices are in the room, the hard tradeoffs surface, and the leadership team owns the result.
We also ground the work in evidence. Before any vision retreat, we run stakeholder interviews, gather operational data, and surface the assumptions leadership has been making about customers, markets, and the team. Theory of Change is our default scaffolding: what change are we trying to create, what activities will drive it, and what assumptions are we betting on?
Finally, we design for follow-through. Most strategic plans fail not at the offsite but in month four, when day-to-day pressure crowds out the new priorities. We put a quarterly review cadence in place, name owners for each strategic initiative, and stay close enough during the first two quarters to help leaders hold the line.
Executive Coaching
Executive coaching at Launch follows International Coaching Federation (ICF) standards on contracting, confidentiality, and ethics. A typical engagement runs six to twelve months, with twice-monthly sessions, written development goals, and a stakeholder feedback process up front so the work is grounded in real data, not just self-report. We coach founders, executives, senior managers, and emerging leaders in transition.
Coaching is the right tool when a capable leader is navigating growth, role transition, interpersonal patterns that aren't serving them, or strategic decisions that require sharper thinking. Coaching is not therapy and not an HR investigation. If the work in front of us belongs in a clinical setting or in an HR file, we'll say so and help route it appropriately. The line matters, and we hold it.
What We Replace, And With What
Patterns we see across the small and mid-sized organizations we work with. If any of these sound familiar, you're in normal company, and there's a real upgrade available.
Annual strategy doc that no one reads after the offsite
Quarterly check-in cadence with a living plan, named owners, and decisions captured between sessions.
HR investigation as the default response to interpersonal conflict
Facilitated conflict resolution: separate forward-looking interest-based work from compliance investigations.
Org chart last updated in 2024, roles defined by whoever was hired
Accountability chart with named owners for every function, decisions rights, and escalation paths.
Engagement survey sent yearly with no follow-through
Diagnostic-to-action cycle: shorter pulse surveys, focused interventions, and visible follow-up.
Leadership development means sending a manager to a one-day class
Multi-session cohort with action learning, peer coaching, and tied-to-real-work projects.
Founder making every meaningful decision personally
Decision-rights map, coached delegation, and a senior team trusted to lead in the founder's absence.
Confidentiality & Trust
OD work only goes as deep as the trust in the room. Leaders open up about doubts they haven't said out loud. Teams name dynamics they've avoided for years. Founders admit what isn't working. None of that happens unless the confidentiality is real, the contracting is explicit, and the consultant is the same person in front of the board as in the one-on-one.
We're explicit about lanes. Executive coaching conversations stay confidential between coach and coachee, with progress notes shared only as the coachee approves. Diagnostic interviews are reported in themes, not attributions: nobody's quote shows up identifiable. HR investigations are a different lane entirely, and we don't run them. When a coaching conversation surfaces something that belongs in an HR investigation, we say so and step out of the dual role.
We also document scope and confidentiality up front. Every engagement starts with a written agreement that covers what gets shared with whom, how reports are structured, what data we retain, and how we handle the moment when something said in confidence intersects with the sponsor's right to know. The boundary work isn't paperwork: it's how OD stays useful over a long engagement.
Why Launch for OD
Four reasons small and mid-sized organizations bring us in, and keep us close after the first engagement.
MSOD-Credentialed Lead
Monica Colgan holds a Master of Science in Organization Development from Central Washington University, one of the long-standing graduate OD programs in the country. This is the practice's core discipline, not an add-on.
15+ Years in the Work
Hundreds of facilitated sessions, leadership cohorts, strategic plans, and culture interventions across private, nonprofit, and government-adjacent organizations. Pattern recognition you can't shortcut.
Multi-Industry Range
Cannabis, nonprofits, professional services, food and beverage, and large public-agency programs. The same OD frameworks, applied to very different operating realities.
Small-Org Pragmatism
We design for organizations with five to two hundred employees. Not McKinsey-priced, not McKinsey-staffed, and not McKinsey-shaped. Realistic scope, realistic timelines, durable outcomes.
Organization Development FAQ
What does an OD engagement cost?
What's the line between OD and HR?
Do you offer executive coaching as a standalone engagement?
Do you do team coaching, not just one-on-one?
Do you work with nonprofit boards?
How long does a real culture change initiative take?
Will you help with toxic-culture cleanup?
What if the founder or CEO is part of the problem?
Can OD work be done virtually?
How do we know if we need OD or HR?
Meet the Team
The experts behind this service, ready to support your business.
Organization Development Capabilities Statement
Download our one-page PDF overview to share with partners, clients, or your team.