One day in Germany, I spent alone at an open-air museum in the Black Forest. Entire farmhouses had been preserved and rebuilt, each one telling the story of how families survived in different regions and different centuries.
Some had earthen floors. Some had carved beams blackened from centuries of smoke. Some had massive roofs designed to store grain through brutal winters. Every structure was different because every family faced different terrain, different weather, different realities.
I thought about charter schools.
Too often, boards and founders search for “the model” as if one blueprint works everywhere. But the rural school in Oregon does not need the same structure as the urban school in Denver. A startup serving highly independent homeschool families requires different systems than a highly academic college-prep model.
Healthy organizations are built around the realities of the people they actually serve, not around someone else’s floor plan.
That’s one of the mistakes I see most often in leadership and governance work: trying to import structures without understanding the environment they were designed for.
Good leaders ask different questions:
- What does this community actually need?
- What are we truly built for?
- What season are we in now?
- What kind of structure will sustain this work long term?
Build the house that fits the family.
Is your organization still operating inside a structure designed for a season you’ve already outgrown?