A two-day facilitated leadership-team engagement. Where the work done privately becomes the work the team does together. Surfacing the gap on a board, plotting it, committing to ninety days.
Killhouse is the team-scale instrument of the Foundership practice. A founder-led leadership team comes off-site for two days. They surface the gap on a board. They plot decisions on a 2×2. They render the organization's Vase. They stress-test the next ninety days against the operational architecture they've just made visible. They walk out with a ninety-day catalog of commitments — owners, cadences, definitions of done.
The work is the work. There is no curriculum to perform. The architecture provides the structure; the team provides the material; the engagement produces five artifacts that outlast the room.
Named for the special-operations training environment where you discover where you'd get killed before the consequence is terminal.
The engagement is structured but not scripted. Each block is a station — a piece of architectural work the team does together, producing a single artifact that will travel home in their pocket. The facilitator runs the room; the team runs the work.
Each station produces one artifact the team owns. The artifacts are the engagement's continuity instrument — the team returns to them at thirty, sixty, ninety days to see what they committed to and what they actually did.
The verbatim record of belief versus action across the leadership team.
Decisions and people plotted on the Belief-Fit Matrix. The map of what's load-bearing.
The organization's belief continuity rendered as a single visual instrument.
Ninety days of decisions checked against the architecture before they're paid for.
Ninety-day catalog. Owners, cadences, dates. The work the team signed for.
The Killhouse is sized for the team that is small enough to walk through the architecture together and large enough that the gap shows up in the room without the founder having to name it.
Operator-built businesses in their fifth-to-twenty-fifth year, where the gap has begun to surface but the founder still owns the room. The engagement is most load-bearing here.
The succession case. Founding generation handing the architecture to the operating generation. The Killhouse renders the belief continuity the founder has been carrying without naming.
Specialist teams inside larger organizations — units carrying the founding belief at distance from the original founder. The Killhouse names what the unit has been protecting at scale.
Killhouse is delivered as a structured two-day on-site engagement, bracketed by pre-work the team does individually with Field Guide and Deck, and a debrief at thirty and ninety days against the commitments the team made in the room.
The Killhouse stands in two traditions. The first is Edgar Schein's process consultation — the consultant is brought into the system, not to the system. The work the team does is the team's; the facilitator runs the architecture. The second is the operator-pedagogy lineage Matt inherited from thirteen years running the CIA's program of instruction — Tell-Show-Do, deliberate practice, instrumented learning under consequence.
One question per card. The non-linear practitioner instrument used as Killhouse pre-work.
The year-long sequential arc. Often opened at a Killhouse and carried forward by the team after.
The entry-point monograph. Killhouse pre-work — each leader completes the seven questions individually before the team arrives.
Killhouse engagements are scheduled by inquiry. The engagement is sized to the team and dated against a ninety-day operational cycle. Inquiry begins a conversation, not a transaction.