Marshall Ganz's snowflake and the leadership cohort

Ganz's snowflake model is a way to scale leadership without losing the relational core. A leadership cohort is how you produce snowflakes deliberately.

The snowflake: a campaign is structured as a central leadership team, each member of which leads a team of their own, each of whose members can lead a team of their own. Power is distributed; coordination is real. The shape is fractal, not pyramidal.

Snowflakes don't appear by accident. They are built through leadership cohorts — small groups of 6-10 emerging leaders who meet weekly for 6-8 weeks, work through a curriculum together, and emerge with the relationships and skills to each lead a sub-team.

A workable cohort curriculum: Week 1 — public narrative (Self/Us/Now). Week 2 — 1:1s. Week 3 — power analysis and theory of change for their sub-team. Week 4 — running meetings. Week 5 — managing conflict. Week 6 — making asks and recruiting. Each week, a homework assignment that gets done in the field and reported back.

At the end of the cohort, each participant launches a team of their own with three people they recruited via 1:1 during the cohort. The cohort becomes a peer group those leaders return to for accountability and support for the next year.