About Cohort Institute
The same teams keep failing in the same ways.
And if you've ever taught a project-based course or led a cross-functional team, you've probably watched it happen — knowing something was wrong, but not being able to see it clearly enough to help.
Jessica Robinson taught project-based courses at CSULB for over a decade. She could tell which teams would struggle by week three — not from who was on them, but from what wasn't being said. Expectations stayed implicit. Ownership went unspoken. By the time problems surfaced, the trust was already gone. She'd watch it happen, knowing the signs, unable to intervene without something concrete to point to.
Eddie Zaldivar saw the same thing inside data science and marketing teams. Experienced professionals, clear goals, identical breakdown. One person carrying the project while gaps went unnoticed. The frustrating part wasn't that these teams failed — it was that everyone could feel it happening and no one had a way to say it.
They'd both tried the standard interventions. Peer evaluations. Team contracts. Check-ins on paper. Retrospectives. Task management tools that showed who's doing what by when. Every one of them addressed the symptoms — the uneven workload, the last-minute scramble, the silent resentment. None of them surfaced the coordination dynamics underneath: the mismatched expectations, the ambiguous ownership, the slow drift that nobody names until a deadline forces it.
The information that could have prevented the failure always existed early. It just wasn't visible to the people who could act on it.
We kept asking the same question: what if someone had seen this three weeks ago?
SQUAD closes that gap. Each team member completes structured check-ins that surface misaligned expectations, ownership gaps, and emerging tensions. Those signals reach the professor as team-level patterns — not individual surveillance, not raw data, but early enough to act on. Week three instead of week eight.
Teams are formed using a behavioral assessment grounded in coordination theory and Oakley's team effectiveness research — 15 working-style roles mapped per student, balanced across teams. Then ongoing visibility keeps the coordination from decaying silently.
What we will and won't do
We're not trying to eliminate team dysfunction — that's not realistic and it's not the goal. We're trying to make sure the moment where things could still be fixed doesn't pass by in silence. If you're working on that same problem, we'd like to build alongside you.
Piloting at California State University, Long Beach — Spring 2026.