Kara Hayward

Kara works with leaders and teams across Fortune 500s, ventures, philanthropies and nonprofits to tackle complex challenges and prototype their way to change. Over the past 15 years, she’s guided clients through questions like: How do we make major decisions with confidence in an increasingly uncertain environment? How does our organization need to evolve how we work to tackle a changing set of problems? What must I, as a leader, do differently for this strategy to take flight?

Before joining Incandescent, Kara was a leader at Next Street, advising small-to-midsize businesses and nonprofits on growth strategy and helping cross-sector coalitions strengthen local small business ecosystems.That work sparked her obsessed with the question of how individuals and groups can take on problems too big to face alone - and what it takes for such groups to truly come together and drive towards a shared vision.

Early in her career, Kara was part of Deloitte Consulting's Strategy and Operations practice. She left Deloitte Consulting to help stand up Bonafide Health’s direct-to-consumer eCommerce platform and launch their women's health products.

Kara is a student of the emotional life of organizations and how group dynamics shape organizational culture and decision-making. She serves as an associate faculty member in CFAR's Dynamics of Consulting program and is a member of the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations (ISPSO). She recently presented a paper at the ISPSO Annual Meeting “Organizational Mythology: Giving us purpose, holding us back,” exploring how the stories we tell in organizations give us purpose and forge collective identity, but can also harden under pressure, limiting our ability to evolve.

Kara graduated from Wesleyan University with a degree in Economics and spent a year at the London School of Economics studying Human Geography, learning about how groups and cities shape one another. In her free time, she’s likely doing one of three things: Putting in time at the boxing gym, bopping around NYC with her partner and kid, or catching a sunset somewhere off the grid.