Dave Closson has been in the room where coalitions get built — and where they quietly fall apart.
Two decades of coalition work across public health, education, and community organizing. The Coalition Operating System is the playbook he wished every table had on day one.
Dave didn't set out to write a book. He set out to stop watching good coalitions dissolve.
Early in his career he sat at a table of 20 organizations, all pointed at the same community, all doing sincere work — and all quietly duplicating, drifting, and burning out. Nobody was wrong. The table was.
Across public health emergencies, prevention networks, campus partnerships, and community-led change, Dave collected the moves that actually worked. He leaned into his military roots — structure, routine, and the discipline of keeping a team aligned under pressure — to turn scattered good intentions into repeatable systems. The patterns. The scripts. The Tuesday-morning rituals. What became the Coalition Operating System is a distillation of that field work — the version that fits on a whiteboard and survives contact with real partners.
He teaches, coaches, and keynotes on coalition design, and he still runs coalitions himself. The COS Model™ is what he wishes he had on day one.
The best ones behave more like a startup than a task force.
The magic isn't the leader. It's the loop the leader protects.
Momentum is a coalition's most fragile and most important asset.