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| SESSION 01 | The Landscape of Change: Frameworks, Failures, and the Human Dimension |
| This opening session establishes the intellectual and emotional foundation for the entire course. Participants examine what we know about why change succeeds and fails, engage critically with the most widely used change frameworks, and confront the uncomfortable truth that most change failure is a leadership failure — rooted not in deficient methodology but in inadequate attention to the human experience of transition. |
| Topics and Practitioner Activities |
| – The organisational change landscape: developmental, transitional, and transformational change distinctions, examples, and leadership implications |
| – Why change fails: the evidence base on the most common and most consequential causes of change initiative failure — and what they reveal about leadership |
| – Survey of leading change frameworks: Kotter’s 8 Steps, Prosci ADKAR, Bridges’ Transition Model, and McKinsey 7S (strengths, limitations, and contextual fit) |
| – The human experience of change: Bridges’ distinction between change and transition, the three zones of transition, and the leader’s role in supporting people through each |
| – Grief, loss, and identity in organisational change: why people resist change that is objectively good for them, and what this demands of leaders |
| – Change readiness assessment: diagnostic tools for evaluating an organisation’s current capacity and appetite for the intended change |
| – Reflection exercise: participants map a real change initiative — past or current — against the evidence on change failure, identifying critical risk points and leadership gaps |
| – Group discussion: what does genuinely human-centred change leadership look like in practice? |
| SESSION 02 | Change Leadership Identity: Self-Awareness, Courage, and Authentic Authority |
| Change leadership begins not with a framework but with a leader. This session turns the lens inward, inviting participants to examine their own relationship with change, uncertainty, and authority — and to develop a personal change leadership philosophy that is grounded in self-knowledge rather than performance. The session draws on adaptive leadership theory, emotional intelligence research, and the psychology of leadership under pressure. |
| Topics and Practitioner Activities |
| – Adaptive versus technical challenges: Heifetz and Linsky’s framework for understanding why adaptive challenges demand a fundamentally different leadership response |
| – The change leader’s self-assessment: exploring personal patterns in response to uncertainty, ambiguity, loss of control, and conflict |
| – Emotional intelligence as a change leadership resource: self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, and social skill in the context of high-stakes change |
| – The authority trap: why positional power is insufficient for leading adaptive change, and what authentic authority requires instead |
| – Values-based change leadership: articulating a personal theory of change leadership grounded in purpose, principles, and honest self-knowledge |
| – Leading from the balcony: the adaptive leadership practice of gaining perspective while remaining engaged — seeing the system while acting within it |
| – Psychological resilience for change leaders: recognising and managing the personal cost of leading sustained change without losing effectiveness or integrity |
| – Individual reflection and peer coaching exercise: participants articulate their personal change leadership strengths, vulnerabilities, and development edge |
| SESSION 03 | Culture, Climate, and the Hidden Architecture of Change |
| Culture is the invisible force that either accelerates or absorbs change. This session equips participants with the diagnostic tools and conceptual frameworks to read organisational culture with accuracy, understand its relationship to change capacity, and design change strategies that are culturally intelligent. The session addresses both the surface manifestations of culture and the deeper assumptions and values that determine whether change takes root or withers. |
| Topics and Practitioner Activities |
| – Defining culture with precision: Schein’s three levels of organisational culture: artefacts, espoused values, and underlying assumptions as well as their differential impact on change |
| – Culture diagnostic methods: conducting a culture audit using observation, narrative inquiry, artefact analysis, and structured leadership conversation |
| – Cultural assets and cultural liabilities: identifying which elements of the existing culture to leverage, which to work around, and which must be directly challenged |
| – Psychological safety as a change enabler: Amy Edmondson’s research on team psychological safety and its critical role in enabling the experimentation, voice, and learning that change requires |
| – Power, informal networks, and the shadow organisation: mapping the informal dynamics that will shape how the change narrative spreads, stalls, or gets subverted |
| – Culture change versus behaviour change: understanding why announcing cultural aspirations without changing structural conditions consistently fails |
| SESSION 04 | Stakeholder Engagement, Communication, and the Change Coalition |
| Even the most visionary change strategy fails without the sustained commitment of a critical mass of stakeholders. This session addresses the full stakeholder engagement challenge — from mapping power and influence, to designing honest and compelling communications, to building the coalition of change advocates that carries the transformation beyond the initiating leadership team into the fabric of the organisation. |
| Topics and Practitioner Activities |
| – Stakeholder analysis for complex change: mapping power, interest, influence, and emotional posture — and why emotional posture is the most important and least-mapped variable |
| – Segmenting the stakeholder landscape: sponsors, early adopters, pragmatic followers, resisters, and vocal opponents — distinct strategies for each group |
| – Honest change communication: why corporate communication spin destroys trust and what courageous, transparent, and credible change communication looks like in practice |
| – Structuring the change narrative: the four questions every stakeholder needs answered — Why change? Why now? What does this mean for me? What do you need from me? |
| – Multi-channel communication design: matching the message, medium, and messenger to the stakeholder audience and the nature of the change |
| – Building the change coalition: identifying, recruiting, developing, and sustaining a network of change sponsors, leaders, and peer ambassadors across the organisation |
| – Managing the senior leadership team: facilitating alignment, managing divergence, and maintaining a united leadership voice when commitment varies across the executive group |
| SESSION 05 | Resistance, Conflict, and Navigating the Transition Curve |
| Resistance is not the enemy of change — it is one of its most important teachers. This session reframes resistance as meaningful data, equips participants with evidence-based approaches to engage those who are sceptical, opposed, or grieving, and develops the facilitation and conflict navigation skills that distinguish change leaders who build trust from those who merely manage compliance. The session pays particular attention to the emotional intelligence demands of leading people through genuine loss. |
| Topics and Practitioner Activities |
| – Reframing resistance: the five most common sources of change resistance (legitimate concerns, unacknowledged losses, trust deficits, inadequate involvement, and poor communication) and how to address each |
| – The transition curve in depth: mapping where different individuals and groups are in their transition journey, and calibrating leadership support accordingly |
| – Listening as a change leadership tool: how deep, non-defensive listening transforms the change leader’s relationship with resistance and generates insights that improve the change design |
| – Engaging the vocal opponent: structured approaches for having courageous conversations with resistant stakeholders that maintain relationship while holding the direction of change |
| – Conflict as creative tension: distinguishing productive conflict are the kind that generates better solutions — from destructive conflict that fragments teams and derails change |
| – Loss, grief, and mourning in organisational change: creating legitimate space for what is being given up, and why leaders who dismiss loss undermine their own credibility |
| – Change fatigue: recognising the signs of cumulative change exhaustion across the organisation and designing change initiatives with human sustainability in mind |
| SESSION 06 | Organisational Agility: Building the Adaptive Enterprise and Sustaining Change |
| The final session brings the course together in an integrating vision: not of change as an episodic event to be managed, but of organisational agility as a permanent and deliberately cultivated capability. Participants explore what it takes to build organisations that adapt continuously, learn voraciously, and lead purposefully through whatever disruption the future brings. The session concludes with participants completing and presenting their Change Leadership Plans — an integrating capstone that synthesises the learning of the entire course. |
| Topics and Practitioner Activities |
| – Defining organisational agility: the six dimensions of genuine adaptive capacity — strategic sensing, structural flexibility, leadership responsiveness, cultural openness, learning velocity, and workforce resilience |
| – Agile organisational design: applying agility principles to structures, governance, decision rights, and operating models without sacrificing accountability or strategic coherence |
| – Building a learning organisation: the disciplines of systems thinking, personal mastery, mental model examination, shared vision, and team learning as the architecture of sustained agility |
| – Sustaining change: the anatomy of change regression; why hard-won gains erode and how to design reinforcement mechanisms that lock in new behaviours and prevent backsliding |
| – Measuring change effectiveness: a balanced scorecard spanning adoption metrics, cultural shift indicators, business outcome measures, and individual wellbeing data |
| – The change-ready leader: synthesising the personal, relational, and systemic dimensions of change leadership into an integrated and authentic leadership practice |
| – Leading through perpetual disruption: developing the psychological resources, purpose, adaptability, equanimity, and community that sustain effective change leadership over a career |
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