Training design for OD and change initiatives

When an organisation restructures, adopts a new way of working or tries to shift its culture, training is almost always part of the plan. It's also often the part that disappoints. People attend, understand the new way of working, and then carry on in the old one.

I design facilitator-led training that is built into the change itself, so that what people learn has somewhere to land.

Why training inside a change initiative so often fails

Training usually arrives as a work package: "the change team will define the new process, then L&D will train everyone on it." By then, the important decisions have been made without thinking about how people actually learn and adapt. Three things tend to go wrong:

• The system hasn't changed yet. People learn the new behaviour on Tuesday and go back on Wednesday to structures, measures and managers that still reward the old one.
• Nobody has addressed what people stand to lose. Every change asks someone to give up status, certainty, expertise or a way of being good at their job. Training that ignores this gets polite compliance at best.
• Training is treated as communication. Telling people about the change isn't the same as helping them become able to work in it.

Designing training as part of the change

I work with the change or OD team early, ideally while the change is still being designed. In practice that means:

1. Mapping what the change asks of each group. Not "understand the new model", but what each role must do, stop doing and get comfortable with.
2. Finding the pull-backs. These are the structures, incentives and unspoken rules that will reinstall the old behaviour, so the change team can fix them or the design can work around them.
3. Working with resistance as information. I design sessions where people can name what they're worried about losing. That makes resistance useful data rather than something to manage around.
4. Sequencing learning with the change. People learn things close to when they'll need them, with practice on real work.
5. Equipping managers first. Line managers carry the change after the training ends, so they experience it, and learn to support it, before their teams do.

What this looks like in practice

Inside a large financial institution, I designed a set of facilitator-led programmes, for behaviour, teams, culture and leaders, that reached more than 2,000 people. They spread from the division where they started into other parts of the business because managers asked for them, not because they were mandated. Read the Servant Leadership case.

In another engagement, structural redesign of how departments sold only held once the teams themselves were rebuilt across disciplines. Training on its own hadn't changed the outcome; changing the structure and the learning together did. Read the ValueFlow case.

Building the facilitators who carry the change

A change lasts longer when your own people can run the learning. I train internal facilitators through a step-by-step pathway: participant, observer, co-facilitator, then lead with a senior facilitator seconded to support them, then sign-off. They know the business, they are still there when I leave, and they can keep the sessions going as the change moves into new teams. Read how this worked in the Servant Leadership case.

Working alongside your change team

I'm not a replacement for a change management methodology or your change team. I'm the learning design partner who makes sure the people side of the plan actually changes behaviour. I work comfortably alongside internal OD teams, change consultancies and project management offices.

Questions change and OD leaders ask