WORKSHOP

Navigating Complex Change

"Most change fails not because the strategy was wrong — but because the organisation wasn't ready for the complexity it created."

Complex change is not big change. It is change that is unpredictable, interdependent, and politically loaded — where the usual project management tools run out of road. This workshop gives HR leaders and senior practitioners the conceptual frameworks and practical tools to lead through it: reading the system, managing competing tensions, and keeping people with you when certainty has gone.

Participants leave able to:

• Distinguish between complicated and genuinely complex change — and why the difference matters for your approach

• Map the competing forces, coalitions, and resistances at play in their own change context

• Apply paradox-aware leadership techniques that hold tension rather than force false resolution

• Design communication and engagement that works with uncertainty, not against it

In-person or virtualHalf-day or full-dayUp to 20 participants

WORKSHOP

Unblocking Your Leadership Team

"Every leadership team has things that cannot be said. Those are usually the things most worth saying."

High-performing leadership teams are not defined by absence of conflict — they are defined by how they handle it. This facilitated workshop creates the conditions for a leadership team to surface what is really going on: the undiscussables, the competing agendas, the unspoken tensions that quietly undermine alignment and execution. Designed for teams that are capable but stuck — and courageous enough to do something about it.

Teams leave having:

• Named and explored the one or two dynamics that are genuinely holding them back

• Built a shared picture of what great looks like — and what is getting in the way

• Made explicit commitments to changed behaviours, not just better intentions

• Established the psychological safety infrastructure for ongoing honest conversation

Full day — off-site recommendedLeadership teams of 5–12Pre-work diagnostic included

COURSE

Strategic Employee Relations

"Employee relations has never mattered more — and rarely been done less strategically."

When employee relations is reduced to case management, HR becomes a fire-fighter. This course rebuilds ER as a strategic discipline: understanding the employment relationship as a dynamic that shapes trust, performance, and culture — and giving HR professionals the skills to intervene upstream, not just respond downstream. Built on 40 years of practitioner experience, it combines leading-edge research with what actually works in organisations.

Participants leave able to:

• Introduction to the Waves model

• Identify early signals of systemic ER risk before they surface as individual cases

• Design proactive ER strategies that reduce conflict and build collective trust

• Hold difficult, high-stakes conversations with managers, unions, and senior leaders

• Connect ER strategy to organisation culture, change and people performance

Modular — 1 or 2 daysIn-house or open cohortHR practitioners & BPs

WORKSHOP

Most factory visits are industrial tourism. This workshop changes that. You’ll learn to read a plant visit as a strategic intervention — using what you see in the people, the layout, the culture and the numbers to assess whether a site has what it takes to compete.

AT A GLANCE

Duration:  Half day (3.5 hrs) or full day with live plant visit

Format:  Facilitated workshop + optional live plant visit

Group size:  Up to 16

WHAT YOU’LL LEAVE WITH

→    A simple 5-step framework for any plant or operations visit

→    The ability to assess factory strategy — scale, flexibility or agility — in under an hour

→    Practical tools to map where a site sits on the technology/sophistication grid

→    Confidence to read culture fast: canteens, KPI boards, supervisor ratios, employee engagement

→    A checklist for whether HR, reward, training and org design are actually aligned to what the factory needs

→    Language to give meaningful, credible feedback to plant leadership

Management systems, visual indicators, discipline — the obsession test

DELIVERY FORMATS

Half-day workshop

Frameworks, tools and worked examples. Ideal as a standalone development session.

Full day with site visit

Half-day input followed by a live plant visit, debrief and structured feedback to leadership.

Bespoke integration

Can be embedded into broader HR capability programmes or leadership development curricula.

WHO THIS IS FOR

→    HR Business Partners

→    HR Directors in manufacturing

→    Operations leaders

→    Finance and commercial managers

→    Graduate and early-career managers in manufacturing businesses

Built on over 40 years of HR leadership in global manufacturing — including the Unilever Production System. Grounded in original research by Upton and Macadam (HBR, 1997) and updated for today’s operational context.

MASTERCLASS

14 Questions Every HR Director Should Be Asking

"The quality of your thinking as an HR Director is determined not by the answers you give — but by the questions you hold."

Drawn from four decades of working with HR Directors across sectors and countries, this masterclass surfaces the questions that separate genuinely strategic HR leadership from sophisticated operational management. Each question opens a lens — on the organisation, on the function, and on the HR Director themselves. Challenging, thought-provoking, and immediately actionable.

Participants leave with:

• A personal diagnostic of where their HR function is — and where it needs to move

• 14 high-leverage questions to carry into board conversations, team sessions, and their own reflection practice

• Clarity on the one or two shifts that will have the greatest strategic impact in their context

• A peer network of HR Directors working through the same challenges

COURSE

The rules of employee relations have changed. Most organisations haven’t noticed yet.

AI is dismantling the traditional employment relationship faster than any legislation, recession or restructure in living memory. The frameworks HR has relied on for thirty years — the grievance procedure, the recognition agreement, the job evaluation scheme — were built for a world that is disappearing.

This course doesn’t update those frameworks. It replaces them.

Built around three provocations that reframe what advanced ER practice actually requires today:

→    The employment relationship is no longer primarily between an employer and an employee. It is between an organisation and a network.

→    The biggest ER risk most organisations face isn’t a strike, a tribunal or a recognition claim. It is invisible — the collapse of informal trust at scale.

→    The tools we need already exist. We just haven’t applied them to ER yet.

Duration:  Two days (or four half-days)

Format:  Practitioner-led. High challenge. Real diagnostics on real organisations.

Level:  Senior HR practitioners and ER specialists. Not for beginners.

Group size:  Up to 14

WHO THIS IS FOR

→    Senior HR Business Partners with significant ER exposure

→    ER Managers and specialists ready to work at a more strategic level

→    HR Directors building an ER strategy for an AI-disrupted organisation

→    People who have found that standard ER training doesn’t match the complexity they actually face

IN-HOUSE OPTION

This course can be configured as a closed programme for a single organisation’s HR team — using your own data, your own ER cases and your own network as the working material. That version is more challenging and more valuable. It is also the version most organisations need most.

Developed from the frameworks in H(R)evolution (Watkins & Dalton, Routledge) and Paradox HR (forthcoming). Grounded in 40+ years of HR leadership across global manufacturing, professional services and the public sector.