Culture change your managers carry out themselves
Change programs rarely fail in the strategy. They fail in the middle, where managers are asked to lead a change nobody prepared them for. CoachingOurselves puts small groups of your own managers around the real problem, using discussion guides written by the people who created Appreciative Inquiry and Future Search.
Why change stalls at the manager
The organization announces a restructure, a merger, a new operating model, a set of values. Then the work of making it real is handed to managers — the people with the least time, the least context, and the most exposure to the people affected.
In a Gartner survey of 473 HR leaders in July 2024, 74% said their managers are not equipped to lead change, and 73% said their employees were already fatigued by it. McLean & Company’s 2026 HR Trends report found 70% of organizations struggling to manage change at all, and titled the finding a growing gap between organizational change and leadership capacity.
That gap is not usually an information problem. The change has been communicated, often repeatedly. What has not happened is a conversation — managers working out, with colleagues who face the same thing, what this change actually means for the people in front of them on Monday morning.
“It has been said that you should never send a changed person back to an unchanged organization. In management development programs, we always do.”
Henry Mintzberg · OD Practitioner, 2011
CoachingOurselves co-founder Henry Mintzberg made this argument in the organization development field’s own journal fifteen years ago. What was needed, he wrote, was learning “connected to the collective experiences in the workplace, so that we can develop better organizations in the process of developing better managers, rather than just hoping that this will happen as a consequence of having developed them.”
The peer group is the intervention
Four to six managers sit down together for ninety minutes. There is no instructor and no preparation. They read a short section of a guidebook together, reflect on it individually against their own situation, then talk — as peers, about live problems, not case studies. They leave with commitments, and they check in on them next month.
The discussion is the learning. The guidebook is the facilitator. That much is true of any CoachingOurselves program.
What makes it an organizational intervention rather than a training course is who is in the room. The group is not a collection of individuals sent away to be developed and returned, one at a time, to an organization that has not moved. It is a working slice of the organization itself — colleagues who will still be dealing with each other next week. When six of them reach a shared conclusion about how change gets handled here, something in the organization has changed, not just something in six people.
Run several groups across a function and the conversations start to converge. Run them across levels, and the organization begins to talk to itself about the change instead of being talked at about it.
Four organizational problems it gets used for
Each of these is a published CoachingOurselves customer, and in three of the four the program was bought by the person responsible for organization development or culture.
McGill University
Written up by McGill’s Director of Organizational Development. Reflection Cafés for 1,700+ managers and supervisors, with topics chosen “appropriate to readiness, participant profiles, and emergent needs in the face of important culture change.” Read the story
UNI Coopération Financière
Seventeen separate credit unions regrouped into one. “Changes are not always easy for everyone and we wanted to help our leaders face these new challenges… CoachingOurselves created a synergy among participants, which was invaluable during our restructuring process.” Read the story
Intelerad
Bought by the VP Talent and Culture. Rapid growth had created silos; the objective was “to improve agility, collaboration and sense of community in the organization.” Groups were deliberately mixed across divisions. Read the story
Gildan
Interviewed for the story: Gildan’s Global Director, Organizational Development. 113 participants across more than eight countries, setting a common bar for what leadership means in the company. Read the story
Where this sits in organization development practice
Practitioners group Appreciative Inquiry, Open Space, Future Search and the World Café together as dialogic approaches to organization development — methods that work with change through structured conversation rather than through instruction or installation.
CoachingOurselves belongs in that family, and not by coincidence. David Cooperrider, who originated Appreciative Inquiry, writes for us. So do Marvin Weisbord and Sandra Janoff, who created Future Search. So do Edgar Schein, whose work on process consultation and organizational culture is foundational to the field, Michael Beer of Harvard on organizational change, Marilyn Laiken on organizational learning, Frances Westley and Brenda Zimmerman on complexity, Beverley Patwell on leading change, and Amy Edmondson on psychological safety.
What that means in practice is that an OD team does not have to translate this into their own language. The guides were written by the people who built the field. See the full list of authors.
Topics for organizational work
Roughly forty of the guides address the organization rather than the individual manager. A selection:
Three ways teams run it
Led by your OD or L&D team. You choose the sequence of topics against the change you are working on, convene the groups, and hold the thread across them. This is the closest fit to a designed intervention, and it is how McGill has run Reflection Cafés for more than a decade.
Facilitated by the managers themselves. Groups rotate the facilitator role. Certification is two sessions, about five hours. This is what makes it affordable to reach every manager rather than a selected cohort, and it spreads ownership of the change rather than concentrating it.
Cascaded through the organization. A manager who has been through a program runs the same topics with their own team. This is where management development turns into organization development — the same conversation moving down and outward instead of stopping with the person who attended.
Common questions
Is this change management training?
Not in the methodology sense — it does not teach a change framework or certify practitioners. It is the layer most change programs are missing: the managers who have to carry the change actually talking through what it means where they work. It sits alongside a change methodology rather than replacing one.
Can we use it during an active change, or does it need to come first?
During. The sessions work on live situations, so a change already underway gives the group better material, not worse. UNI ran it through a seventeen-organization merger.
Do we need an external facilitator or consultant?
No. The guidebook carries the structure and the content. Most organizations run it internally; some bring in a certified partner for the first cycle and then take it over.
How many groups do we need before it affects the culture?
There is no threshold we would defend as a number. What matters more is that groups are mixed across functions, that they run on a rhythm rather than once, and that what surfaces in them gets back to whoever is steering the change.
How does it fit with an existing leadership program?
It fits underneath one. Formal training sits in the 10% of the 70:20:10 model; this lives in the 20% and makes the 70% deliberate. Several customers alternate it with their existing curriculum.
What does it cost?
Programs start at $5,000 a year for up to 10 managers, and the cost per manager falls as the program grows. For organization-wide work we quote against scope — talk to us about what you are trying to shift.
Is it available in other languages?
Yes — 14+ languages, including English, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese and Chinese. Gildan ran it across more than eight countries.
When is it the wrong tool?
When the change is purely technical and nobody’s behaviour has to alter. When leadership is not prepared to hear what comes back out of the groups. And when what is wanted is a single event rather than a rhythm — one session will not shift a culture.
Start with a conversation about the change
Tell us what you are trying to shift and we will tell you honestly whether this is the right instrument for it. Or sit in on an open session first and judge the method for yourself — a real topic, a real group, sixty minutes.
Book a 30-minute call
Join a demo session
Read Mintzberg’s 2011 paper, “From Management Development to Organization Development”