A 12-week programme that helps a team move through a period of change together. Built to prepare a team emotionally, culturally and behaviourally, whether the change is confirmed, still taking shape or already underway. Measured with the Wharton School and the ACC team through a real transition. Every measurable dimension moved.
Professor Michael Parke of the Wharton School partnered with riders&elephants and the ACC team to study the intervention across a real transition. The full findings are public.
Every organisation going through a change has a strategy. A timeline. A comms plan. What most don't have is an honest, measurable understanding of how their team actually feels about what's coming.
Emotional resistance is the reason strategies stall. Not the plan on the wall. Not the timeline in the slide deck. What the people carrying the change actually feel about it in the room, on the call, in the corridor.
Most leaders are told to communicate more clearly and hope for the best. That's not a strategy. That's a wish. The Change Readiness Programme is the alternative.
At riders&elephants we move and measure the emotions that drive performance. Because the most human part of change has always been the most avoided and unmeasured. This programme puts a rhythm and a method around it, before the change arrives.
Delivered by riders&elephants or a Certified Partner. Twelve weeks, timed around your change: before it is announced, while it is still taking shape, or once it is underway. A restructure, a merger, a transformation, a new operating model, a new leader.
The team goes into the change already knowing how they want to feel through it, what to watch for when they don't, and what to do together when it gets hard. That's what emotional readiness looks like in practice.
A two-hour or four-hour facilitated workshop with the whole team, depending on how comprehensive you want it. Name the desired feelings the team will design for, and the undesired feelings that signal the change is getting hard. Choose the feelings to track, usually three of each.
A 15-minute Weekly Retro slotted inside an existing team meeting: two cards, a quick check-in, a short conversation. Two deeper facilitated sessions at weeks 4 and 8. Trend data starts to accumulate. The team owns the rhythm.
A 90-minute closing session. Twelve weeks of emotional trend data on the table. Revisit the team’s chosen feelings. Reflect on personal growth. Decide what carries forward beyond the programme, into the change itself.
Twelve weeks of measured emotional data, individual reflections, and a shared strategic document the team carries into the change. Not a workshop artefact left on the wall. A capability the team owns.
Everyone in the team knows exactly what happens each week. The rhythm is designed to slot into an existing team meeting rather than sit on top of one.
A two-hour or four-hour facilitated workshop with the whole team. The team names the emotions they want to design for, the ones that signal resistance, and chooses the feelings to track, usually three desired and three undesired. Facilitated by riders&elephants or a Certified Partner.
Facilitated · 2 hours · Whole teamFifteen minutes each week, run inside an existing team meeting. On their phone, everyone picks one black card and one white card from the Emotional Culture Deck, then rates how often they felt each of the team’s chosen feelings, from Not often to Almost always. No sign-in, no names. Then the team talks about the week. Nothing new on the calendar.
Team meeting · Weekly · 15 minsA 60–90 minute facilitated session. Look at three weeks of trend data. Where are the desired feelings landing. Where are the undesired ones spiking. Set personal intentions for the next four weeks.
Facilitated · 60–90 minsWeekly check-in continues. The team owns it now. Trend patterns become visible. Real behavioural shifts start to show up in how people talk to each other about the coming change.
Team meeting · Weekly · 15 minsAnother facilitated session. Same shape as week 4. Refresh commitments. Name what's changed. Decide what to double down on for the last four weeks before the change lands.
Facilitated · 60–90 minsWeekly check-in continues. By this point the team runs the rhythm without prompting. The check-in becomes part of how the team works, not something being done to them.
Team meeting · Weekly · 15 minsThe closing session. Twelve weeks of trend data on the table. Revisit the top desired and undesired feelings. Reflect on personal growth. Decide what the team carries forward into the change.
Facilitated · 90 mins · Whole teamThis programme is built for teams who work together every day and are heading into, or already living through, a period of change. It works whether you know exactly what the change is, or it is still uncertain and ambiguous.
Facilitation, tools, data infrastructure and the coaching cadence to keep it moving.
A two-hour or four-hour facilitated workshop for the whole team, delivered by riders&elephants or a Certified Partner.
60–90 minute facilitated sessions at week 4 and week 8, held to reset direction based on the trend data.
A 90-minute Reflect & Review session to close the arc and decide what carries forward into the change itself.
The digital Weekly Retro, set up with the feelings your team chose: a private link for the team, a room screen with a QR code, and a weekly picture for the team’s leader. Designed to slot into an existing meeting.
Emotional Culture Deck, Exploring Team Change Canvas, the digital Weekly Retro, Reflect & Review Canvas.
The team’s leader sees each week in words, colours and cards, and every earlier week beside it. Nobody is ever named.
Professor Michael Parke of the Wharton School of Business studied the ACC team through a real transition, running this programme as designed. Every measurable dimension moved. Not correlations. Statistically significant shifts, measured before and after.
Small percentages, big real-world impact. Prof Parke's comparison from the community replay: pain medication has a 0.08 effect-size correlation and is still highly effective. Small statistically significant shifts, multiplied across a whole team every week, compound quickly.
Read the full study →
An hour-long community session where Professor Parke walks the room through the two field studies, the numbers behind the headlines, and what it means for practitioners. Sign in with your Elephant Riders account to watch.
Watch the community replay →
A note on quotes from the field. We publish real quotes from real teams who've run this programme. We don't publish composites and we don't publish anything without the team's sign-off. As the programme is delivered inside more organisations, this section fills up. For now, the ACC × Wharton study speaks for the method.
A 15-minute light-touch conversation each week, designed to run inside an existing team meeting. If you already have a weekly stand-up or a fortnightly leadership meeting, the check-in slots straight into it. Nothing new on the calendar. On top of the weekly rhythm: 60–90 minutes for the whole team at weeks 4 and 8, two or four hours at week 1, and 90 minutes at week 12. That's it.
Change Readiness is for a team moving through change together. The Change Leadership Programme is for leaders, bringing them together to build the skills and techniques to lead their own teams through change. Many organisations run both: leaders on Change Leadership, and their teams on Change Readiness.
riders&elephants directly, or an ECD Certified Partner. The programme is designed to be delivered by trained facilitators who have completed the ECD Certified Consultant Development Programme.
Nobody is ever named. Each week everyone rates how often they felt each of the feelings the team chose at its workshop, and can add a short note, without their name.
The team’s leader sees the team’s ratings together: the week in words, how often each feeling was felt, the cards people picked and the notes. Never who rated what, and the notes are shown in an order that can’t reveal who wrote them.
If your organisation wants a wider view, an observer sees each team’s averages week by week, and nothing else. No notes, no individual ratings. An average needs at least two people behind it, so one person’s answers can never be worked out.
Go-deeper reflections are for the person writing them. Nobody at your organisation sees them. See who sees what.
Everyone is told this on their phone before they rate anything, and nothing leaves the team without the team knowing.
You can run the check-ins and tools yourselves. The facilitated sessions at week 1, 4, 8 and 12 are where the shift happens, and those need trained facilitation to hold the room. The rhythm without the facilitated moments becomes an admin exercise. The programme is designed as a whole.
No. Engagement surveys measure how people feel about the company as a whole, once or twice a year. This measures how a specific team feels about a specific change, week by week, in a way the team itself acts on. Different question, different rhythm, different outcome.
Two ways in. Have a first conversation with us at riders&elephants to explore whether the timing and shape fit your organisation. Or reach out to a Certified Partner in your region who can deliver this with your team.