STRATEGY ACTIVATION
Confidently drive your next change initiative by bridging the gap between your vision and implementation
SOLD OUT
April 7 – 11, 2025
8:00 AM – 11:00 AM PDT / 11:00 AM – 2:00 PM EDT
Price: $995
Making change happen is a monumental task.
As a change leader, you’ve likely poured massive amounts of time, energy, and resources into implementing a change only to run out of oomph and insight when it comes to actually getting people to change their behavior.
This can happen for many reasons, but one of the biggest challenges is knowing how to move people from hearing about a change to actually living it.
In this three-day course, you will move from feeling frustrated that you don’t have the right tools to engage people to effectively applying a powerful framework that moves people from alignment to adoption. You’ll even build a personalized strategy activation plan.
Take the first step in building your strategy activation practice.
Why take this course
- Learn a step-by-step, proven system for engaging employees in change initiatives
- Acquire flexible change activation tools that can be applied immediately and reused for multiple applications
- Collaborate and problem-solve with peers navigating similar change challenges
- Gain powerful insights into reasons strategy activation fails—and how to avoid the pitfalls
- Earn 16 Professional Development Units (PDUs) toward your Certified Change Management Professional® (CCMP®) Certification through the Association of Change Management Professionals (ACMP)
Create your own strategy activation plan
This course is designed for practical application. Bring your change challenge, apply new methods, and build your activation plan.
Throughout the course, you’ll learn critical questions to ask in order to continue refining your plan and get tools and frameworks for leading the activities in your daily practice.
This course is for:
Executive Leaders: Responsible for enacting organizational strategy across large and complex organizations.
Managers: Making sure their teams are contributing effectively to corporate strategy.
Strategy and Management Consultants: Supporting/facilitating clients through change initiatives.
Transformation and Learning Professionals: Looking to equip and align teams toward effective collaboration.
This course is for you if...
- You are responsible for major change initiatives in your organization
- You are part of a change or transformation team and want to build new skills to be more successful
- You need to more deeply engage employees in a change program
- You want to embed a more effective change methodology into your organization
- You are advising others on how to activate change in their organizations
- You want to build new skills in change tools rooted in people-centered design, co-creation, and visual thinking
- You want to teach others how to make change happen
Course Features and Benefits
About the Learning Experience
This hands-on course is led by an expert change practitioner. It combines on-demand content with live workshops designed for real-time collaboration, instruction, and practicing key skills.
This course is fully virtual and will be delivered via Zoom and MURAL. You’ll connect with and learn from fellow participants as well as your course instructor. In addition to the full-group activities and discussions, the group will be divided into small cohorts for further collaboration.
Added Bonus
Each course registrant will have the opportunity to book a 30-minute consultation on your specific change challenge with your course instructor. This invaluable one-on-one time will allow you to get more in-depth feedback, and tailored suggestions and best practices to help craft a successful activation campaign.
You’ll also receive a copy of The Strategy Activation Playbook with your course registration.
Additional Benefits
- Lifetime access to course portal and materials including MURAL template
- A library of strategy activation tools and frameworks, as well as an instructional guide for how to use these in your daily practice
- Access to new tools, bonus content, and course updates as the course evolves
Earn 16 PDUs toward your CCMP®
As a Qualified Education Provider™ (QEP™) through ACMP, this course qualifies for 16 PDUs toward your CCMP®. Follow these steps to earn your PDUs:
- Complete the three-day virtual training program.
- Complete a one-on-one project review with your instructor to go over your culminating project within 30 days following the program.
- Submit your completed three-part culminating project within 30 days of completing the course via the course portal. Culminating project includes: a refined activation plan, a governance model, and measurement dashboard.
After completing all three steps, you will receive your Strategy Activation Course Certificate. Once that is received, you will be responsible for reporting your PDUs through ACMP’s online system.
BEFORE DAY 1
Prework
- Define your change challenge
- One 30-minute new learner orientation
DAY 1
Fundamentals of strategy activation
- Course objectives and what to expect
- Change theory
- Four phases intro
Getting started with strategy activation
- Craft a clear vision
- Develop a measurement system
- Use empathy to understand key stakeholders
DAY 2
Map the inside landscape of the organization
- Discovery cards
- Barriers to Change cards
Understand the outside forces working for and against your organization
- Force field analysis
- Bring it together insights
- Prepare the activation plan
DAY 3
Adapt and refine the plan
- Share draft plans and gather feedback
- Use insights to make the plan stronger
Bring your strategy to life and ongoing refinement
- Design your dashboard
- Design the governance model
- Bring your strategy to life and ongoing refinement
Your Instructor
Zac Ryland, Consultant
Zac brings a blend of experiences as a former educator and from a decade of consulting with large, Fortune 500 clients across a wide range of industries. His career has been focused on experience design methodologies, all applied to help drive change at both the individual behavior changes level and in support of broader organizational changes.
He has led work and solutions across a variety of changes, evolutions, and transformations spanning customer/patient experience improvement, systems implementation/adoption, process improvement, awareness and communications, innovation system creation, and employee experience/retention/burnout. He recently led the design and development of two award-winning solutions – one focused on evolving the customer experience in one of our nation’s largest retail healthcare organizations and another focused on changing the sales organization in one of the world’s largest medical device manufacturers.
What Our Learners Say
“I highly recommend this course to anyone who wants to apply a proven analytical process to achieving lasting strategic change. XPLANE provided simple yet detailed tools, a contextual overview of their process, and a clear step-by-step guide to successfully gain team buy-in.”
J. Michael Hawthorne
PG, Principal, Sr. Vice President
GEI Consultants, Inc.
“This course was packed with frameworks to build your activation plan that sets you up for successful strategy execution. I’ve already incorporated what I learned into my current program. Thanks, XPLANE!”
Anonymous Participant
“This course gave me better clarity on how to engage stakeholders in change initiatives.”
Deje Bragg
Virginia Beach City Public Schools
“This course gave me a practical process that I can roll out immediately with clients to help them get their strategy implementation work to stick.”
Lisa Richardson
Owner
Lisa Draws Ideas
“This course was excellent! It was packed with value and delivered in a highly effective way. I am much more confident in my ability to help my clients activate their strategies.”
James Thomas
Owner
Four Forces Consulting
“Throughout the course I received tons of tools, exercises, and creative ideas to support change initiatives with my clients.”
Line Morkbak
Facilitator of Global Collaboration
Global LEAP
“This session exceeded my expectations! The complex concepts were presented in a simple, digestible way, empowering leaders to engage more effectively in the change work needed to create lasting impact.”
ACMP Strategy Activation Masterclass Participant
“The course was packed with valuable content and practical building blocks to bring change initiatives to life at every stage of an organizational project.”
Anonymous Participant
Course Resources
For more information about the content that will be covered and what to expect throughout the course, download our course syllabus today.
Get the eight tactics that will help you build your strategy activation plan and accelerate your organization’s change transformation results.
A future leader will have the best ability to execute strategy through people. Enhance your change leadership skills and help your organization thrive in today’s world of unrelenting change by using a modern change management methodology and tried-and-true tips found in our playbook.
FAQ
Q: We’ve tried strategy activation methods before, what makes this different?
A: We’ll give you the critical missing piece between strategy planning and change implementation that’s essential to success: How to activate your employees and leverage how employees and organizations embrace change.
Q: How can you help me get traction on my change initiative?
A: We’ll reveal how employees learn and provide tools to help you better navigate common barriers to change.
Q: Why should I trust XPLANE?
A: XPLANE has been helping leaders worldwide tell impactful change stories since 1993. Frequently, clients come to XPLANE with an overwhelming amount of data, and look to us to simplify and construct the information into a narrative people can better understand and align around.
Our storytelling methods have successfully helped organizations’ employees (1) buy-in to a new culture, (2) adopt a new process or methodology, (3) get them aligned around a new vision, and more.
With over 30 years of trying and learning on real projects with our clients, we’re eager to share our methods and resources with you to help you create impactful stories for positive change.
Q:I’m super busy. How many hours will I need to invest? What’s the estimated course hours and assignment time?
A: Our course is built to fit your busy schedule. It includes:
- An hour of asynchronous video content to view at your own pace.
- 6 hours of hands-on, live, group-instruction sessions with your instructor to practice key skills, ask questions, and get additional feedback on course activities.
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