
The lecture starts with real work: you take one organization you know well and lay out the first four weeks, from watching before you change anything to one small change you can measure.
This course is built from six disciplines: organizational development, change management, company culture, leadership development, internal communications and facilitation.
The map of the course
A simple dictionary for reading lectures from other fields as transformation work
Three questions to ask after every lecture
A short self-diagnostic that shows which sections to watch first
Download the First Four Weeks Plan and fill in one line after each lecture.
What an organisation is and what development can actually change
Characteristics of organisational development and who does this work
The research-action model and the PDCA cycle
The organisational development process model
When to use it and when not to
How to sell the idea internally
Arranging the meeting with management and getting agreement
Applying project management tools to the work
Forming the team and applying systems theory
Organisational needs assessment
Assessment options: observations, interviews, questionnaires, data
Needs analysis and reporting
How to deliver the findings without triggering defence
Building the cause-effect diagram
Developing the action plan
Intervention options: individual, group, process, global
A worked example of a real action plan
Coaching, mentoring and training as interventions
360 assessment and job design
The responsibility matrix and policy writing
Conflict management as an intervention
Team options: dialogue, team building, process discussion, facilitation
Process options: total quality management, six sigma, re-engineering, benchmarking
Global options: working across cultures and with virtual teams
Why evaluation decides whether you get the next project
How to measure progress
Calculating return on investment for a development project
The Kirkpatrick model and the Balanced Scorecard
Kotter's eight-step model
The three-phase model of change
Resistance to change and where it comes from
How people usually react to change
Eight mistakes companies make when implementing it
The consequences of those mistakes
What actually determines whether change succeeds
Splitting large change projects into smaller ones
The role of managers versus the role of leaders
Sequencing the eight steps in practice
How to create a sense of urgency
Reinforcing the belief that change is necessary
The role of leaders in introducing change
Creating the change team
The rider, elephant and path model
Guiding the rider with clear direction
Motivating the elephant
Simplifying the path
Promoting the vision among employees
Creating the conditions change requires
Achieving quick wins that build belief
Finalising the change properly
Fixing it in the company's culture
The CES model as Google applies it
Whether culture can be deliberately created
Why culture decides business outcomes
How culture appears in the first place
Case study: the Netflix culture
Describing employee behaviour and creating rituals
Selecting people who fit and integrating newcomers
Communicating and training people on the culture
Leading by example and supporting culture through responsibility
Working out what you actually want from people
The mistakes almost everyone makes in the description
Who to include in the process and how it runs
What to do with the previous set of values
What corporate rituals are and why repetition works
Rituals or discipline: which one you actually need
Designing interview questions that test for fit
Integrating new employees into the culture
Channels: posters, internal media, website, email signature
Training people on the new culture and using every situation to teach it
Building a culture of responsibility
Preparing the launch and measuring culture afterwards
Transparency, positivity and measurement
Recognition and uniqueness
Listening as a cultural practice
The mistakes that undo all of it
Gallup and Google research on management
Ten key competencies of a modern manager
Formats for developing managers
Blanchard's four manager competencies
What good and bad strategy look like
Strategy sessions and offsites
The basics of performance management
How to teach managers this knowledge
Leadership styles theory
The six levels of delegation
The problems micromanagement creates
Options for teaching managers to delegate
Team formation and the manager's role in hiring
Stages of team development
Personality types in a team
The dysfunctions of a team and team-building activities
How to turn a specialist into a manager
Why coaching is the most modern management style
Situational leadership
Feedback as a daily management practice
What managers need to know about engagement
The difference between engagement and wellbeing
How managers can hear what people are actually saying
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
The transformation was announced in January. By March everyone had gone back to working the way they always did, and nobody said a word about it.
Why most transformations quietly fail
Not because the plan was wrong. Because somebody skipped the diagnosis and jumped straight to the intervention. A team-building offsite gets run when the actual problem was a process. A new set of values gets published when the real issue was that managers behave differently from what the poster says. Money is spent, energy is spent, and six months later the organisation is exactly where it was.
The second reason is that change is designed for the rider and forgotten for the elephant. People are given a rational argument and no reason to care, so they nod in the room and change nothing on Monday.
What this course does differently
We diagnose first. Observations, interviews, questionnaires, real data, then a report you can put in front of management without it being dismissed. Only then do we choose the intervention level — individual, team, process or global — because picking the wrong one is the single most expensive mistake in this field.
After that, the full mechanics: Kotter's eight steps with the urgency stage done properly, culture described through observable behaviour rather than adjectives, rituals and hiring filters that make it stick, the communication campaign, and manager development, because change travels through managers or it does not travel at all. And at the end, evaluation with Kirkpatrick and the Balanced Scorecard, so you can prove what the project returned.
Who is teaching this
Mike, the number one HR instructor on Udemy. More than 1.6 million course enrolments, over 150,000 professionals trained, PHRi and SHRM-CP certified, HRCI representative in more than 10 countries. I built the people function of the unicorn Preply and worked at Wargaming, Alfa-Bank and iDeals — companies that reorganised themselves more than once while I was there.
The cases we go through
Netflix, Miro, Tesla, Starbucks, Buffer and Basecamp, each one used for a specific mechanic rather than as decoration. How Netflix wrote behaviour down. How Miro integrates newcomers. What Starbucks does with rituals. Where each of them would fail if copied without the context.
What is included
- Lifetime access to all course materials
- Active instructor support in the Q&A section
- Udemy Certificate of Completion
- Practical assignments and real business cases
- A section with additional courses, tools and resources
Before you start
Organisational change is slow, unglamorous and mostly consists of conversations. If you were hoping for a framework that does it for you, this is not that. If you want the method that actually works, and the honest version of how long it takes, start with the first lesson today.