AIM to harness change

Every effective piece of development work starts with a rigorous assessment to identify what the gaps are between your current skills, and where you need to be. Companies can spend a large amount of money for consultants to perform assessment centres, personality tests, 360 feedback and many more techniques to give you this answer. I have personally worked with a firm that charged nearly £100,000 for such an assessment. However, the alternative of going into a development programme without identifying the skill gaps first ultimately leads to a generic delivery that has no real traction or meaning for those taking part.

At Harness Change we won’t tell you where the gaps are. We deliver a self-reflection practice with such potency that every individual will be able to identify the need for change.

At harness change we use horses...

Once candidates can see and feel where the skill gap is, we choose key interventions to trigger a step change in their development. This is a process that you may already be familiar with if you have been on development programmes previously. These will usually come in the form of diagrams and models to visually explain how things work. We all love a good model that means we can fit whatever problem and issue we are having into a simple box to trigger that light bulb moment. There are some favourites that we have seen to be transformative in peoples thinking and understanding of how to move through to the desired outcome. We don’t just present different models, we also specialise in coaching, facilitation, strategy planning and many more tools to help you get to your goals. The key difference for us at harness change is the work with the horses makes this part of our role a lot more effective, and a lot sharper than your traditional consultancy and

development programmes. We have already assessed the skill gap in a way where you can see, feel and understand the impact and what needs to change. This means when we give you a set of tools to start making that change, change becomes unavoidable.

Now you know what needs to change, and you have the tools it's time to put it into practice. In a typical leadership programme, the only time you get to test your new techniques is back to the workplace with your team or colleagues. Inevitably you are not going to deliver perfectly the first time and are going to feel some friction until you have mastered the new techniques. This is where harness change differs. This is a time where we go back to the horses and you have the opportunity to test your new techniques with our horses' feedback loop and keep practising until you can see and feel when you have hit the right notes. It means when you are back in the workplace you can hit the ground running, excelling from day 1. There’s no learning curve, no transition period because all the learning has been done in the arena with the horse in a safe sandbox environment.