One week after I started my own company (in May 2025), I was invited to Novo Nordisk to facilitate a change management workshop after a big organisational change where new units have been created.

I only had two hours to facilitate this with a brand-new leadership team with 15 leaders that were having their first official meeting.

I proposed to do a “Temperature Check” for the leadership team so we knew if the team was in a good shape to drive the change and what help they needed to become successful.

The process for the workshop was three simple steps:

1. What are you excited about?
2. What are your concerns?
3. Which actions do you propose to make you and our team successful?

My reflection

When I was preparing for the workshop, I was thinking: How on earth are we going to make a change management plan for a huge change in two hours with a team that is newly established and meeting each other for the first time? I was also wondering if people would speak up, when they don’t really know each other?

But there was no need to worry! With a simple post-it note process and clear problem statements we managed to chunk the elephant into small pieces, and we succeeded with outlining the most important steps for driving  the change forward. The leader of the team quickly managed to set a safe psychological tone and during the first step in process, the Excitement part, the leaders expressed that they were excited about being together, so this also contributed to an open and honest dialogue.

So, I learned (again!) that things can look overwhelming from a distance but with a stringent process and paying attention to psychological safety, a lot of things can be accomplished in two hours.