“Week 4’s constraint calendar was the first artefact our operations manager did not immediately rewrite. He recognised the shutdown windows because we had stolen them from his own wall planner.”
Flagship programme
The Change Field Method
Eight weeks, hybrid. You bring a live change. We teach a sequence you can run without us after the last session. This is business consulting for change management taught as a craft, not a certification mill.
Learning outcomes
By the close of week eight you will have artefacts that belong to your organisation, not a generic toolkit.
- A field map of informal influence covering at least two sites or functions.
- A sponsor script that a senior leader can speak without notes.
- A ninety-day cadence with named owners, including who is allowed to pause work.
- A limitation log that states what this change will not repair.
- A supervisor job aid tested in at least one live shift or service window.
Who it is for
Programme directors, internal change leads, and operational executives who already own a live transformation. Participants should have authority to convene a sponsor and access to a frontline group. We decline seats from people shopping for a credential with no live work attached.
Modules
Week 1 — Intake and unlearning
We inventory the artefacts you already have: charters, RAID logs, pulse surveys. Most get archived. We keep only what still describes work as it is done.
Week 2 — Field mapping
Structured interviews and shadowing. You leave with a diagram of unofficial routes: who people actually ask, who can stall a form, who translates between functions.
Week 3 — Sponsor sentences
Draft, record, and rewrite the explanation of the change until it survives a corridor conversation. Sponsors attend this week in person or by video.
Week 4 — Constraint calendar
We overlay the change onto shutdowns, award negotiations, school holidays, and peak trading. The output is a calendar that operations will recognise.
Week 5 — Supervisor job aids
Short written and spoken prompts for the people who run the shift. Tested, not workshopped in the abstract.
Week 6 — Resistance as data
How to log objections without collapsing them into “mindset”. Includes a session on unions, professional bodies, and quiet experts.
Week 7 — The pause protocol
A named method for stopping work without humiliation. Includes who can call a pause and how the sponsor explains it.
Week 8 — Handover studio
You present the artefacts to a peer cohort. We edit in the room. After this week, Appfieldbase is optional, not required.
Instructor
Maren Holt
Maren founded Appfieldbase after seventeen years inside Australian utilities, mining services, and public health programmes. She teaches the field method because most of her own early work over-indexed on communication plans and under-indexed on who actually held the keys to the depot.
She still takes two embedded partnerships a year; the rest of her time is this programme and the Sponsor Alignment Intensive.
Informational pricing
AUD 6,800 per seat for the public cohort (ten seats). An in-house cohort for one organisation is quoted from AUD 38,000. Travel to sites outside South Australia is billed at cost. No payment is collected on this website. See fees and refunds.
Questions we actually get
Do you issue a certificate?
We issue a letter of completion that names the artefacts you produced. We do not sell a badge, and the letter is worthless without those artefacts.
Can I attend without a live change?
No. The method is practised on real work. If your organisation is between programmes, wait or bring a contained operational change (a roster, a ticketing system, a depot layout).
What is a real limitation of this programme?
It will not repair a strategy that the executive still disagrees about. If two sponsors want opposite operating models, week 3 will expose that — and we will recommend the Sponsor Alignment Intensive instead of continuing to teach field tools on top of a split brief. The eight-week format also cannot substitute for industrial relations advice; we will name that boundary in the limitation log.
Is the hybrid format workable from regional Australia?
Yes. Two days are on site in Telowie or at your location; the rest is video with asynchronous review of artefacts. Bandwidth assumptions are modest on purpose.
From recent cohorts
Dense. I wanted more time on union briefings than the syllabus allowed. Still used the pause protocol in week 9 of our own programme, after the course had ended.
Ask about the next cohort
Tell us the live change you would bring. If it is a poor fit, we will say so in the first reply.