Cathy Sheppard has just become an Elite Elephant Rider, one of the highest badges on the ECD Certified Pathway. When we asked her to reflect on how she got here, she sent back something far better than an application. She sent back the thinking of someone who has spent twenty three years helping adults learn, and five of them weaving The ECD into that work until it became part of how she sees a room. We asked if we could publish it. She said yes. What follows is Cathy, in her own words.

Changes in how people respond to emotional culture conversations

I've noticed a huge shift in the way people talk about emotions over the years, and I think my perspective on this comes from a much longer journey than just the five or so years I've been using The ECD.

I've been facilitating learning with adults for around 23 years now. A lot of my early work was with Playcentre and teachers including leadership development, communication, facilitation skills, Te Tiriti o Waitangi, positive guidance...

Eva was an Innovation Lead. Not a facilitator. Not a coach. She had a big change to carry her leaders through, and she'd never run the Emotional Culture Deck before in her life.

She didn't wait to become an expert. She picked up the deck, she picked up the workshop, and she ran it herself. Sixty leaders. Seven offices. Her first time.

I feel that's the part worth sitting with. Not that it worked, though it did. That she was the one who ran it. Most change work hands you a plan and a consultant to deliver it. This was a leader, standing in her own room, asking her own people one honest question.

The conversation almost everyone skips

Most change work hands you a plan. Almost none of it asks how your people need to feel to come through the change well.

We spend the energy on the announcement. The all-hands, the slides, the order of the message. And then we wonder why the plan meets resistance, or quietly stalls. Change doesn't fail because of the plan. It fails because of how people...

Most emotional culture work can never prove it worked. This story can.

When Susannah King formed a brand-new team at Amazon, she decided from day one to build its emotional culture on purpose. Then she did the rare thing. She measured it, and she invited a business school to measure the outcomes independently. What follows is her story, the numbers that moved, and a handful of moves you can steal for your own team this week.

A confession, and a decision

Susannah opened her session with us by admitting something most leaders keep hidden.

"I don't know why I chose a career in HR and learning and development, because I'm very introverted."

Thirty years across finance, healthcare, communications and HR, now heading a global product team spanning eleven countries and more than 450 sites, and she still felt the flutter of imposter syndrome before she spoke. That honesty is exactly why the rest of her story lands. This was not theory. This was one leader choosing, on purpose, to put ...

Something quietly remarkable is happening in cities and time zones around the world. Every quarter, our Elephant Rider Chapter Leads open a door, set out some chairs (or a Circle live room), and create space for the conversations that matter. No workshops. No webinars. Just practitioners gathering to share what is working, what is hard, and what they are learning.

This past quarter, twelve chapters across four continents met on a single theme: Coaching & Mentoring.

The quarter's theme: Coaching & Mentoring

Q2 was about the quieter, more personal side of the work. Not group facilitation, but the one-to-one. How do we use the ECD in a coaching conversation? In mentoring someone through a stretch in their career? In self-coaching, when we need to find our own words for what we feel before we can move? Our chapters picked up the ECD coaching tools, tried them in pairs, and explored where they might use them in their real work.

The magic, as always, was not in the tools themselves. It w...

For years, the most important conversations at work have been the ones we never quite make time for. The concern someone carries but doesn't raise. The way a team wants to feel but never names out loud. We built our whole practice around making those conversations sayable, and this week we took a real step forward.

Over the last two days we ran the very first live workshops of a new programme, delivered for the first time on a brand new digital platform we've been quietly building. Two real teams, in real rooms, cards on the table and phones in hand. It was the first time everything came together, and I feel like we're standing at the edge of something.

Two conversations teams rarely get to have

The programme brings together two conversations.

The first is Unspoken Conversations. It grew out of our research partnership with Professor Michael Parke at the Wharton School. The study kept showing the same thing. Naming how we feel about a concern, not just what the concern is, changes ...

"You can't measure that." I've heard some version of that sentence for eight years. Emotions are too soft, too subjective, too fuzzy to count. There's no ROI on a conversation about how people feel. Do the culture workshop if you must, but don't pretend you'll ever prove it did anything.

I've stopped arguing with that sentence. We're answering it with evidence instead. And I want to show you that evidence while it's still being built, not after it's polished.

Where it started

For almost 9 years now, The Emotional Culture Deck has helped leaders and teams around the world have the conversations most workplaces avoid. Conversations about how people actually feel at work, and how they want to feel. We could see the work landing in the room. People could feel it. And the person who signs the invoice was still being asked to take it on faith. So at the start of this year we quietly began building the Emotional Evidence Platform. One QR code, one short survey, and the impact of emotional ...

There's a moment in every certification review where we stop reading the application and start picturing the room it describes. A leadership team somewhere in the world, cards on the table, someone saying out loud how they actually want to feel at work. That moment is why the ECD Certified Pathway exists. Every badge below represents dozens of those rooms, and the ripples from each one travel further than any of us often get to see.

In the first half of 2026, fourteen leaders across eleven countries reached new milestones on the pathway, from Sri Lanka to Scotland, Ghana to Aotearoa New Zealand. Before the names, we feel it matters to say this. These badges are not certificates of attendance. They are proof of practice. Each one was earned by facilitating real emotional culture conversations inside real organisations, across our Culture, Change, Stakeholder and Leadership specialities.

The badge unlocks

Senior Elephant Riders

• Azeem Saheer, Culture, Sri Lanka
• Erika Barden, Cult
...

by Jeremy Dean, R&E Founder

by Jeremy Dean, R&E Founder

I met someone for coffee recently. He’s spent a decade building digital products and is now behind one that one million people use. I’d been told he was worth talking to. He was.

He said something that stopped me. “You have anec-data evidence.”

He paused. “But you’re building real-data evidence now.”

It’s the thing most founders in the human space are running on. The story from the workshop that made everyone cry. The leader who said it changed everything. The team that came back six months later to say they were still using the language.

Real. Meaningful & True. And completely impossible to put in front of a CFO.

I’ve been building riders&elephants for almost a decade. I created The Emotional Culture Deck. We’ve certified 2,000+ practitioners across 45 countries so far. People within our community deliver emotional culture conversations, workshops & programmes inside governments, hospitals, startups, and multinationals on almost every continent.

An...