Event Description
Changemakers Is Coming to a Cookstown in September!
There’s a myth that excellence gets delivered — that it arrives in a slide deck, gets installed by a consultant, or gets rolled out via a new framework. If you’ve ever sat through a change programme that looked brilliant on paper and evaporated within six months, you already know that myth is false.
Excellence isn’t something you import. It’s something you uncover.
That’s the premise behind Changemakers on the Road 2026, S A Partners’ popular annual conference reimagined as a series of practical, half-day workshops travelling to four cities across Ireland this autumn:
· Cookstown (29 September)
· Maynooth (30 September)
· Limerick (1 October)
· Cork (2 October)
Each session is capped at 40 places, keeping the room small enough for real conversation and real thinking — not another lecture from the stage.
Three Pillars, One Simple Truth
The workshop is built around a straightforward but demanding idea: sustainable excellence already exists somewhere inside your organisation. Your job as a leader isn’t to invent it – it’s to find it, nurture it, and build the systems that let it last.
Finding Excellence
The morning opens with benchmarking, maturity assessments and roadmapping – practical tools to help you see clearly where excellence already lives in your business, and where the gaps really are, rather than where you assume they are.
Nurturing Excellence
From there, the focus shifts to development: building a learning and coaching system centred on leadership and lean thinking, so that excellence becomes something people grow into, not something imposed on them from above.
Sustaining Excellence
Finally, the workshop turns to what keeps progress from sliding backwards – the systems, processes and frameworks that make change durable rather than a one-off initiative that fades the moment attention moves elsewhere.
It’s a deceptively simple structure, but it addresses the real reason most change efforts stall: organisations get good at starting things and much worse at keeping them alive.
Practical by Design
This isn’t a conference where you watch and take notes. Changemakers is built as a hands-on, interactive workshop – you’ll leave with a working understanding of what to benchmark, how to define the capabilities you need to develop, and how to design the systems framework that supports excellence long after the workshop ends.
And the learning doesn’t stop when the day does. Alongside the workshop, delegates have access to
· follow-up coaching support
· a chance to work through how these ideas apply to your specific organisation,
Coaching will help you test your thinking with someone who’s done this before, and keep momentum going once you’re back at your desk. Ideas are only as good as their implementation, and that’s exactly the gap this coaching is designed to close.
A Room Full of People Who Get It
One of the most consistently mentioned benefits from past Changemakers events isn’t on any agenda slide – it’s the people in the room. Senior executives, operations directors and change leaders from different sectors, all wrestling with the same fundamental question: how do you build something excellent that actually lasts? The conversations over refreshment breaks and at the closing lunch are often where the real value shows up – a chance to compare notes with people facing the same pressures, without the sales pitch.
Guest Insight: Frank Devine, Author of Rapid Mass Engagement
Adding real depth to the day is guest speaker Frank Devine, author of *Rapid Mass Engagement: Driving Continuous Improvement through Employee Culture Creation*. Following a corporate career spanning Shell, Unilever, ABB and Fiat, Frank built a culture-change consultancy specialising in something rarer than most change methodologies admit to: creating genuine employee “pull” for continuous improvement, agreed by consensus with senior leadership, rather than change imposed top-down.
His work with organisations including Coca-Cola, Rolls-Royce, GSK and Boston Scientific speaks directly to the Changemakers philosophy — that lasting improvement is built from the inside, engaging people at the level of values and beliefs, not just behaviours. If you want to know what it actually looks like to turn resistance into ownership at scale, Frank’s perspective is worth the trip on its own.
The Details
Dates & Locations:
– 29 September 2026 — Glenavon Hotel, Cookstown, Belfast
– 30 September 2026 — Glenroyal Hotel, Maynooth, Dublin
– 1 October 2026 — Radisson Blu, Bunratty, Limerick
– 2 October 2026 — Vienna Woods, Cork
· Time: 08:00–14:00
· Cost: £250 per person (£150 Early Bird rate until 28 August 2026)
Who should attend:
Senior executives shaping culture and strategy, operations directors, and senior managers ready to lead measurable change and make a real impact through their people.
Places are limited to 40 per venue, so early booking is genuinely worthwhile.
To book visit: www.sapartners.com/events or email events@sapartners.com
Excellence already exists in your organisation.
Changemakers on the Road will help you find it.
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