Evidence Domain

Change Management

What it studies

How organisations move from current to intended states: change models, resistance and readiness, communication, participation, transition psychology and the conditions under which change embeds rather than reverts.

Why it matters

Every workplace strategy is a change programme wearing a spatial costume: new settings assume new behaviours, sharing models assume relinquished territory, presence logic assumes revised habits. The behavioural assumptions registered in Workshop IV are change management's delivery obligations — and the evidence is consistent that participation during the process (the community group, co-creation) outperforms communication after the decision.

Questions it answers
  • What behavioural distance does this concept require the organisation to travel?
  • Where will resistance concentrate, and what is it protecting?
  • Which changes need participation, which need communication, which need time?
  • How does change embed rather than revert after project demobilisation?
Evidence sources
  • Change management research (participation effects, readiness, transition models — read critically; the practitioner literature outruns its evidence)
  • The methodology's own change infrastructure: community group records, sentiment maps, behavioural assumption registers
  • Post-change behavioural evidence: which assumed behaviours landed
  • Resistance patterns from previous organisational changes
Design and policy implications

Change scoped from the behavioural assumption register, not from a generic curve; participation designed into the methodology itself (the community group is change infrastructure); change intensity priced into trade-offs — the ratio step and the culture distance have change costs; change capability sustained into Recalibrate, because norms decay after project teams leave.

Related methods
Common misuse

Change as communications: posters, town halls and moving guides deployed against behavioural change that needed participation, leadership modelling and time. The parallel misuse is the change-curve industry — stage models presented as science when their evidence base is thin to absent.

Further research

Which change interventions actually move workplace behaviour — as opposed to which are conventionally deployed — is surprisingly under-evidenced; the field runs on practitioner conviction more than controlled comparison.