4.4 The Change Strategy

The change strategy closes the Organisational context and approach area. It is the artefact where everything learned about context and everything decided about approach becomes explicit and reviewable.

Why a change strategy exists

CM3 names three purposes:

1. Spelling out the change management approach that has been selected — making the choice explicit rather than implicit in a series of activities
2. Allowing others to understand and debate the approach — a strategy nobody can argue with is a strategy nobody has engaged with
3. Setting expectations — about what the change team will do, what leaders must do, and what will not be done

The second purpose is the one most often lost. The point of writing the approach down is to invite challenge while it is still cheap to change. A change strategy circulated for information rather than for debate has forfeited most of its value.

Typical contents

Level of adoption required

Including this explicitly is one of the most useful disciplines in the whole syllabus. It forces the conversation with the sponsor about whether the benefit survives compliance-level adoption or genuinely requires internalisation — and therefore whether the funded change effort is proportionate to the outcome expected. A great many change failures are visible in advance as a mismatch between the adoption level required and the intervention level funded.

Lessons from previous change initiatives

This section is where history of change — one of the internal context factors — enters the plan formally. Writing down what happened last time, and what the organisation consequently believes about change, does two things: it stops the current team repeating a known failure, and it signals to stakeholders that their scepticism has been heard rather than dismissed.

Linear versus volatile situations

CM3 draws an explicit contrast, and it is examinable:

• In a highly linear approach to change, often working alongside traditional project approaches, the change strategy would be written at the beginning and outline high-level steps — what will happen and in which phase.
• In a more volatile situation, the change management strategy focuses more on the processes, tools and techniques that would be used in certain situations rather than the actual actions — for example, whether a continuous change cycle is being used.

This distinction reflects the same logic as planned versus emergent change. Where the destination and sequence are knowable, commit them to paper. Where they are not, committing invented specifics to paper produces a document that is wrong within weeks and then ignored. In volatile conditions the durable content is the method: how decisions will be made, which feedback mechanisms will run, how prioritisation will work, and what triggers a change of approach.

Keeping it useful

Two practical points. First, the change strategy is not the communication plan or the stakeholder engagement strategy — those are separate documents covered later in the syllabus, and the change strategy sits above them, setting the approach they implement. Second, in a continuous change cycle the strategy is a living document. If the delivery strategy shifts from phased to voluntary adoption, or the required adoption level is revised, the strategy should be updated and re-circulated — otherwise the document that was written to set expectations begins quietly misleading people about them.

Who the change strategy is for

The document has three distinct audiences, and writing for only one is why so many change strategies go unread.

The sponsor and senior leaders need to see what is being asked of them and what the approach assumes about their involvement. This is where the required adoption level and the resourcing implications belong, because those are the decisions only they can make.

The project or programme leadership needs to see how change activity interlocks with delivery — which outputs the change approach depends on, when training must happen relative to release, and what the delivery strategy implies for both parties.

The change team itself needs it as an operating document: the approach, the practices in use, the relationships and the networks.

A strategy written only for governance reads as a compliance artefact and is filed. A strategy written to be argued with by all three audiences does the job CM3 describes — allowing others to understand and debate the approach, and setting expectations while those expectations can still be adjusted.

Length is not the measure. A short, specific strategy that names the adoption level, the delivery strategy and the lessons being applied is far more useful than a long one that describes change management in general.