12.3 Communications Planning

APMG Change Management Foundation Exam

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1 Chapter 1: The v3 Foundation Exam and the Organisational Context

1.1 Exam Structure, the Five Syllabus Areas and the Certification Path 1.2 Scene Setting: External and Internal Factors Shaping Change 1.3 Change Management, Benefits and Dis-benefits

2 Chapter 2: Understanding the Change Context

2.1 Kelman's Three Levels of Adoption 2.2 VUCA and the Cynefin Framework 2.3 Planned Change versus Emergent Change 2.4 Systems Thinking in Change 2.5 Organisational Culture and Its Three Levels

3 Chapter 3: Diagnosing and Structuring the Change Approach

3.1 Lewin's Force Field Analysis 3.2 Co-Design 3.3 The ADKAR Model 3.4 Evolving the n-Step Process and Kotter's Eight Accelerators

4 Chapter 4: Delivery Strategy, Agile Practices and the Change Strategy

4.1 Delivery Strategy: Big Bang, Phased, Voluntary and Iterative 4.2 Agile Practices and Agile Change Practices 4.3 The Continuous Change Management Cycle 4.4 The Change Strategy

5 Chapter 5: People and Change — Individual Difference and Response

5.1 Differences in People and Personality Preferences 5.2 Neuroscience and Change: SCARF, Mindset and Insight 5.3 The Change Curve 5.4 Bridges' Transition Model

6 Chapter 6: Motivation, Resilience and Learning

6.1 Rewards, Punishment and Pink's Three Motivators 6.2 Positive Psychology, Resilience and Appreciative Inquiry 6.3 The Beckhard-Harris Change Formula and Schein's Two Anxieties 6.4 Competence, Learning and the Learning Dip 6.5 Learning Preferences: Kolb, Honey and Mumford

7 Chapter 7: Key Roles in Change Leadership

7.1 Key Roles in the Change Process 7.2 The Role of the Change Sponsor 7.3 The Change Agent's Role and Personal Influence 7.4 The Role of Local Leadership in Change

8 Chapter 8: Psychological Safety, Leadership and Culture

8.1 Psychological Climate and Psychological Safety 8.2 Carolyn Taylor: How Leadership Shapes Culture 8.3 Leadership Styles and Organisational Climate

9 Chapter 9: Teams and Change

9.1 Team Structures and Change Agent Networks 9.2 Tuckman's Stages of Team Development 9.3 Lencioni: Assessing and Growing Team Effectiveness 9.4 Harvesting the Value of Team Diversity

10 Chapter 10: Stakeholder Identification, Analysis and Engagement

10.1 Stakeholder Definition and Identification 10.2 Stakeholder Analysis, Segmentation and Empathy Mapping 10.3 Stakeholder Mapping and Sources of Power 10.4 Barriers to Engagement 10.5 Planning Stakeholder Engagement

11 Chapter 11: Communication Theory, Messaging and Emotional Connection

11.1 Communication Theory and the Communication Process 11.2 Barriers to Communication and Cognitive Biases 11.3 Messaging: Setting Context and the Tell, Sell, Include Approach 11.4 Appealing to Hearts and Minds

12 Chapter 12: Communication Channels and Planning

12.1 Ways of Communicating and VARK Language Style Preferences 12.2 Communication Channels: One-Way, Two-Way, Lean and Rich 12.3 Communications Planning

13 Chapter 13: Assessing Change Impact and Severity

13.1 Change Management as Risk Management and the Two-Step Assessment 13.2 Step 1: Categorising Impacts and Identifying Impact Areas 13.3 Step 1 Continued: Gap Analysis, Impact Profiles and Monitoring 13.4 Step 2: Change Impact Severity

14 Chapter 14: Resistance to Change

14.1 Causes of Resistance and Oreg's Four Neural Factors 14.2 Common Reasons for Resistance and How to Deal With Them 14.3 Building a Strategy to Manage Resistance

15 Chapter 15: Change Analytics and Exam Readiness

15.1 Measurement Types and the Change Delivery Scorecard 15.2 Building a Change Analytics Strategy 15.3 Exam Technique and Final Revision

12.3 Communications Planning

Key Takeaways Explain This Topic AI

Effective change communication planning provides information, provides the context for change, engages people in change, and evaluates and gathers feedback

Providing context gives people a map that helps them navigate what may otherwise be seen as chaos

A change communication strategy contains background, overall aims and approach, stakeholder analysis and engagement, key messaging, channels, risks and measurement methodology

Engaging people means allowing them to develop shared understanding, exchange ideas, relay concerns and contribute

Evaluating and gathering feedback checks how communication is being received and whether it has been effective
Last updated: September 2026

Change communication that is impactful requires effective planning and focused effort all the way through change. CM3 sets out what planning must achieve and what the resulting strategy contains.

The four things communication planning must find ways to do

Purpose What it means
Provide information Keep people updated with relevant and timely information, ideas and concepts

Provide the context for change People need to understand the bigger picture surrounding the changes and be able to relate it to their own situations . This provides a map which helps them navigate what may otherwise be seen as chaos

Engage people in change Allowing them to develop a shared understanding, exchange ideas, relay concerns and contribute to making change happen

Evaluate and gather feedback Check how communication is being received and whether it has been effective

The map metaphor in the second purpose is worth holding onto. Without context, a series of individually reasonable changes is experienced as chaos — one thing after another with no discernible pattern. Context does not reduce the amount of change; it makes the change legible, and legible change is far easier to absorb than the same volume of apparently random change.

The fourth purpose is the one most often missing from real plans. A communication plan that lists what will be sent and to whom, with no mechanism for checking whether it landed, has planned only the transmission half of the communication model. Given that meaning is constructed by the receiver, checking what was received is not optional refinement — it is the only way to know whether communication has occurred at all.

The change communication strategy

CM3 sets out the contents:

Section What it covers
Background The change, its drivers and the communication context

Overall change communication aims and approach What communication is trying to achieve and the broad approach — including the balance of tell, sell and include

Stakeholder analysis and engagement Who the audiences are, their interest and influence, and expected levels of resistance

Key messaging The core messages, developed around the challenge, what makes it worthwhile, where we are heading and how we get there

Channels to be used The mix of lean and rich, one-way and two-way channels
Risks Communication risks — misinterpretation, timing conflicts, leaks, message fatigue
Measurement methodology How the effectiveness of communication will be assessed
Where each section comes from

The strategy is largely an assembly of work done elsewhere in the syllabus, which is a useful way to remember it:

Stakeholder analysis and engagement comes from the stakeholder identification, segmentation, mapping and engagement-strategy work

Key messaging comes from the four key-message areas and the tell/sell/include decision
Channels comes from the lean/rich analysis

Measurement methodology connects forward to change analytics, where assessing the effectiveness of communications and engagement is explicitly part of a change analytics strategy

Risks

The risks section is the one people skip. Communication risks worth recording include:

A message reaching one group before another, so people hear about their own future second-hand
Announcements colliding with results, restructures or other programmes' milestones
Message fatigue from volume — the amount of information barrier
Predictable misinterpretation, particularly where euphemism is being used
Key spokespeople being unavailable at the point of announcement
Communication planning is not a one-off

Effective planning requires focused effort all the way through change , not a plan written at initiation. In a continuous change cycle, communication planning is part of the loop: discovery reveals how messages are landing, ideas generate adjustments, prioritisation selects them, and action delivers.

The practical implication is that the communication plan should carry a review cadence, and that the evaluation purpose feeds it. A plan that is delivered exactly as written for twelve months, despite feedback, has failed at the fourth purpose while succeeding at the first.

What good looks like

A communication plan that satisfies all four purposes is recognisable. It contains fewer communications than a poor one, because each is targeted at a segment rather than broadcast to everyone. Each has a stated know, feel, do outcome rather than a topic. It mixes lean and rich channels deliberately, with rich channels reserved for the messages that need them. It names who delivers each message, respecting the two-source rule. And it has an explicit route by which the change team learns what people actually took from it — which is often as simple as asking a change agent network what their colleagues are saying.