Study guide
11.2 Barriers to Communication and Cognitive Biases
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
11.2 Barriers to Communication and Cognitive Biases
Key Takeaways Explain This Topic AI
Barriers to communication include organisational hierarchy, organisational culture, technology, amount of information, type of information, and attitudes and perceptions
Cognitive biases are filters people use when receiving communication
Confirmation bias is confirming one's own existing beliefs
Status quo bias is the preference for keeping things as they are
Availability bias focuses on more memorable or easily available information, and loss aversion means losses are felt more strongly than gains
Last updated: September 2026
Two distinct problems interfere with change communication: barriers that obstruct the message and biases that distort how it is interpreted.
Barriers to communication
CM3 names six:
Barrier How it obstructs
Organisational hierarchy Messages passing through layers are filtered, softened or lost; upward messages especially so
- Organisational culture A culture where challenge is unwelcome suppresses the feedback the change team needs
- Technology Systems people cannot access, formats they cannot open, or channels not everyone uses
- Amount of information Too much and it is not read; too little and rumour fills the gap
Type of information Content mismatched to the audience — technical detail to a general audience, or vague reassurance to specialists
- Attitudes, perceptions What the receiver already believes about the change, the sender and the organisation
- Hierarchy and culture are the structural ones
Hierarchy degrades messages in both directions. Downward, each layer adds its own interpretation and omits what it considers unimportant, so the message reaching the front line can differ materially from the one sent. Upward, bad news attenuates at every level, which is why sponsors are often the last to learn a change is failing.
This is precisely the problem change agent networks solve. A network provides a route that bypasses the hierarchy in both directions — trusted, 'one of us' messages down, and unfiltered reality up.
Amount and type of information
These two are the barriers change teams create themselves. Amount is the more common failure: a change programme generating weekly bulletins, monthly newsletters, town halls and intranet updates produces a volume that guarantees none of it is absorbed. Fewer, better-targeted communications outperform more.
Type is a segmentation failure. A single message written to satisfy every audience satisfies none — it is too detailed for the general population and too vague for the people who need specifics.
Cognitive biases
Behavioural psychologists have identified many cognitive biases ( Kahneman, 2012 ). These are the filters people use when receiving communication . CM3 examines four:
Bias Definition How it shows up in change
Confirmation bias Confirming own beliefs Someone who has decided the change will fail reads every setback as proof and discounts every success
Status quo bias Keeping things as they are "Why do we have to change everything? There are many systems that are still effective"
Availability bias Focus on more memorable or easily available information One vivid failure story from a colleague outweighs statistics from twenty successful sites
Loss aversion Impact of losses felt more strongly than gains A change offering a clear net benefit is resisted because the specific losses are more salient than the diffuse gains
Distinguishing status quo bias from loss aversion
These two are easily confused because both produce resistance to change. The distinction:
Status quo bias is a preference for things staying as they are , expressed as a defence of the current state. "What we have works."
Loss aversion is about the asymmetric weighting of losses against gains . The person may accept the change is better overall but still resist, because what they lose feels bigger than what they gain.
A statement like "Why do we have to change everything? There are many systems that are still effective" is a defence of the current state — status quo bias .
Working with biases rather than against them
Biases cannot be argued away — attempting to correct someone's confirmation bias with more evidence typically strengthens it. What works is designing communication that accounts for them:
For loss aversion , name the losses explicitly and specifically before describing the gains. Unnamed losses loom larger than named ones, and acknowledging them removes the sense that the change team is hiding something. This is the same discipline as the dis-benefit conversation and the change-curve guidance not to minimise losses.
For status quo bias , do not attack the current state. Telling people that what they have built is deficient triggers defence. Appreciative Inquiry's approach — identifying what works well and building on it — is designed for exactly this, and it explains why AI increases motivation to change.
For availability bias , provide vivid, concrete, memorable positive examples rather than aggregate statistics. One credible story from a peer site who has already made the change beats a percentage.
For confirmation bias , the strongest counter is having the message carried by someone the receiver already trusts — a change agent from their own area — because the source is the thing their filter is applied to.
Barriers and biases together
A useful way to hold the two apart: barriers stop the message arriving; biases change what it means when it does. A message blocked by hierarchy never reaches the receiver. A message filtered by confirmation bias arrives fully and is interpreted as confirming what the receiver already thought.