11.1 Communication Theory and the Communication Process

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

11.1 Communication Theory and the Communication Process

Key Takeaways Explain This Topic AI

A structured approach to communication ensures the right level of interaction, with the right people, at the right time, in an efficient way

The sender decides on and constructs the message, translating thoughts into words, symbols or diagrams

The message is transmitted via a communication channel to a receiver who decodes and interprets it

Noise refers to anything that interferes with the message between sending and receiving

Shannon and Weaver's original concern was technical interference, but noise in change also includes competing messages and preoccupations

Last updated: September 2026

Communication is the largest single element of most change managers' work, and CM3 starts with the underlying model.

Why a structured approach

A well-thought-out and structured approach to change communication and stakeholder engagement ensures that:

• The right level of interaction occurs
• With the right people
• At the right time
• In an efficient way , to achieve successful change

All four are constraints, and all four are routinely violated. Too much interaction with the wrong people at the wrong time is as much a failure as too little. "The right level of interaction" also acknowledges that not every stakeholder needs deep engagement — which is what segmentation and mapping are for.

The basics of communication theory

The model has four components:

Component What happens

Sender A person decides what message to send and constructs the message. They need to translate their thoughts into words, symbols, diagrams and so on in order to formulate their message

Communication channel The message is transmitted via this channel

Receiver The person at the receiving end decodes the message, to give it their own interpretation in a way they can relate to and make meaning of

• Noise Anything that interferes with the message , from the time it is sent to when it is received
• Encoding: the sender's problem

The sender must translate thoughts into words, symbols or diagrams. This translation is lossy. What is obvious inside the sender's head — the context, the reasoning, the qualifications — does not automatically survive into the words chosen.

This is why change communication written by people who have lived with the change for months so often baffles its audience. The sender encodes using shared understanding the receiver does not have. Terms like "target operating model", "phase two" or "the new ways of working" carry precise meaning for the change team and almost none for anyone else.

Decoding: the receiver's construction

The receiver decodes the message to give it their own interpretation in a way they can relate to it and make meaning of it . This is the single most important idea in the model: meaning is constructed by the receiver, not transmitted by the sender.

The consequences for change work are direct:

Two people can receive an identical message and take opposite meanings from it, and both are decoding correctly according to their own context

• A message that has been sent has not thereby been communicated
• The only way to know what was received is to check — which is why feedback matters

The decoding is shaped by the receiver's context: their position on the change curve, their history of change, their WIIFM, their cognitive biases, and what else they have heard.

Noise

Noise is anything that interferes with the message between sending and receiving. CM3 gives technical examples: with a landline telephone this could be crackling heard during a call, or with a mobile phone a call cutting out due to a weak signal. It notes that it was this sort of interference, at a technical level, which was Shannon and Weaver's main concern at the time of their research.

In change work, the useful extension is that noise is rarely technical. The interference is:

• Type of noise Example
• Competing messages Three other change programmes communicating in the same week
• Preoccupation The receiver is dealing with month-end, or worried about redundancy
• Contradictory signals The message says one thing; the leader's behaviour or the reward system says another
• Rumour An informal account already circulating that the official message must displace
• Volume So much change communication that none of it is read

The change manager's job with noise is not to eliminate it, which is impossible, but to account for it: repeat the message, use multiple channels, time it to avoid known peaks, and make sure the non-verbal signals do not contradict the verbal ones.

Using the model deliberately

A practical checklist derived from the four components, applied to any significant change communication:

Encoding — is this written in the receiver's language, or in ours? Would someone outside the change team understand every term?

Channel — is this channel appropriate for the content? Bad news and complex content need richer channels than a bulletin

Decoding — what will this group most plausibly take from this, given where they are and what they fear? What is the worst reasonable interpretation?

Noise — what else is competing for attention right now, and does anything in the organisation's behaviour contradict this message?

Question 3 is the one that most improves communication quality, because it forces the sender to read their own message from the position of someone who does not already agree with it.