Study guide
1.2 Scene Setting: External and Internal Factors Shaping Change
APMG Change Management Foundation Exam
Track your progress as you read
Finished sections get a check mark.
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
1.2 Scene Setting: External and Internal Factors Shaping Change
Key Takeaways Explain This Topic AI
External factors include world events, international market conditions, technological trends, industry trends and national culture
Internal factors include organisational culture, governance structures and style, history of change, change maturity and attitude to risk
A poor history of change creates cynicism that the next change initiative inherits before it starts
Change maturity often tracks project and programme maturity and shapes how fast an organisation can absorb change
- Understanding context precedes designing the approach — CM3 puts context first for that reason
- Last updated: September 2026
The first syllabus area is called Organisational context and approach , and the ordering is deliberate: you understand the context before you design the approach . A technically excellent change plan dropped into a hostile context fails. The same plan in a receptive context looks like genius.
External factors
External factors sit outside the organisation's control and typically create the pressure for change:
World events — a pandemic, war, or major geopolitical disruption reshapes what organisations must do and how fast
- International market conditions — currency, supply chain, demand shifts, interest rates
- Technological trends — automation, artificial intelligence, cloud migration, platform obsolescence
- Industry trends — competitor moves, consolidation, changing customer expectations, new entrants
National culture , or cultures plural for multinational enterprises, which shapes how change is received in each territory
The change manager's job with external factors is not to control them but to translate them: to turn "the market has moved" into a message that a warehouse supervisor in Frankfurt understands and believes.
Internal factors
Internal factors determine the organisation's capacity to respond, and they are where most change initiatives are won or lost:
Internal factor Why it matters Question to ask
Organisational culture(s) Culture can vary across parts of a single large organisation, even domestically Is this change compatible with how we actually behave?
Governance structures and style Determines how decisions get made and how fast Who can say yes, and how long does that take?
History of change A poor history creates problems the next change inherits What happened last time, and what did people learn from it?
Change maturity Often tracks project and programme maturity — slow and methodical, fast and agile, or somewhere between Have we done change of this size and type before?
Attitude to risk Shapes appetite for experimental, safe-to-fail approaches Are we allowed to try something and have it not work?
History of change deserves special attention
If the last three initiatives were announced with fanfare and quietly abandoned, your stakeholders are not resisting your change — they are responding rationally to a pattern. The Study Guide is explicit that a poor history of change can create many problems for the next change. Practically, this means the change manager should surface that history early rather than pretend it away: run a lessons-learned review, name what went wrong last time in your own communications, and demonstrate concretely what is different now. Silence on the subject reads as either ignorance or evasion, and both cost trust.
Change maturity sets your realistic pace
An organisation with high change maturity has established roles, recognised change practices, leaders who know what sponsorship means and staff who have absorbed change before. An immature organisation has none of these, and a change manager who imports a sophisticated approach into it spends the whole initiative explaining the approach rather than delivering the change. Change maturity often goes hand in hand with project and programme maturity, and it tells you whether to plan for slow and methodical delivery, fast and agile delivery, or something between.
Culture varies inside one organisation
A point CM3 makes explicitly and that catches candidates out: culture can vary across various parts of large organisations even when they are not multinational . The trading floor and the compliance function of one bank, sitting in one building, can hold genuinely different values about risk, speed and hierarchy. A single change approach applied uniformly across both will land very differently in each. Segmenting by culture, not just by department or geography, is part of good context scanning.
Turning context into decisions
Context scanning is only useful if it changes what you do. In practice a context scan should produce answers to three questions:
How much change can this organisation absorb right now? Change saturation is real. If four initiatives are already competing for the same people, the honest answer may be that yours needs to wait or shrink.
What approach fits? A high-risk-appetite, change-mature organisation can run experimental, emergent change. A risk-averse, immature one needs planned change with visible structure.
Where are the cultural landmines? Which parts of this change contradict a deeply held assumption about how we work here, and does senior leadership know?
That third question is the one change managers most often skip and most often regret. If there is a fundamental incompatibility between the proposed change and the underlying culture, it can be extremely hard to make the change successful, and that assessment needs to reach senior leadership early — while the approach can still be adjusted.