Study guide
13.2 Step 1: Categorising Impacts and Identifying Impact Areas
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
13.2 Step 1: Categorising Impacts and Identifying Impact Areas
Key Takeaways Explain This Topic AI
The three impact categories are intended change, unintended or unplanned change, and change management activities
Intended change includes the vision of the new world, removal of barriers, and disruption to productivity while absorbing the change
Unintended change includes system outages, process workarounds and misdiagnosed behavioural responses
Change management activities themselves impact business as usual, through SME involvement, training time and coaching change networks
The McKinsey 7-S model is used to identify impact areas: strategy, structure, systems, shared values, style, staff and skills
Last updated: September 2026
Sub-step 1.1: Categorising change impacts
CM3 identifies three categories of impact:
Intended change
The vision of the new world, the removal of barriers to get there, and the disruption to productivity while absorbing the change. This should include consideration of areas out of scope or not impacted by the change .
Two things are worth noticing. First, disruption to productivity while absorbing the change is classified as intended — it is an expected, planned consequence, not an accident. This is the learning dip, and treating it as intended means it should be budgeted for rather than reported as a problem.
Second, the instruction to consider areas out of scope or not impacted . Recording explicitly what does not change serves two purposes: it prevents scope drift, and it directly supports Bridges' endings guidance about letting people know what will not change.
Unintended or unplanned change
System outages, process workarounds and misdiagnosed behavioural responses are examples of these.
This is systems thinking made operational. Unintended change is a formal category because it is expected to occur, not because it is a failure. "Misdiagnosed behavioural responses" is an interesting inclusion: it covers the situation where the change team reads a behaviour incorrectly — treating an ability gap as resistance, for example — and the resulting mismatched intervention becomes an impact in its own right.
Change management activities
The involvement of subject matter experts, time spent in scheduled training or in coaching change networks will impact business as usual.
This category is routinely omitted from impact assessments and it should not be. Change management work consumes the same finite operational capacity the change is trying to protect. Every hour an SME spends advising the change team is an hour not spent on their job; every training day is a day of reduced output; every change agent working alongside their day job is carrying two roles.
Counting this honestly changes plans. A change that looks affordable when only the intended impacts are counted may not be once the change activity's own footprint on business as usual is added — which is precisely the kind of finding that belongs in a severity assessment.
Sub-step 1.2: Identifying impact areas with McKinsey 7-S
CM3 uses the McKinsey 7-S model to identify which areas of the organisation are impacted:
- Element Definition
- Strategy The plan created to maintain and build competitive advantage
- Structure The way the organisation is structured and who reports to whom
- Systems The daily activities and procedures that individuals engage in to get the job done
Shared values The core values of the organisation evidenced in the corporate culture and the general work ethic
- Style The style of leadership adopted
- Staff The employees and their general capabilities
- Skills The abilities and capabilities of the employees working for the organisation
- Watch the definitions
Two pairs cause confusion.
Systems here means daily activities and procedures that individuals engage in to get the job done — working practices and procedures, not IT platforms. A statement like "there are defined working practices and procedures in place" describes Systems in this model. This is a different sense from Carolyn Taylor's systems , which are the management mechanisms that control, plan, measure and reward.
Staff and Skills are closely related and easy to blur. Staff is about the employees and their general capabilities — who is there, in what numbers, with what roles. Skills is about the abilities and capabilities those employees hold. A change that requires more people is a Staff impact; a change that requires different expertise from the same people is a Skills impact.
Why 7-S is used here
Using 7-S as an impact checklist forces assessment beyond the obvious. A team assessing a new system will identify Systems and Skills impacts without prompting. They will less often notice that the change alters Structure because approval routes shift, or Style because the new process assumes delegated decision-making that the current leadership style does not support, or Shared values because it changes what the organisation implicitly says it prioritises.
Working through all seven deliberately is a cheap way to surface impacts that would otherwise emerge mid-delivery as surprises.
Working the categories in practice
The three categories are most useful applied as three separate passes over the change, because each surfaces different material.
Pass one — intended. Walk the future-state process end to end and record what is deliberately different: tasks that disappear, tasks that appear, decisions that move, handovers that change. Record explicitly what stays the same, since that is both scope control and a message people need.
Pass two — unintended. Ask what else touches the parts you just changed. Which downstream team receives the output? What currently absorbs exceptions? What informal arrangement depends on the step being removed? This is systems thinking applied deliberately, and it is the pass most often skipped because it has no obvious boundary.
Pass three — change activity. Cost the change work itself against operational capacity: SME hours, training days, change agent time, engagement sessions. Convert it to the units the business recognises — days out of the rota, shifts uncovered — rather than leaving it as an activity list.
Running the passes separately matters because a single combined workshop reliably produces a long list of intended impacts and almost nothing from the other two categories.