Study guide
10.2 Stakeholder Analysis, Segmentation and Empathy Mapping
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
10.2 Stakeholder Analysis, Segmentation and Empathy Mapping
Key Takeaways Explain This Topic AI
Segmenting stakeholders allows more specific and relevant communication and engagement strategies to be planned
Segments can be considered by department, location, internal versus external, and primary versus secondary
Stakeholder responses depend on where they are on the change journey, their attitudes, past experiences, change readiness and whether they will benefit
A key aim of analysis is to understand stakeholders' level of interest by stepping into their shoes and identifying their WIIFM — what's in it for me
- An empathy map is a useful tool for gaining insight into another person's perspective
- Last updated: September 2026
Once stakeholders are identified, analysis digs deeper into who they are and what they need. CM3 covers segmentation, interests and empathy mapping.
Segmenting stakeholders
It can be useful to segment or group stakeholders in a way that helps differentiate between the differing needs of stakeholder groups .
The rationale is explicit: segmenting means more specific and relevant communication and engagement strategies can be planned for them . Targeting and prioritising effort in this way makes better use of time and resources and increases the chance of successfully engaging with stakeholders through change .
Ways in which segments or groupings can be considered:
- Segmentation Example
- Departments across the organisation Finance, operations, customer service
- Locations London, New York, Frankfurt
- Internal, external Employees versus suppliers, customers, regulators
- Primary, secondary Directly impacted versus indirectly affected
Segmentation is the discipline that prevents the single all-staff email. It is worth noting that the right segmentation depends on the change: a change to a global process may segment best by location because the regulatory and cultural contexts differ; a change to a shared system may segment best by how each department uses it, cutting across geography entirely.
What shapes a stakeholder's response
Stakeholder responses to change depend on factors such as:
- Where they are on the change journey
- Their attitudes to change
- Their past experiences of change
- Their level of change readiness
- Whether they are likely to benefit or not from change
The first factor connects straight to the change curve: two people can be equally committed and respond very differently because one is at anger and blame and the other at acceptance. Treating a difference of position as a difference of attitude is a common analytical error.
The third factor connects to the history of change context factor, at individual scale. Someone whose last three change experiences were poorly handled brings that to this one, and no amount of assurance about the current change addresses it directly.
WIIFM: what's in it for me
A key aim of stakeholder analysis is to dig deeper and gain a better understanding of the stakeholders' level of interest in change . This can be done by stepping into their shoes, to understand their perspective and their WIIFMs — their 'what's in it for me' .
WIIFM is often dismissed as cynical, but it is simply an accurate account of how people evaluate a proposal. A change that is genuinely good for the organisation and neutral-to-negative for a particular group will be resisted by that group, and no amount of organisational benefit messaging changes that arithmetic.
The honest applications of WIIFM analysis are:
Find the genuine benefit for this group and lead with it. It often exists and is simply not being said, because the communication was written from the organisation's point of view.
Where there is no benefit, say so and address the loss. This is the dis-benefit conversation. Manufacturing a benefit that a group can see is not real destroys credibility more thoroughly than acknowledging the loss would.
Where the group bears cost for others' benefit, make that visible and recognised. People will accept a lot when the sacrifice is acknowledged rather than pretended away.
Empathy mapping
An empathy map is a useful tool to gain insight and consider another person's perspective. CM3 illustrates it with a specific example: a stakeholder called Bill, a plant manager in a utility business, who has been asked to introduce new reporting systems as part of new safety regulations for the plant.
An empathy map structures perspective-taking around what the person is seeing, hearing, thinking and feeling, saying and doing, and what their pains and gains are. Its value in change work is that it forces a shift from what we need Bill to do to what Bill's world actually looks like — including the pressures on him that have nothing to do with your change but entirely determine how he responds to it.
In practice, empathy mapping is most useful for a small number of critical stakeholders rather than for every group. Building one properly takes a facilitated session, and it earns its cost where a single stakeholder's response materially affects the change.
From analysis to engagement
Analysis is only useful if it changes the engagement. The output of this stage should be, per segment: what they care about, where they are on the change journey, what their WIIFM is, and what that implies for how and when to engage them. That feeds directly into the stakeholder engagement strategy, which records for each stakeholder or group their level of interest and influence, the potential impact of change on them, their potential level of resistance, the desired engagement outcomes, and the high-level approach for engaging them.