Study guide
10.1 Stakeholder Definition and Identification
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
10.1 Stakeholder Definition and Identification
Key Takeaways Explain This Topic AI
A stakeholder is someone who has an interest in or influence over the outcome the change is intending to achieve
Stakeholders can be internal or external to the organisation
Identification questions include who will be affected, who is responsible, who is accountable, who benefits and who can influence the change
Identification methods include facilitated workshops and one-to-one conversations
Conversations should explore stakeholders' views on change, who they believe will be impacted, and the consequences of involving or not involving others
Last updated: September 2026
The Stakeholders and communication syllabus area opens with definitions, and CM3 draws them from the Change Management Institute's body of knowledge.
The definitions
Stakeholder: "someone who has an interest in or influence over the outcome the change is intending to achieve" — Change Management Institute, The Effective Change Manager: The Change Management Body of Knowledge , 2nd edition, 2022.
Two features of this definition matter:
Interest or influence. Either qualifies. Someone with high influence and no interest is still a stakeholder — and often a dangerous one to overlook, because their disinterest can turn to opposition the moment the change touches them.
The outcome the change is intending to achieve. The definition is anchored to the outcome , not the project. People who are not in the project's scope but who are affected by the outcome are stakeholders.
Stakeholders can be internal or external to the organisation. External stakeholders — customers, suppliers, regulators, partners, unions, sometimes the public — are consistently under-identified in internal change work, and their omission is one of the more expensive kinds of oversight.
Engagement , in the context of change, is defined by Julie Hodges as "the means by which an organization increases involvement of its employees and other stakeholders with organizational change."
The five identification questions
Effective stakeholder engagement begins with identifying stakeholders. Useful questions:
Who will be affected by this change?
Who will be responsible for making it happen?
Who will be accountable for it?
Who will benefit from the change?
Who can influence the change?
Each question surfaces a different population, and using only one produces a partial list. Question 1 catches the impacted; question 5 catches the powerful; question 4 catches beneficiaries who may be your strongest advocates and who are frequently forgotten because they are not causing any trouble.
Question 1 in particular should be answered with systems thinking , not with the project scope. Who is affected extends to the teams downstream of a changed process, the people who currently absorb exceptions, and the external parties who interact with the changed part of the organisation.
Identification methods
CM3 names two:
- Facilitated workshops
- One-to-one conversations
Both are conversational rather than analytical, which is deliberate. A stakeholder list produced by one person reading an organisation chart reflects that person's mental model of the organisation and will miss the informal, the external and the unexpected. A workshop with people from different parts of the business produces a materially better list because each participant knows a different part of the network.
What conversations should explore
Conversations with stakeholders can explore:
Their views on change — this change specifically, and change in general given their history of it
Who they believe will be impacted or could impact change efforts — using each stakeholder as a route to identifying more stakeholders, which is how you find the ones no chart shows
Their thoughts on the potential positive and negative consequences of involving or not involving other stakeholders, and in what ways to do so
That third item is unusually sophisticated and worth dwelling on. It asks stakeholders to advise on engagement design , not just to be engaged. Someone who knows a department well can tell you that involving a particular group early will help, or that involving another group prematurely will generate an objection before you can answer it. This is co-design applied to the engagement approach itself.
Identification is not a one-off
Stakeholder identification runs continuously, for the same reason discovery does in the continuous change cycle. New stakeholder groups emerge as impacts become clearer — CM3 notes explicitly that as the change network identifies new impacts or stakeholder groups, impact profiles may change.
The practical discipline is to revisit the stakeholder list at defined points: after impact assessment, after each delivery phase, and after any organisational change that alters who does what. A list compiled at initiation and never revised will be materially wrong by mid-delivery.
Common identification failures
Three recur often enough to check for deliberately:
Failure Why it happens Correction
External stakeholders omitted The change is framed as internal Ask explicitly: customers, suppliers, regulators, partners
Beneficiaries overlooked They are not complaining, so they are invisible Ask "who benefits?" as a separate question, and recruit them as advocates
The quietly powerful missed High influence, low current interest, so they do not appear in any conversation Ask "who could stop this?" as well as "who is affected?"