15 Aug ABCDE Change Management Framework
Every institution holds more of what it needs than it realizes: the colleague already experimenting, the data already collected, the center already funded, the partner organization already willing. Phase A is the deliberate inventory of those assets and the people who will carry the work forward. This is the strengths-based move that defeats the blank page, because the question is never what do we lack, but what do we already have and who is already with us. The allies aggregated here become the coalition every later phase depends on.
Institutional change crosses boundaries that day-to-day work rarely does: faculty and administrators, academic and student affairs, IT and instruction, leadership and the people closest to learners. Phase B builds the working relationships between those functions, in the places where decisions actually get made. Bridges are not introductions; they are shared commitments about who decides what, who informs whom, and how the work moves between offices. Teams that skip this phase feel it later, when a promising pilot stalls at the first boundary it was never connected across.
With allies gathered and bridges built, Phase C turns to making: the course redesigns, the professional learning, the tools, the workflows, the supports that close the real gaps named at the start. The sequence matters here most of all, because capabilities built on the earlier phases land in an institution ready to receive them, while capabilities built first become solutions in search of adopters. Just as essential is who can reach what gets built: capabilities that only some can access create change that only some experience.
A capability no one seeks out changes nothing, and good work does not advertise itself. Phase D builds the demand that gives the change momentum: communicating what exists and why it matters, training the people who will use it, and developing the champions whose enthusiasm travels farther than any announcement. This is where the coalition from Phase A earns its size, because demand grows through trusted voices, colleague to colleague, far faster than through any official channel. The work here converts what was built into what is used.
The final phase asks the hardest question: what has to be true for this work to outlive the people who started it? Phase E builds the answer into the institution itself, through the policies that make new practice standard practice, the leadership commitments that protect it across transitions, and the funding models that carry it past the grant or the pilot. This is the apex of the pyramid because everything below it points here: change becomes an ecosystem when it no longer depends on any single team’s continued attention to survive.
The framework has anchored change work across a range of institutional contexts, each engagement mapping the five phases to the culture and needs of the teams doing the work.
