Performance improvement interventions fail not because they are poorly designed but because organizations cannot implement and sustain them. EDD8536 addresses this implementation gap, developing the change management competencies needed to move from intervention design to organizational reality — and to keep improvements in place long after the initial implementation effort has ended.
The people side of organizational change
Why change management requires understanding human responses to change
- Prosci's ADKAR model: EDD8536 applies Prosci's ADKAR model — Awareness (of the need for change), Desire (to participate and support the change), Knowledge (of how to change), Ability (to implement required skills and behaviors), and Reinforcement (to sustain the change) — as a framework for understanding and managing individual transitions through organizational change. The model's practical value is that it identifies where individuals are stuck in their change journey and prescribes specific interventions for each barrier
- Bridges' transition model: The course covers William Bridges' distinction between change (the external situation — new processes, new structures, new roles) and transition (the internal psychological process people go through to come to terms with the new situation). Bridges' three phases — ending/losing/letting go, the neutral zone, and the new beginning — explain why people resist even positive changes and what leaders must do to support people through each phase
- Resistance as information: EDD8536 reframes resistance to change not as an obstacle to overcome but as valuable information about the change itself. Resistance often signals legitimate concerns — that the change threatens valued aspects of current practice, that the implementation timeline is unrealistic, that the change will create unintended consequences, or that the case for change has not been adequately communicated. Understanding resistance diagnostically, rather than dismissing it as obstruction, enables leaders to improve both the change and its implementation
Change management processes and tools
EDD8536 develops proficiency with systematic change management processes — the structured approaches that guide organizations through the planning, implementation, and reinforcement of change initiatives. The course covers stakeholder analysis (identifying who is affected by the change, how they are affected, and what their likely response will be), change impact assessment (systematically analyzing how the change will affect specific roles, processes, tools, and organizational structures), communication planning (designing targeted messages for different stakeholder groups at different phases of the change), sponsor management (building and maintaining the active and visible support of organizational leaders throughout the change process), and coaching and training plans (developing the specific knowledge and skills that people need to perform effectively in the changed environment).
Sustaining change and preventing regression
Most organizational change initiatives produce initial results that gradually erode as the organization reverts to previous patterns of behavior — what improvement scientists call "regression to the mean" of organizational habit. EDD8536 addresses this sustainability challenge directly, examining why improvements fail to sustain (insufficient reinforcement, competing priorities, leadership turnover, inadequate measurement systems, cultural resistance that was suppressed during implementation but resurfaces afterward) and developing strategies for embedding changes in organizational systems, structures, processes, and culture so that they persist beyond the initial implementation effort. The course covers reinforcement mechanisms including aligned performance management systems, revised job descriptions and role expectations, modified organizational structures, updated standard operating procedures, and ongoing monitoring and feedback systems that detect and correct regression early.
Professional literature and evidence-based practice
EDD8536 develops the practitioner's capacity to engage with the professional literature on organizational change — critically evaluating research findings, practitioner case studies, and change management frameworks to build an evidence-based change management practice. The course addresses the relationship between academic research on organizational change (which tends toward theoretical models and controlled studies) and practitioner literature on change management (which tends toward prescriptive frameworks and case studies), developing the capacity to draw on both traditions while recognizing their respective strengths and limitations.
EDD8536 assignments include change management plans, stakeholder analyses, sustainability strategies, and organizational change case studies
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Change management plans, stakeholder analyses, sustainability strategies, ADKAR assessments, transition management papers.
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Frequently asked questions
The distinction between change leadership and change management reflects a substantive difference in focus, orientation, and competency set that the EdD program addresses through two separate courses for good reason. Change leadership (the focus of EDD8526 in the Educational Leadership specialization) is concerned with the strategic and visionary dimensions of organizational change: establishing the direction and urgency for change, building coalitions of support, creating and communicating a compelling vision for the future state, empowering people to act on the vision, and institutionalizing new approaches in the organizational culture. Change leadership operates primarily at the organizational and strategic level, addressing questions of direction, purpose, and motivation: Why should we change? What should we become? How do we mobilize collective energy toward a new future? The theoretical foundations of change leadership draw heavily on leadership theory (transformational leadership, adaptive leadership, distributed leadership) and organizational development (systems thinking, learning organization theory, organizational culture). Change management (the focus of EDD8536 in the Performance Improvement specialization) is concerned with the structured, systematic, and process-oriented dimensions of implementing specific changes: How do we move specific individuals from their current state to the desired state? What processes, tools, and techniques do we use to manage the transition? How do we ensure that people have the awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement needed to adopt new behaviors? How do we sustain the change once the initial implementation effort concludes? Change management operates primarily at the individual and process level, addressing questions of implementation, transition, and sustainability. Its theoretical foundations draw on change psychology (how individuals process and respond to change), project management (structured approaches to planning and executing complex initiatives), and behavioral science (how to systematically modify individual and group behavior in organizational settings). In practice, successful organizational change requires both: change leadership without change management produces inspiring visions that never translate into changed behavior; change management without change leadership produces technically proficient implementation of changes that lack strategic purpose or organizational commitment. The EdD program recognizes this complementarity by offering both courses — in different specializations, reflecting their different orientations — but with enough overlap in change theory that learners in each specialization understand the other dimension.