Change Communication: Make Communication Part of Change Implementation

Communication · Executive Insight Brief · 231

The workaround may be the evidence

Lewis’s framework treats stakeholders as actors who interpret influence enact and evaluate change rather than audiences awaiting announcements

Premise

Change becomes real through communication as people interpret expectations, coordinate work, question inconsistencies, learn new practices, and decide whether to support, adapt, resist, or redirect an initiative. In Laurie K. Lewis’s framework, communication is not a campaign added after leaders choose a change. It is one of the processes through which implementation itself is accomplished.

Lewis developed this view through a cumulative research program: studies of dissemination and input seeking, nonprofit implementation approaches, the 2007 Organizational Stakeholder Model of Change Implementation Communication, and the 2011 integration of strategy, stakeholder interaction, power, resistance, and outcomes. The governing question shifts from whether people were told to what communication is shaping enactment.

The essential model

Stakeholders are not passive recipients. Employees, managers, customers, regulators, unions, funders, and partners interpret change, exchange information, form coalitions, challenge claims, and develop alternatives. Their concerns and interactions can prompt implementers to revise strategy. Communication is therefore recursive, conditioned by stakes, credibility, institutional pressures, prior change history, readiness, and desired fidelity or uniformity.

Lewis identifies five design dimensions: dissemination versus soliciting input; one-sided versus acknowledgment of competing evidence and costs; gain versus loss framing; targeted versus blanket messaging; and discrepancy versus efficacy. No pole is universally superior. The task is to select a combination that fits the change, relationships, decision rights, need for speed, and required degree of adaptation.

Why this matters

Consider an illustrative global platform rollout. Leaders broadcast the rationale and survey employees, while regional teams retain unofficial spreadsheets because the system cannot support local regulation. The issue appeared in comments but was classified as resistance. A Lewis-informed diagnosis asks whether input could alter design, whether messages reflected different stakes, and whether claims about the performance gap were paired with credible capacity to solve it.

The framework distinguishes message frequency from communication quality. Lewis’s employee-perspective study found that frequency alone was unrelated to perceived success, while the perceived value of input and communication of vision mattered more. Executives should also separate uniformity, fidelity, and authenticity: standardized visible use can coexist with superficial compliance, while local adaptation may reduce fidelity yet improve practical implementation.

Risks and limits

Clear communication cannot rescue a defective change. Stakeholders may understand an initiative and oppose it for rational reasons involving safety, professional standards, customers, local knowledge, or organizational memory. The framework is an integrative implementation lens, not a standardized instrument with one validated score, and its empirical foundations do not validate every pathway across industries, cultures, change types, or power structures.

The model does not decide whether a change should proceed, how much stakeholder influence is appropriate, or which trade-off among speed, participation, fidelity, adaptation, and efficiency is correct. Surveys can simulate participation when input has no route to decision. Attendance, message opens, sentiment, or visible adoption cannot establish goal accomplishment, authentic acceptance, or the absence of unintended consequences.

Executive takeaway

Design communication as part of implementation governance. Define where fidelity is essential and adaptation is legitimate, map stakeholder stakes and influence, choose the five strategy dimensions deliberately, and specify how input can affect decisions. Monitor informal sensemaking as well as official messages, and evaluate uniformity, fidelity, authenticity, goal accomplishment, and unintended consequences separately. More communication is not the same as better implementation.

Key questions

• Which stakeholders can shape implementation rather than merely receive information?
• What input is genuinely sought and which decisions can that input change?
• How should sidedness framing targeting discrepancy and efficacy fit this change?
• Are visible adoption uniformity fidelity and authenticity telling the same story?

Selected sources

• Lewis, L. K. (1999). Disseminating information and soliciting input during planned organizational change: Implementers’ targets, sources, and channels for communicating. Management Communication Quarterly, 13(1), 43-75.
• Lewis, L. K. (2007). An organizational stakeholder model of change implementation communication. Communication Theory, 17(2), 176-204.
• Lewis, L. K. (2011). Organizational Change: Creating Change Through Strategic Communication. Wiley-Blackwell.