What OCM Should Be Doing When There Is No Change to Manage Yet
The Assess phase is where change management is most often wasted -- and where it has the most to offer.
Seneca Bailey
3/6/20267 min read
There is an uncomfortable moment that happens on almost every structured transformation program, usually somewhere in the first few weeks.
The project is in Assess. The future state has not been designed. The technology has not been selected, or if it has, the configuration decisions that will determine what actually changes for people are still months away. There are process mapping sessions happening, discovery workshops running, current state documentation being built. Good work. Necessary work. Work that belongs entirely to the business analysts and process owners doing it.
And the change manager is sitting at her desk wondering what, exactly, she is supposed to be doing.
This is the Assess phase problem for OCM. It is real, it is common, and how organizations respond to it determines whether change management adds value from the beginning or scrambles to catch up from behind.
The Two Wrong Answers
There are two responses to the Assess phase problem that feel reasonable and are both mistakes.
The first is to have OCM manufacture presence. Sit in on process mapping sessions. Attend discovery workshops. Show up in rooms where the work is happening, even without a defined role or a defined deliverable, on the theory that being embedded early is better than arriving late.
The problem with this is not that early involvement is wrong. It is that presence without purpose is not involvement -- it is observation. An OCM practitioner sitting in on a current state mapping session with no defined contribution is not doing change management. She is watching business analysis happen. And the cost of that presence is not zero: it adds an observer to rooms full of people with day jobs to get back to, it diffuses the OCM focus at exactly the point where it should be building something, and it creates the impression that OCM coverage has happened when it has not.
The second wrong answer is to have OCM go quiet. Wait for the future state. Hold the change strategy until there is a change to be strategic about. Stay in standby until the design is far enough along to assess impact against.
This one feels disciplined but it is actually a missed opportunity. The Assess phase contains information that is genuinely valuable to change management -- not about the future state, which does not exist yet, but about the human conditions inside which that future state will eventually land. The organizational readiness, the existing stress points, the capacity constraints, the political dynamics that will shape how change is received. None of that requires a future state to observe. All of it is present right now, in the rooms where the mapping work is happening.
The problem is not that OCM has nothing to do in Assess. It is that most OCM practitioners have not defined what the right work actually is.
What Is Actually Happening in Assess That OCM Should Care About
When an organization runs a structured discovery and process mapping effort, it is asking a specific group of people -- usually subject matter experts and process owners who are also doing their regular jobs -- to do something difficult. To hold the complexity of their current work in their heads, articulate it clearly enough for others to document, identify the gaps and inefficiencies in it honestly, and engage constructively in imagining something different.
That is a significant ask. And it happens against a backdrop that the project plan does not capture: the political tensions between functions, the history of previous initiatives that promised transformation and delivered disruption, the resource pressure of being asked to map processes while the quarterly close is happening, the anxiety about what the future state might mean for roles and teams and ways of working that people have spent years building.
None of these things are change management problems yet. The change has not been defined. But they are conditions. And conditions shape whether change, when it arrives, lands well or lands hard.
This is what OCM can observe and measure in Assess -- not what the change will be, but what it will be landing into.
Change Sensing: A Different Frame for Assess Phase OCM
The reframe that unlocks Assess phase OCM is this: in the absence of a change to manage, the job is to sense the conditions for change.
Change sensing is not change management. It is not stakeholder analysis, because there are not yet stakeholders of a defined change to analyze. It is not impact assessment, because there is not yet a future state to assess impact against. It is not a communications plan or a training strategy or a resistance management protocol.
It is systematic, lightweight listening. Structured to surface the early signals that will become the foundation of everything that follows.
In practice, this means designing a sensing mechanism that runs alongside the Assess phase work rather than inside it. Not an observer in the room. A structured pulse to the people doing the room's work -- asking, at regular intervals, a small number of questions calibrated to surface what matters.
The questions that matter most in Assess are not about the future state. They are about the present experience of the people being asked to build toward it.
Clarity, Conflicts, and Collision
The framework I have found most useful for Assess phase change sensing organizes around three signals.
Clarity measures whether the people doing the discovery and mapping work understand what they are working toward and why. Not the future state design -- that does not exist yet -- but the purpose of the effort, the mandate behind it, and the decision-making authority that will govern what happens with what they produce. Low clarity at this stage is a leading indicator of resistance later, because people who do not understand why their process is being mapped are unlikely to trust the future state that emerges from it.
Conflicts surfaces the friction points that the process mapping sessions are generating but not resolving. Where are two functions seeing the same process differently and nobody has the authority to adjudicate? Where are legacy decisions embedded in the current state that will be politically difficult to redesign? Where are the workstream boundaries creating gaps that the mapping sessions are falling into? Conflicts surfaced in Assess are design inputs. The same conflicts surfaced at go-live are adoption crises.
Collision tracks the cumulative pressure on the people being asked to do this work alongside everything else. A business running a major transformation program is almost never running just one initiative. The SMEs doing the process mapping are also in the quarterly close, onboarding a new system, absorbing a reorg, or managing a team through uncertainty. Collision is the signal that the change has more competition for attention and capacity than the project plan accounts for -- and catching that signal early, before the future state design assumes an availability that does not exist, changes what the project can realistically plan for.
These three signals can be gathered with a survey that takes ten minutes to complete, run no more than once a month per workstream. The output is not a lengthy report. It is a simple dashboard that answers one question for project and business leadership: are the conditions for this program healthy, and where is the earliest stress showing?
What This Produces That Matters
A well-run Assess phase change sensing effort produces three things that are genuinely difficult to build any other way.
The first is an early change landscape. Before anyone has defined the future state, OCM has a documented picture of the human conditions inside the organization -- the capacity constraints, the trust levels, the political friction points, the clarity gaps. When the future state design begins, that picture is the foundation for the change impact assessment rather than a starting point built from scratch.
The second is credibility with the project team. An OCM practitioner who arrives in Plan with data about what the Assess phase revealed -- concrete, specific, organized -- is a different presence in the room than one who shows up having attended sessions and observed. Data earns standing. Observation does not.
The third is an early warning system for project leadership. The Collision signal, in particular, tends to surface things that project plans assume away: that the SMEs being asked to design the future state are already at capacity, that the timeline assumes availability that does not exist, that the change is landing on a function that is managing three other things simultaneously. This is information that sponsors and PMO leaders need before they commit to a design and deployment schedule -- not after the adoption stalls.
The Argument This Makes About OCM
There is a broader point worth naming here.
When OCM sits in on process mapping sessions without a defined role, it is accepting a position that the project defines for it. When OCM designs a sensing framework that runs alongside Assess and produces something the project cannot produce any other way, it is defining its own position -- and making it harder to marginalize.
The Assess phase problem is not really about what OCM does in Assess. It is about whether OCM is a function that shapes how projects design for change, or a workstream that executes the activities it is assigned. A workstream waits for direction. A function identifies the gap and builds something for it.
The gap in Assess is real. The conditions for change are present before the change is. Sensing those conditions early, systematically, and with a deliverable that project leadership finds indispensable going into Plan -- that is what OCM is for when there is no change to manage yet.
Someone had to say it.
Try This
Before your next program enters the design phase, ask your OCM team one question: what do we know about the human conditions inside the organization that the future state will be landing into?
If the answer is "we will assess that once the future state is defined," you are starting the change work after the window for it has already opened. The conditions that will determine whether your change lands well are present right now, in the Assess phase work happening around you.
Design something to sense them. It does not have to be elaborate. It has to be systematic, lightweight, and calibrated to the questions that matter. Clarity, Conflicts, Collision is one frame. The right frame for your organization may look different. What matters is that it exists -- and that it runs before you need what it tells you.
Seneca Bailey is an organizational change strategist and the founder of Unbroken Work. She writes on change management, organizational design, and the systems that determine whether transformation actually lands. More at unbrokenwork.com.
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