The Essayons Change Method
A research-based change management framework that holds the organizational and individual perspectives at the same time, grounded in doctoral research on employee experience during change.
What is the Essayons Change Method?
The Essayons Change Method is a change management framework that manages the organizational and individual dimensions of change simultaneously rather than choosing one at the expense of the other. It works in three layers. The Lens of Experience diagnoses what people bring into a change. The Integrated Change Management Model (ICMM) sets out five execution steps: identify the need to change, identify the stakeholders, develop the change, implement the change, and reinforce the change. Commander's Intent governs how leaders communicate throughout. At each step, the Method requires leaders to address both what the organization must do and what the people affected by the change need to understand.
Most established change models do one dimension well. Process-driven models describe what the organization should do and treat adoption as a downstream consequence. Individually focused models describe how people move through transition and leave the operational work unspecified. The Method was developed to close that gap, because in practice the two dimensions fail together.
Three Layers, One System
The full framework operates in three layers. Each is necessary. None is sufficient alone.
What you are walking into before the first communication goes out. Nobody comes to change neutral.
What to do once you understand the terrain, with organizational and individual work running in parallel.
How the leader communicates throughout, so direction and understanding are built simultaneously rather than sequentially.
What is the Lens of Experience?
The Lens of Experience is the accumulated weight of prior events that every employee brings into a change initiative before a single word has been communicated. It is invisible to the leader and completely real to the employee. Every change announcement lands on people who have been through change before, and their prior experience shapes what they hear regardless of what was said.
Four components make up the lens. Each one requires a question the leader must answer honestly before the change begins.
Name the prior change in this organization most similar to what you are about to launch. If your people draw a straight line from that change to this one, what conclusion do they reach? If the answer is unfavorable, the announcement is not ready.
Map the informal landscape before the announcement. Who are the informal leaders whose reaction carries disproportionate weight? Which unresolved tensions will this change activate rather than resolve? This is intelligence gathering, not soft work.
Assess the trust climate honestly. What recent events made deposits into the trust account, and what made withdrawals? A communication mode that works in a high-trust environment can be a match to dry paper in a low-trust one.
Turn the diagnostic on yourself. What is your default communication mode under pressure, and does it serve this change? Leaders who communicate well at the outset and turn directive when resistance appears are watching their own lens activate under stress.
Discovering group dynamics after the announcement is significantly more expensive than discovering them before.
What are the five steps?
The execution layer of the Method, the Integrated Change Management Model, has five steps. Each step carries two tracks that run in parallel. The organizational track is the work the business must do. The individual track is what the people affected need in order to move with the change rather than around it.
Organizational
Define the business problem precisely enough that it survives a two-sentence explanation.
Individual
Answer the question every employee is already asking: why is this happening, and why now?
Organizational
Map who is actually affected and who holds decision authority at each stage, not who you assume is affected.
Individual
Treat the people the change lands on as participants with a perspective, not recipients of a decision.
Organizational
Design the solution and the path to it, accounting for the journey rather than only the destination.
Individual
Build the transition people will actually live through, including what they lose along the way.
Organizational
Move when the plan is good enough to start, then adjust from real conditions.
Individual
Give people the clarity, support, and standing to act inside the change rather than around it.
Organizational
Treat implementation as the midpoint. Measure whether the change held and correct where it did not.
Individual
Confirm the new way of working is understood, supported, and sustainable before attention moves on.
What is the difference between Commander's Intent and Commander's Directive?
A Commander's Directive communicates the task and the method: what to do and how to do it. A Commander's Intent communicates the end state and the reason for it: what success looks like and why it matters. A directive produces compliance. An intent produces understanding.
The distinction matters because compliance does not survive contact with conditions the plan did not anticipate. When people understand the intent behind a change, they can make sound decisions in situations nobody scripted. When they have only been given the method, they stop at the edge of their instructions. In organizational change, where conditions shift constantly and no plan survives intact, compliance is not enough.
Where does this framework come from?
The Method comes out of a phenomenological study of employee experiences during disruptive organizational change in construction companies, conducted for a Ph.D. in Organizational Leadership at National University. The research examined how integrated communication and organizational guidance through Commander's Intent shape employee experience and change acceptance.
The findings were consistent. Directive orders produced limited shared understanding. Top-level directional guidance produced greater alignment and change acceptance. The people who had been through change before carried that experience into the next one, and leaders who did not account for it were surprised by resistance that had been predictable from the start.
Smith, P. R. (2026). Integrated Communication and Organizational Guidance in Construction: A Phenomenological Study of Employee Experiences During Change (Order No. 32785526). ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.
How is the Method used in practice?
A framework that lives in a binder does not change anything. The Method is built into the Change Management Information System, our platform for running change as a measurable process. Each phase in the platform carries the organizational and individual work side by side, and readiness surveys, stakeholder sentiment, and adoption tracking make the diagnostic layer something you can see rather than something you infer.