Can changemaking be taught?

Approximately 70% of transformational efforts fail. We often blame strategy, leadership, culture, funding, politics, or bad luck. Increasingly, my research suggests another explanation: we have never treated changemaking as a profession.

Architects, teachers, engineers, surgeons, firefighters, pilots, and musicians all develop explicit competencies. We expect them to practise, improve, receive feedback, and continue learning throughout their careers. Changemakers, by contrast, are largely expected to figure it out as they go.

That has left generations of extraordinary people underprepared, unsupported, and far more dependent on talent and perseverance than any serious profession should tolerate.

One of the central questions driving my PhD is deceptively simple: if changemaking is a profession, what are its competencies? This post offers an early answer.

If you listened to my Q2 Field Notes, you'll recognize this as one of the biggest shifts in my thinking. Increasingly, I suspect that successful transformation depends not only on good methods but on the abilities of changemakers. If that's true, understanding the competencies they can develop becomes just as important as understanding the tools they use.

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While my recent writing has focused on the predispositions that may draw someone toward changemaking, today's post turns to a different question: once someone is drawn to this work, what can they deliberately learn to become most effective?

Changemakers have largely learned through improvisation. We apprentice ourselves to problems, borrow techniques from adjacent professions, accumulate scars, and hope that experience eventually resembles expertise. No mature profession would deem that sufficient.

If we can articulate the competencies of changemaking, we can begin to do what every mature profession eventually learns to do:

• recruit people whose natural predispositions fit the work,

• develop them intentionally rather than accidentally,

• coach them through increasingly complex challenges,

• recognize excellence,

• and sustain meaningful impact over an entire career.

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Image credit: Pexels from Pixabay

My research suggests 9 core and 6 situational competencies.

While most of the competencies below emerge from my own research and practice, they are also informed by the work of others who have shaped my thinking. In particular, futurist Bob Johansen's work on future leadership skills has influenced several of the situational competencies, including dilemma flipping, bio-engaging, human calming, and what he calls "smart-mob swarming." His work has been an important companion as I develop a competency framework specifically for changemakers.

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The 9 Core Competencies of Changemakers

These are the competencies all effective changemakers demonstrate. Some emerge naturally. Others require years of deliberate practice. Together, they form the professional foundation of changemaking.

1. Curiosity — Embracing uncertainty; actively seeking and enjoying new perspectives and experiences.

2. Systems Thinking — Building on the predisposition of systems sensitivity, this competency involves analysing interdependence, feedback loops, leverage points, and unintended consequences in order to design more effective interventions. Detailed in my earlier post.

3. Empathy — Understanding and responding to the lived experience of others when designing and leading change.

4. Strategy — Stripped of rigidity, effectively coordinating action across all spheres of influence. Related to Bob Johansen's concept of "clarity."

5. Facilitation & Collaboration — With humility and vulnerability, guiding groups toward possibility that is unlocked through cooperation.

6. Intentionality — Translating conviction into deliberate action.

7. Influence — Enlisting others, whether through charisma, story, or orchestration. Closely related to Bob Johansen's "smart-mob swarming."

8. Impact Assessment — Defining and communicating success; indispensable for legitimacy and scale. Detailed in my earlier post.

9. Sense of Purpose — Knowing your “why”; the compass and stamina behind changemaking. Detailed in my earlier series.

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Situational Competencies

While not universal, these competencies can give changemakers the edge to navigate crises, build resilience, and turn intractable problems into breakthroughs. Think of them as the extra gear. You can ride without it, but if the journey challenges you, you’ll be glad it’s there.

1. Self-Awareness
Knowing yourself: your motivations, blind spots, and triggers. This isn’t indulgence — it’s essential for trust, clarity, and the power of conviction. Leaders at peace with both their ego and trauma — who know how they come across — are better able to mobilize others.

2. Self-Care & Resilience
Effective changemakers burn bright, and that takes stamina. In some, it may mean cultivating stoicism: staying grounded under pressure. For others, it means implementing habits that allow for renewal. Either way, resilience is non-negotiable for a lifetime of impact.

Human Calming

“Developing a sense of centeredness that cultivates inner focus, maintains composure under pressure, and guides others with steady grounded presence in a brittle, anxious, nonlinear, and incomprehensive world.” — Bob Johansen

3. Decisiveness
Consensus has its place. But when the moment demands action, indecision can sink a movement. Decisiveness is the courage to make the hard call when it matters most.

4. Dilemma Flipping (after Bob Johansen)
The toughest problems present as unsolvable paradoxes — until someone reframes them into opportunities. It’s a skill of foresight, timing, judgment, and creativity: resisting premature conclusions while avoiding endless delay.

5. Bio-Engaging (after Bob Johansen)
Nature holds wisdom, and biomimicry has rightfully been pushing its way into mainstream decision-making. Changemakers who draw on ecological principles — interdependence, resilience, regeneration — design solutions better suited for today’s crises.

6. Gameful Mindset
Play is not frivolous. It’s an adaptive, experimental, and engaging approach to solving problems. Changemakers who approach transformation with a playful mindset — testing, iterating, inviting collaboration — create momentum and possibility.

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Why the distinction matters

Core competencies are universal. Without them, transformation doesn’t stand a chance.

Situational competencies are amplifiers. They mark the difference between good and great practice.

Core skills let you survive the terrain of change. Situational skills let you thrive in its steepest climbs. They don’t replace the core ones. They extend them.

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Cultivating changemaker competencies

For more than twenty years and across six continents, I have been helping leaders, executive teams, coalitions, and mission-driven organizations build these competencies — long before I had language for the framework emerging through my PhD.

I increasingly see my work as professional development for changemakers. Sometimes that means coaching individual changemakers or executive teams through an especially complex or ambitious transformation. Sometimes it involves diagnosing why transformational efforts stall or derail. I often develop transformational strategy, build collaborative processes, recalibrate systems, or help groups develop the confidence and judgment required to lead meaningful change together.

If your organization is navigating significant change — or if you're a leader who wants to become a more capable changemaker — I offer executive coaching, team development, facilitation, and strategic advisory grounded in this work.

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The bigger picture

My work in defining changemaking isn’t about narrowing the field to an elite few. It’s about professionalizing the craft so that we can recruit, equip, and sustain more changemakers for the long haul.

Competencies are not the whole story. My research increasingly suggests that changemakers also share certain recurring predispositions—ways of seeing and relating to the world that make some people more likely to step toward transformation in the first place.

Predispositions may influence who becomes a changemaker. Competencies shape how effective they become. That distinction has become one of the central questions of my research—and, increasingly, the reason this publication exists.

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