Love Your Agent of Change: Embracing Your Partner in Transformation
This article is based on a presentation co-developed by DITA Strategies and Intuitive Stack and presented at ConVEx 2025 by Dan Schommer and Amber Swope. This article was originally published in the Best Practices newsletter through CIDM in Fall 2025.
Picture this: Someone walks into your next team meeting with a laptop full of PowerPoint slides, armed with industry best practices and a mandate from upper management to “transform how we do things around here.” Your immediate reaction might be to bristle – after all, who is this person to tell you how to do the job you’ve been perfecting for years?
This agent of change represents both your organization’s greatest opportunity for breakthrough improvement and its highest risk of disruptive failure. The difference between these outcomes depends on how you choose to engage with them – and how they choose to engage with you.
While the agent of change sees possibilities you might miss, they may also lack the institutional knowledge that prevents costly mistakes. However, when properly engaged, these catalysts can help your organization achieve transformations that would be impossible through incremental adjustments alone.
The Agent of Change
Agents of change are the driving force behind new projects, initiatives, or ways of working. They are always looking for opportunities for improvement and are usually from upper management, a different department, or an external company. As such, they are often unfamiliar with the team and processes affected by their projects.
Their Role
Because the agent of change brings an outside perspective, experience from different contexts, and fresh eyes on familiar problems, they often see improvement opportunities that teams might miss due to familiarity or resignation to current, outdated processes.
Their Strengths
Agents of change bring a powerful blend of objectivity, cross-department or -industry insight, and innovative thinking that can unlock new possibilities for organizations. By identifying hidden inefficiencies, introducing proven strategies from other contexts, and challenging entrenched assumptions, they help organizations imagine the art of possible. Their ability to generate momentum and support bold decisions makes them invaluable partners in driving meaningful, lasting transformation.
Their Risks
While agents of change bring valuable perspective and momentum, their impact must be carefully managed. Their outsider status can lead to blind spots—missing critical cultural, political, and operational nuances that shape the current environment. Without deep familiarity with past efforts, regulatory constraints, or technological limitations, they may propose solutions that are misaligned or impractical. Recognizing and mitigating these risks is essential to ensure that their contributions enhance, rather than disrupt, the path to meaningful and sustainable change.
How to Spot an Agent of Change
Agents of change are unmistakable in their approach and energy. Whether they’re consultants, new hires, internal champions, or representatives from other departments, they arrive with a fundamentally different perspective than anyone already using the existing systems. Because they haven’t necessarily lived through the organization’s previous failed initiatives, they are positive about the prospect of change. They get excited by new opportunities because they don’t carry the same scars of past disappointments.
The agent of change typically:
Arrives with a mandate or strong conviction about necessary changes.
Possesses knowledge of trends and best practices from other contexts.
Sees current processes with fresh eyes, sometimes unclouded by historical context.
Has experience with similar transformations in different environments.
Operates under pressure to deliver results within defined time frames.
May lack deep understanding of specific organizational culture and constraints.
This perspective creates both tremendous value and significant blind spots. The agent of change may be the only person in the room who isn’t constrained by “how we’ve always done things.” On the other hand, they may also be less equipped to understand why things evolved the way they did.
Agent of Change’s Motivation
Agents of change are motivated by professional success in implementing their recommendations, by the intellectual challenge of solving problems, and often by organizational mandates to deliver specific outcomes. They’re looking to protect the team in the future, not protect the team in the now – but they may not fully understand what protecting the team entails.
Unlike team members who are motivated by maintaining current effectiveness and relationships, agents of change are often driven by:
Fulfilling organizational mandates or professional objectives.
Demonstrating the value of their expertise and recommendations.
Advancing their professional reputation through successful implementations.
Solving complex problems that showcase their capabilities.
Creating measurable improvements that validate their approach.
While teams focus on preserving what works well, agents of change focus on creating what could work better. This fundamental difference in motivation creates natural tension but also opportunity.
The Change Initiative
While there are many types of change initiatives, common types include process overhauls that align with industry best practices, performance measurement systems that provide better visibility, workflow revolutions that standardize operations across teams, and technology transformations that promise better efficiency.
Each type of initiative carries its own challenges and opportunities. Process changes alter how content professionals do their fundamental work. Measurement changes affect how leadership defines and evaluates success. Workflow changes impact relationships and established practices that may have taken years to develop. Technology changes affect the tools people regularly use, which then impacts processes and potentially workflows.
The success of any change initiative depends not just on the quality of the proposed solution, but on how well the agent of change understands the current state and how well they work with your team to bridge the gap between where you are and where you need to go. The opportunity is for the team to actively partner with the agent of change to define a shared vision for success.
The Relationship Between the Agent of Change and the Affected Team
The most successful change initiatives recognize that transformation happens at the intersection of change expertise and institutional knowledge. Agents of change bring valuable perspective, but the existing teams provide essential context. Neither alone is sufficient for sustainable change.
Agents of change serve as stewards for the organization’s future capabilities, while internal teams serve as stewards for current operations and relationships. Success requires honoring both responsibilities.
This relationship creates inherent tensions that must be actively managed:
Timeline Pressures:
Agents of change often operate under pressure to deliver results quickly, while
Team members know that sustainable change takes time.
Address this by establishing realistic milestones that balance expectations with internal capacity.
Credibility Gaps:
Agents of change may wonder whether the teams are truly open to change, while
Team members may question whether agents of change truly understand their work.
Bridge this through structured knowledge transfer and pilot implementations that demonstrate mutual competence.
Accountability Conflicts:
Agents of change may be accountable for implementation success while
Team members are accountable for ongoing operations.
Clarify these different accountabilities and create shared success metrics that honor both perspectives.
Knowledge Transfer:
Agents of change may eventually move on to other projects, but
Team members must live with the changes indefinitely.
Plan for knowledge transfer from the beginning, ensuring that team members can maintain and evolve new approaches independently.
Use Case: New Authoring Tool Adoption
In your organization, let’s imagine that management is bringing in a project manager to move content authoring from Tool X to Tool Y. As the agent of change, the project manager has a broader view of the content operations vision. But they don’t take time to share their vision – Instead they initiate the project by describing the new tool’s great features, explaining how it will integrate better with other systems, and assuming that the content team is onboard to change critical technology for their daily work. They announce the technology change along with a proposed timeline in a full team meeting without any prior consultation with the team leaders.
Not surprisingly, every team member is taken aback by the announcement. You are the ones that rely upon Tool X every day to create content and, although it has its limitations, you have worked around them to produce the content on time for the past four years. Not only was your entire team disenfranchised in the decision to change tools, but the agent of change neglected to discuss the schedule with the team leaders or consult the tool experts on the customizations they’ve made to Tool X. The meeting quickly ends when a team lead tells the project manager that they need to have a conversation before there is any further discussion about the project.
Agents of change often overlook the emotional aspects of change, including the stress and anxiety that comes when you change how people work while still requiring them to produce results on an aggressive schedule.
The agent of change may also, correctly or incorrectly, assume that the manager who assigned the project also provided the impacted teams with sufficient context.
While your immediate, and understandable, response is to reject the tool change and the messenger, this is the time for you to lean in and engage the project manager. The reality is that higher-ups have already mandated the tool change. The best thing you can do is actively participate in the transformation so that you can mitigate any collateral damage and, hopefully, help build a process that works for your team.
To do this:
Share your team’s current workload and concerns so the project manager can adjust the implementation schedule around your limitations.
Collaboratively clarify what success will look like when the new tool is implemented. This includes agreeing on potential test cases and metrics.
Ask about prior examples of success to see what lessons you can apply to your project.
Share lessons learned from previous tool transition experiences and offer suggestions on how to avoid them.
Provide all the requirements, use cases, and dependencies you have for the authoring tool. With this knowledge, the project manager and tool experts can help you understand how the new tool functions differently than the current one.
Explain the customizations that you’ve made to the current tool so that the project manager and tool experts can help you find the best configuration for the new tool.
Ideally, the agent of change recognizes their missteps and resets to a more collaborative and cooperative approach. The key is moving from a model where agent of change unilaterally defines the project while the impacted team implements it, to one where they work together to create approaches that combine best practices with internal constraints and opportunities.
Strategies for Successful Engagement
Working effectively with agents of change requires a careful balance of openness to new ideas and protection of valuable institutional knowledge. Both sides must approach the relationship as a learning partnership rather than a power struggle.
For Teams Working with Agents of Change – Share Context Generously
Agents of change can’t know what they don’t know. Provide historical context about why processes evolved, what previous changes attempted to accomplish, and what lessons you learned from past initiatives.
Be Specific About Requirements. Rather than saying “that won’t work here,” explain the specific regulatory, cultural, or technical constraints that shape your environment. Help agents of change understand the difference between universal best practices and context-specific requirements.
Offer Guided Exploration: Volunteer to show agents of change how current tools and processes work in practice, not just how they appear on paper. Let them shadow you during real work situations so they can see the complexity and nuance involved.
Engage with Measured Optimism. Approach recommendations with openness while maintaining healthy skepticism. Ask questions like “How did this work in other organizations?” and “What challenges did they encounter during implementation?”
Propose Pilot Approaches: Suggest testing new ideas in small, controlled environments before attempting organization-wide implementations. This allows agents of change to learn about your specific context while minimizing risk.
For Agents of Change – Listen Attentively
While you are an expert in your specific area, this doesn’t mean you know what is necessary in every context; nor do you know what the team has already tried to implement.
Invest in Discovery. Spend considerable time learning about the current state before proposing a future state. Conduct thorough interviews, process mapping, and observation to understand not just what people do, but why they do what they do. You’ll need this background information to determine how technology can help them.
Acknowledge Expertise. Recognize that team members are experts in their own environment, even if they’re not experts in industry trends or new technologies. Position yourself as bringing knowledge to complement, not replace, their institutional wisdom.
Test Assumptions. Regularly validate your recommendations against organizational reality. Ask questions like “What am I missing?” and “What have you tried before?”
Build Relationships First. Invest time in understanding team members as individuals with professional pride and expertise. Demonstrate respect for their contributions before proposing changes to their work.
Plan for Culture. Account for organizational culture, politics, and informal systems in your implementation planning. What works in other contexts may need significant adaptation for this environment.
Building Bridges. The best way to work together is to collaborate and communicate. Start with a joint assessment of the current state, continue with collaborative solution design, then implement the solution as a continuous learning process, with both parties regularly reflecting and refining strategies based on new insights and evolving conditions. The agent of change must transfer knowledge and capabilities if they want to empower the affected team to take responsibility for adapted solutions.
The difference between successful and failed change initiatives often comes down to whether the agent of change and the impacted team share a vision of success and can work together.
Your agent of change isn’t an interloper to be endured – they’re a catalyst to be engaged.
Their fresh perspective, experience, and change expertise represent your organization’s opportunity to break through limitations that team members might not even recognize. But their value can only be realized through genuine collaboration that respects both change expertise and institutional wisdom. The challenge is how to adapt the agent of change’s knowledge to your context while building internal capability for continued improvement.
When agents of change and affected teams work together as learning partners, combining outside perspective with inside knowledge, the result isn’t just successful project implementation – it’s organizational capability that continues generating value long after the agent has moved on to their next engagement. The best change initiatives don’t just deliver better processes – they build better change capability within your team for whatever challenges come next.
Are you ready to work with an agent of change to update your information architecture? Book a free discovery call with Amber Swope.
