PCM Assurance™

Personal Change Management (PCM) is a defined discipline founded by Dr Grant Van Ulbrich that focuses on how individuals experience, interpret, and adopt change. 

Definition of PCM Assurance

PCM Assurance (Personal Change Management Assurance) is a governance and assurance framework that verifies whether individuals involved in organisational, digital, or cultural transformation have been supported, enabled, and able to navigate personal change.

Unlike traditional change management measures that focus on activities, communications, or system deployment, PCM Assurance™ focuses on human readiness, personal choice, behavioural adoption, and sustained engagement.

PCM Assurance provides leaders, boards, and regulators with evidence that transformation initiatives have not only been implemented, but genuinely adopted by people.

Most transformation programmes are declared successful when technology goes live, training is delivered, or milestones are met.

However, research consistently shows that transformation fails not because of strategy or systems, but because people are unable or unsupported in navigating personal change.

PCM Assurance exists to close this gap.

It ensures that:

• Human readiness is measured, not assumed
   
• Personal resistance and uncertainty are identified early
   
• Leadership decisions consider lived employee experience
   
• Transformation risk is reduced before failure becomes visible
   

PCM Assurance treats personal change as a measurable and governable dimension of transformation.

PCM Assurance provides assurance that:

• Individuals understand the change and its impact on them
   
• Personal choice and agency have been acknowledged
   
• Emotional, cognitive, and behavioural readiness has been assessed
   
• Leaders have visibility of adoption risk in real time
   
• Behaviour change is sustained beyond implementation
   

This shifts assurance from retrospective reporting to active risk prevention.

Change management typically focuses on:

• Plans
   
• Communications
   
• Training completion
   
• Engagement activities
   

PCM Assurance focuses on:

• Personal change readiness
   
• Individual response to change
   
• Human adoption risk
   
• Behavioural follow through
   
• Leadership accountability for people outcomes
   

PCM Assurance does not replace change management.
It verifies whether it actually worked for people.

PCM Assurance is operationalised through Personal Change Management.

Scared So What® functions as the operating system that enables PCM Assurance™ by providing:

• Personal change diagnostics
   
• Real time adoption insight
   
• Leadership visibility of human risk
   
• Evidence of behavioural progress
   

This allows organisations to govern transformation with the same rigour applied to financial, operational, and technical risk.

PCM Assurance is applicable to:

• Digital transformation
   
• AI adoption
   
• Organisational restructuring
   
• Cultural change
   
• Mergers and acquisitions
   
• Public sector reform
   

Anywhere people are expected to change, PCM Assurance applies.

Hiatt, J. (2006). ADKAR: A Model for Change in Business, Government and our Community. Prosci.

Kotter, J.P. (2012). Leading Change. Harvard Business Review Press.

McKinsey & Company (2015). The Inconvenient Truth About Change Management.

Van Ulbrich, G. (2020). Transforming Sales Management: Lead Sales Teams Through Change.

Van Ulbrich, G. (2022). Including Choice into Change Models via SCARED SO WHAT (MSc Thesis).