Before You Announce Anything: The Research Behind the Threshold Check for Organizational Change Readiness
- Megan Zara
- Aug 19
- 9 min read
Updated: Aug 21
Most change efforts begin with an announcement.
A new policy. A revised workflow. A technology rollout. An invitation to participate in a professional learning program. The message is drafted, reviewed, scheduled, and sent.
But what if the most important design work happens before anyone writes the announcement?
I built the Threshold Check as a practitioner after watching people hesitate at doors that were, by every formal measure, already open. The resources were free. The training was available. The invitation had gone out. Still, people stalled, stepped away, or never entered at all.
The four questions are not a personality quiz or a leadership hack. They are a practitioner’s translation of theory into a small, pre-announcement design instrument:
Who exactly has to walk through this door?
Is this an invitation, or a pathway?
What’s already true on this side of the threshold?
Who crosses first, and what’s waiting for them?
The Threshold Check grew out of my work in higher education, specifically faculty adoption of open educational resources. I designed and facilitated professional learning at a large public university and kept encountering the same problem: formal permission did not reliably become practical participation.
What follows is where each question comes from: and what I think it can and cannot do.
1. Who exactly has to walk through this door?
The theoretical root of this question is Lave and Wenger’s concept of legitimate peripheral participation (1991). Their argument challenges the assumption that people first absorb information and then enter a practice. Instead, people become practitioners by finding a legitimate, recognized way to begin: even before they know very much.
Wenger (1998) extends this idea by showing how participation shapes identity. Who we become is connected to what we are permitted to do inside a practice, and how our contribution is recognized.
In my own work, this appeared first as a design problem rather than a theoretical one. A faculty mini-grant I created did not ask participants to arrive as adopters, advocates, or experts. It allowed them to enter as investigators: a narrower, legitimate role with its own dignity and purpose.
That shift mattered. Moving from an undefined “anyone interested” to a named identity that someone could actually occupy helped transform a program that eleven people ignored into one that fourteen people completed.
This is what the first question is asking:
Not simply who is allowed to participate, but who has a legitimate role to step into.
Vague invitations do not necessarily fail because people are apathetic. They often fail because no one can locate themselves inside the word “everyone.”
Before announcing a change, name the narrow group that must do something differently. Then name the role they can begin from.
2. Is this an invitation, or a pathway?
This question sits close to the center of my research because it describes a distinction open education often struggles to make.
Open licenses can grant significant formal permission: retain, revise, remix, and redistribute. Yet a faculty member who is legally free to use an open resource may still have no idea how to evaluate it, adapt it, attribute it, or plan for the labor involved.
The formal openness of the resource can exceed the practical openness of the situation.
An open door is not the same thing as a usable door.
Baxter and Montgomery’s work on relational dialectics (1996) offers a useful adjacent lens here. Openness is not necessarily a fixed state that a relationship achieves and then maintains. It is continuously negotiated alongside limits, tensions, and competing needs.
Petronio’s communication privacy management theory (2002) sharpens a related idea: boundaries are not simply obstacles to openness. When they are negotiated well, boundaries can make meaningful participation possible.
In Threshold Check language, a pathway is what that negotiation looks like when made concrete. It answers:
What happens first?
What happens next?
What support is available?
What does “done” look like?
Where can someone ask for help without having to start over?
An invitation announces that a door exists. A pathway builds the stairs.
This matters in higher education, where “available” can quietly mean “you must find it, interpret it, fit it into your workload, and solve the implementation problems yourself.” The same is true in organizational change more broadly. A message can be welcoming in tone while still requiring people to perform invisible planning work before they can begin.
3. What’s already true on this side of the threshold?
This question comes from feminist care ethics, particularly the work of Joan Tronto (1993, 2013) and Nel Noddings (1984, 2013).
Tronto describes care through interlocking obligations: attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness, and: later: caring with. Together, these ideas move care beyond individual goodwill. Care is not only about whether someone means well. It is about whether responsibility has been organized so that support can be dependable, shared, and responsive to actual conditions.
Noddings adds an equally important point: care cannot be completed entirely inside the intentions of the person offering it. It depends on the expressed reality of the person receiving it.
In practice, this meant I could not assume that goodwill was doing the work of support. I had to ask what was actually true for the people I was trying to reach:
How much time did they really have?
What had already failed them?
What did they distrust?
What competing demands were present?
What would participation cost?
What capacity, knowledge, or support already existed?
This question protects against treating hesitation as a character problem.
Hesitation may be an honest report about trust, workload, history, accessibility, or capacity. Enthusiasm from the person announcing a change cannot substitute for those conditions.
Care, read this way, is not sentiment. Care is infrastructure.
The practical implication is simple but demanding: before you ask people to move, look carefully at the ground they are standing on.
4. Who crosses first, and what’s waiting for them?
Wenger’s concept of trajectories (1998) helps explain why the first people to enter a practice often need something different from those who follow later.
Becoming a practitioner is not a straight line from novice to expert. A person may move inward, remain peripheral, move between communities, or participate in several practices at once. Early movers are not merely “early adopters” in a population. They are people entering a space before the path is well established.
They need company: not just permission.
In my own program, the same content produced different outcomes under different conditions:
Offered as self-paced and optional, almost no one finished.
Required as a grant prerequisite, more people completed it, but the badge risked becoming a compliance checkpoint.
Offered within a facilitated, paid cohort: with deadlines, structure, and real company: fourteen out of fourteen participants across two cohorts completed the full sequence.
The content did not change. The conditions around the first movers did.
I have come to call the ongoing relational labor of keeping a threshold usable hinge work. It is easy to underdesign because it does not announce itself like a launch. It is not the door. It is not the room. It is the small, often unglamorous mechanism that keeps the door connected to its frame.
Early movers who enter an empty room rarely return to tell you why they left.
Where the Threshold Check sits in change literature
The Threshold Check is not a rupture with the change-management canon. It is closest to traditions that focus on readiness, context, motivation, and implementation conditions.
Lewin’s (1947) original work examined the forces holding groups in equilibrium, although the familiar “unfreeze, change, refreeze” formulation is a later simplification of his work (Cummings, Bridgman, & Brown, 2016). Kotter (1996) presents change as an ordered sequence involving urgency, coalition-building, vision, action, and reinforcement.
Bridges (1991) focuses on the internal process of transition, beginning with endings rather than announcements. Hiatt’s (2006) ADKAR model describes five individual outcomes: awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement. Kegan and Lahey (2009) examine the hidden competing commitments that can prevent people from changing even when they sincerely want to.
Rogers (2003) looks at adoption across populations, including innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. Weiner (2009) moves toward organizational readiness, describing it as shared commitment and collective confidence shaped by task demands, resources, and situational factors. Deci and Ryan (2000) identify autonomy, competence, and relatedness as basic psychological needs that contexts can either support or undermine.
The Threshold Check is most closely related to these conditions-oriented traditions. But it is designed for a different moment.
It is not:
A sequential change process
A model for sorting people into adopter categories
A validated readiness assessment
A promise that an announcement will succeed
It is a pre-flight instrument: something the person holding the pen can run before communicating the change, while there is still time to redesign the threshold.
Heifetz’s (1994) distinction between technical problems and adaptive challenges is helpful here. Technical problems have known solutions that an expert can supply. Adaptive challenges require the people living with the change to participate in the work of figuring it out.
A better announcement may solve a communication problem. It cannot, by itself, solve a missing pathway, insufficient capacity, broken trust, or an empty room.
What this does: and where it stops
I want to be precise about the evidence.
The Threshold Check comes from practitioner research in one higher education and open education context. It is not a controlled study. The participation patterns I observed are real, but modest. They show that people participated differently under different conditions. They do not prove that the same design will transfer automatically to a leadership team, nonprofit board, or company introducing a new tool.
My claim is narrower: the underlying pattern may travel because the conditions around entry matter wherever someone with less power is asked to walk through a door built by someone else.
There is also an important complication. Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) warns us not to treat care as innocent. Care can sustain participation, but it can also become invisible labor quietly absorbed by the people already holding the system together.
The Threshold Check does not run itself. Someone still has to notice hesitation, build the pathway, and remain present for whoever crosses first. That labor is real. Naming it is part of making this a design practice rather than a wish.
A hinge does not decide who belongs in the room. It makes it possible for the door to move without coming off its frame.
That is what these four questions are for.
#ThresholdCheck #OrganizationalChange #HigherEducation #OpenEducation #CareEthics #SystemsDesign #HumanScaleSystems #ChangeLeadership #FacultyDevelopment
Continue the practice
I’m Megan Zara, a PhD student, practitioner, founder of The Open Practice Academy, relational leadership and change coach, and human-scale systems designer. My work sits at the intersection of faculty development, curriculum design, open education, organizational change, and care-centered practice.
If you want to explore the framework independently, begin with The Threshold Check Lightning Lesson.
You can also explore Megan Zara’s learning and coaching offerings on Maven.
If you are ready to apply it to a real change, Beyond the Threshold: A Practicum in Human-Scale Change and The Threshold Plan: A Working Session offer more supported spaces for practice. For a focused individual engagement, Relational Practice Coaching creates room to examine what is happening, understand what is underneath it, and choose what to try next.
For institutions and campus teams, TOPA can also help build a supported Custom Learning Pathway or provide Specialist Support for a change that needs more than an announcement.
Sources and References
Baxter, L. A., & Montgomery, B. M. (1996). Relating: Dialogues and dialectics. Guilford Press.
Bridges, W. (1991). Managing transitions: Making the most of change. Addison-Wesley.
Cummings, S., Bridgman, T., & Brown, K. G. (2016). Unfreezing change as three steps: Rethinking Kurt Lewin’s legacy for change management. Human Relations, 69(1), 33–60.
Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268.
Heifetz, R. A. (1994). Leadership without easy answers. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Hiatt, J. (2006). ADKAR: A model for change in business, government, and our community. Prosci Learning Center Publications.
Kegan, R., & Lahey, L. L. (2009). Immunity to change: How to overcome it and unlock potential in yourself and your organization. Harvard Business Press.
Kotter, J. P. (1996). Leading change. Harvard Business School Press.
Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511815355
Lewin, K. (1947). Frontiers in group dynamics: Concept, method and reality in social science; social equilibria and social change. Human Relations, 1(1), 5–41. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872674700100103
Noddings, N. (1984). Caring: A feminine approach to ethics and moral education. University of California Press.
Noddings, N. (2013). Caring: A relational approach to ethics and moral education (2nd ed.). University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520957343
Petronio, S. (2002). Boundaries of privacy: Dialectics of disclosure. State University of New York Press. https://doi.org/10.1353/book4588
Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017). Matters of care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds. University of Minnesota Press.
Rogers, E. M. (2003). Diffusion of innovations (5th ed.). Free Press.
Tronto, J. C. (1993). Moral boundaries: A political argument for an ethic of care. Routledge.
Tronto, J. C. (2013). Caring democracy: Markets, equality, and justice. New York University Press.
Weiner, B. J. (2009). A theory of organizational readiness for change. Implementation
Science, 4, Article 67. https://doi.org/10.1186/1748-5908-4-67
Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge University Press.
Zara, M. (forthcoming). Threshold design for relational openness: Mini structures and hinge work in open education. Practitioner research developed from work at The University of Texas at Arlington.
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