Bottom line
Durable change follows five stages in order — Understanding, Appreciating, Navigating, Manipulating, Changing. The sequence is the argument: leaders who skip stages fail not for lack of vision but because the organization wasn't prepared to hold what they tried to build. The test of the fifth stage is whether the change survives your departure. Expect 12–18 months before stage four has been earned, and three to five years to reach the fifth genuinely.
The value of an organization is that it operates on an infinite time horizon. You don't. Whatever you accomplish in your career will largely disappear when you leave unless it has been built into something that continues without you.
For a nonprofit, the board of directors holds the mission in trust. They hire a president to pursue it, approve the strategy that leadership develops, and bear ultimate responsibility for whether the organization succeeds. The staff — including its leaders — work in service of that mission, under that oversight. That structure matters here because it draws the ethical line around everything that follows: change that advances the board's mission is the work. Change that substitutes a leader's own aims is a betrayal of the structure, not just a lapse in judgment.
Most leaders believe they start changing their organization on day one. They start something on day one, but it isn't change — not the durable kind. This framework describes what has to happen before your interventions actually take root. The five stages are Understanding, Appreciating, Navigating, Manipulating, and Changing.
I learned this framework the way the Marine Corps teaches it — by rotation. Officers are moved every two or three years, deliberately, across different assignments and different types of units, precisely so that adapting to a new organization becomes a trained skill rather than a personality trait. Every rotation is a forced repetition of the early stages: a new map to build, new terrain to respect, new paths to learn.
Then there are the times the organization itself has to change. In the days after September 11, I was a first lieutenant at Camp Lejeune, assistant operations officer of an infantry battalion, when word came that the Marine Corps would convert us into its new anti-terrorism battalion. I was twenty-four — maybe twenty-five — and the transition landed on my desk. Within about a month we had security teams in Incirlik, Turkey, and Marines reopening the embassy in Kabul — while the full conversion ran against a mission-essential task list with external evaluators at both ends. It is very rare for a company — or a nonprofit — to attempt disciplined change with evaluators who are not incentivized to declare you a success.
That speed was possible because the institution had already built what this essay says a leader must earn: shared doctrine, common standards, and people drilled by rotation in exactly the stages above. And none of us were new to the battalion — the maps, the trust, and the standing existed before the mission changed. What converted in thirty days was the organization, not the foundations under it. Civilian organizations have none of that pre-installed. Which is why the sequence has to be earned personally, by the leader, before change will hold.
Understanding is the foundational intelligence-gathering stage. Before you can do anything else, you have to develop an accurate picture of how the organization actually works — not how it is supposed to work on paper, not how it is described in the org chart or the strategic plan, but how it actually functions. Who holds informal power. Where decisions really get made. What the organization values in practice versus in rhetoric. What the load-bearing assumptions are that nobody questions.
The key word is accurate. This stage is not about forming opinions or developing a change agenda. It is about resisting that instinct and instead building a true model of the system you are operating in.
What you are building: A map. Not a plan — a map.
The failure mode: The leader who skips this stage is operating on assumptions — usually assumptions imported from their last organization, or from the interview process, or from whoever hired them. They diagnose the wrong problem, or the right problem in the wrong place, and their interventions miss.
Observable indicator: You can accurately predict how the organization will react to a given proposal before you make it.
New leader vs. incumbent: For a new leader, this stage is somewhat socially protected — people expect you to be in listening mode. For a leader who has been in place a year or two without doing this work, it is harder, because you have already been operating on your incomplete map and may have made commitments based on it.
Understanding is cognitive — you are building an accurate map. Appreciation is something different. It is the stage where you move from knowing how the organization works to genuinely valuing why it works that way.
Every organization has patterns that look like dysfunction from the outside — or from day one — but that exist for reasons. A process that seems bureaucratic was probably built in response to a real failure. A cultural norm that seems counterproductive probably protected something that mattered. A power structure that looks inefficient probably reflects a compromise that held something together.
Appreciation means you have done the work to understand the why behind the what. Understanding alone is not enough — you can understand something and still dismiss it. Appreciation requires that you hold it with some respect — even if you ultimately intend to change it.
What you are building: Credibility and trust. When the people inside the organization sense that you actually understand why things are the way they are, they start to believe you will not break something important by accident. That belief is what gets you access to the next stages.
The failure mode: The leader who understands but does not appreciate is the one who comes in confident, moves fast, and breaks things they did not know were load-bearing. They are often right about the diagnosis and still wrong about the intervention.
Observable indicator: People inside the organization start bringing you problems they would not have shared earlier. You have demonstrated you will not react badly to complexity.
New leader vs. incumbent: For a new leader, appreciation takes time and cannot be faked — people can tell when you are performing it. For the incumbent, the risk is the opposite: you may have developed so much appreciation that you have lost the outsider's eye and started defending things that genuinely should change.
On the overlap between Understanding and Appreciation: Understanding is descriptive — what is true. Appreciation is interpretive — why it is true and what it is worth. You are doing both simultaneously in practice, but they are distinct cognitive and relational tasks. Leaders routinely achieve one without the other, which is why they need to be named separately.
You have built the map. You respect the terrain. You can move through the system. Now you start to work it — consciously, deliberately applying what you know to move people, resources, and decisions in directions they would not naturally go on their own.
That is manipulation. And it is the prerequisite for real change.
The reason the word matters is that it forces an acknowledgment most leadership writing papers over: effective change agents are not just visionaries or communicators — they are operators who understand leverage and use it. They know which relationships to cultivate before a hard decision, which framing will move which person, which sequence of conversations gets a proposal to the table in a position to survive. They engineer outcomes, not just advocate for them.
The mechanical sense and the provocative sense are actually the same thing viewed from different angles. Mechanically, you are manipulating variables in a system to produce a desired output. Provocatively, you are doing that with people and institutions — and pretending otherwise is naive.
The ethical line: Manipulation becomes nefarious when the outcome serves the manipulator at the expense of the organization or its people. Manipulation is legitimate when it is in service of the organization's genuine interests — the mission the board has defined and charged leadership to pursue — even when those interests are not yet visible to the people being moved. The distinction is not in the method. It is in whose interests the outcome serves. And that judgment is not the leader's to self-certify: the check is transparency to the board — the people who hold the mission in trust. A leader whose moves cannot survive being explained to their board is on the wrong side of the line.
This is uncomfortable because it collapses the clean separation between good leadership and political maneuvering. The framework's argument is that separation was always false.
What you are building: Actual leverage. Not authority granted by title, not influence earned by trust alone — but the operational capacity to move the organization in a specific direction against its own inertia.
The failure mode: The leader who manipulates without having done the first three stages is dangerous — they have technique without wisdom, and they will optimize for the wrong outcomes or break trust they did not know they would need. The leader who refuses to manipulate at all — who finds the whole frame distasteful — stays in Navigation forever and wonders why nothing changes.
Observable indicator: You can engineer a specific outcome through the organization's existing structures and relationships — not by mandating it, but by setting up the conditions for it to happen.
New leader vs. incumbent: For a new leader, you should not be here before 12–18 months in at the earliest, and only if you have genuinely done the prior work. For the incumbent, the question is whether they are manipulating toward organizational interests or toward self-preservation — because by year two, those can start to drift apart.
The reason Manipulation has to come before Change is that Change without it is just announcement. You can declare a new direction; you cannot make it take root unless you have already moved the people and systems that will determine whether it survives.
Everything before this was preparation. This is the stage most leaders think they are doing on day one.
Real change — the kind that survives your departure — is not an event. It is the result of so thoroughly reshaping the organization's structures, norms, relationships, and self-understanding that the new way becomes the default. The organization no longer needs you to hold it in place. It holds itself.
That is the test. Not whether the change happened on your watch. Whether it persists after.
This is why the sequence matters so much. The leader who announces change from a position of incomplete understanding produces resistance. The leader who mandates change without appreciation breaks load-bearing things and loses trust. The leader who tries to change without navigating first does not have the standing to make it stick. The leader who skips manipulation produces change on paper — new org charts, new policies, new language — that the organization quietly routes around.
By the time you have earned the right to be in Stage 5, the change is often less dramatic than it would have appeared from the outside. It is more durable precisely because it has been built into the system, not imposed on it.
What you are building: Institutional memory and organizational identity. The change becomes part of how the organization understands itself — not something a particular leader did, but how things are done here.
The failure mode: Two. First, the leader who reaches this stage but mistakes motion for change — reorganizations, rebrands, strategy pivots that do not alter underlying behavior. Second, the leader who changes the right things but does not embed them — does not rewrite the incentives, the hiring criteria, the stories the organization tells about itself — and the change evaporates when they leave.
Observable indicator: The people who were skeptical of the change are now defending it. It has acquired its own constituency.
New leader vs. incumbent: For a new leader, reaching genuine Stage 5 probably takes three to five years minimum — less if the organization is in crisis and more receptive to disruption. For the incumbent, the question is whether they have been building toward this or cycling through Stages 3 and 4 without ever consolidating.
Most leadership development prepares people to announce change. This framework describes what it actually takes to make change real — and more importantly, to make it last.
The stages are not a checklist. They describe what you have to earn before your interventions become permanent. A leader can have a clear vision, strong values, and genuine commitment to the mission and still fail to produce lasting change — because they tried to build before the foundation was ready.
The infinite time horizon of an organization is both its greatest asset and its most demanding requirement. It means the work is never really finished, that progress accumulates across generations of leadership, and that what any one leader builds is only as valuable as what it contributes to what comes next. The five stages are a framework for taking that seriously: they are how you build change that outlasts you.