Your change framework was probably built on American college students

There's a quiet moment in most change programmes... the one where a senior practitioner pulls out a familiar framework, plots the stakeholders on a 2x2, and the room nods along. The model has the right shape. The categories feel intuitive. Everyone goes home feeling productive.

Too bad the framework probably wasn't built for those people.

In 2010, a paper from Joe Henrich, Steven Heine and Ara Norenzayan landed in Behavioral and Brain Sciences with a finding most behavioural science citations still tend to skate past. Roughly 96% of the subjects in leading psychology studies came from "WEIRD" backgrounds (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic). WEIRD populations make up about 12% of the world. An earlier analysis by Jeffrey Jensen Arnett found that 67% of participants in American studies were college students whose brains are still developing in ways that affect risk evaluation and decision-making.

That's the foundation a lot of your stakeholder engagement models, "resistance" frameworks and adoption curves were built on. Then generalised... to a manufacturing workforce in regional Australia. To a council serving a culturally diverse community. To a university with significant first-generation student populations.

The argument here runs deeper than diversity. Diversity training tends to live in the communications plan, while validity sits one level lower, in whether the underlying diagnosis is structurally sound for the people in front of you.

The professional reflex (and one I've felt myself, more than once) is to attribute mediocre programme results to resistance, poor sponsorship, or inadequate resourcing. Sometimes those explanations hold. More often, frameworks tend to get over-relied on as universal instruments, when the cleaner read is that they were designed for one corner of human experience and quietly mis-read the rest.

The article on markwinter.com.au sets out a three-question Framework Stress Test that takes about ten minutes and is worth running before you commit to any significant methodology in a complex programme. It walks through the research base behind the model, the contextual mismatches you might be carrying in, and what a practitioner from a non-WEIRD setting would adjust.

If you're choosing the methodology for your next programme and want a sounding board that doesn't arrive with a pre-built deck, you can work through the diagnostic with Pragma at app.pragmaticchange.com.au. The same questions sit behind a lot of what the team uses in practice (the FAQ covers the working approach in more detail).

For the full critique, with citations and the three diagnostic questions in their original form: Read the full article on markwinter.com.au.