Methodology and process

The survey’s 83 qualitative and quantitative questions are based on best practices of change management, previous UNLOCK surveys, UN reform topics, global trends, knowledge gaps, and known challenges faced by members of the UNLOCK Network. We included a section tailored for leads of Central Change Management Functions to collect organizational in addition to individual-level viewpoints. The survey’s beta version was extensively reviewed by a dozen volunteers from the UNLOCK Network and tested by UNSSC staff before its release.

In July 2023 we sent the survey to members of the UNLOCK Network and asked them to forward it to other change management practitioners in their respective organizations. We also reached out to change management and transformation practitioners in UN agencies not yet represented in the UNLOCK Network; and offered alumni from UNLOCK’s course ‘Introduction to Change Management’ the opportunity to participate. Inevitably, our reach and that of the UNLOCK Network is limited, which explains the overrepresentation of North American and European responses, the uneven distribution of participants across organizations, in a few cases and the number of participating organizations. And due to the timing of the survey, which fell during the summer holiday period for many people, we prolonged access to the survey to the first week of August 2023 to accommodate organizations who requested an extension. The next survey iteration will be conducted outside the summer months. Until then, we will expand our outreach to include additional UN organizations.

Demographic information was collected for internal UNLOCK purposes only. Raw data was stored securely. Findings were shared, whether within the UNLOCK Network or here, solely in aggregated form to ensure that information wouldn’t be linked to one organization and/or respondent. Respondents could opt out of sharing their name at the start of the survey and withdraw from the survey at any time. Participants who wished for their input to open-ended questions to be used as case studies or testimonials in the future were asked to give consent electronically.

In addition, we employed a combination of manual and automated techniques to analyze the open-ended questions. We used grounded theory to arrive at initial results. For consistency we then reclassified the information according to industry-wide categories used in some of the quantitative questions. Several individuals cross-checked the ultimate results. Initial results were shared and discussed with the UNLOCK Network at the yearly Peer Exchange meeting in Copenhagen from 22 to 25 August 2023.

The observations of the UNLOCK Network members to these initial results informed the deep-dive analysis of the findings. We ran comparisons by organization size and in some relevant cases by change management certification status. In many instances these two factors significantly influence results.

We leveraged the range of available graphs to optimize the representation and interpretation of data and insights. When presenting results to optional questions, we excluded those who did not answer and only included those who answered those specific questions. Therefore, our charts display the number of responses collected for each question.