International affairs practitioners work in an environment where international and domestic change is constant, but most of the literature on change management still focuses on an organization’s leadership and formal change managers rather than the individual researchers or program staff. This gap must be filled because the support staff and implementors are the people closest to change but without a decision-making role. The result is that practitioners are expected to adapt quickly, but they are rarely given a simple framework for how to do so.
One reason the literature is limited is that international affairs sits at the intersection of politics, institutions, and external events. Change in this field is not just organizational; it’s also driven by elections, crises, wars, economic shocks, leadership turnover, alliance shifts, and domestic political realignment. That makes it harder to conduct a clean academic study on the job.
If the face of this problem’s complexity, International Affairs Thinker aims to provide personal experiences from the field so practitioners can prepare for the challenges of the international affairs knowledge industry (IAKI). While academics work on study design, you can join the Practitioner’s Network to get support and community now.
The kinds of change practitioners face
International affairs practitioners face both internal and external change. Internally, they may deal with new leadership, new policy guidance, office reorganizations, staff turnover, shifting budget priorities, new reporting requirements, new technology, or changes in workflow and approval chains. Externally, they must adjust to elections, sanctions, coups, trade disputes, shifting public opinion, partner-country politics, multilateral agendas, and changes in the domestic political climate that reshape what their government can do internationally.
What makes this especially demanding is that these changes often arrive at the same time. A practitioner may be asked to support a new foreign policy priority while also learning a new system, adjusting to a new supervisor, and responding to a fast-moving crisis abroad. In that environment, adaptability becomes a professional skill, but shouldn’t come at the cost of compromising a professional’s passion for the job and core values.
Corporate change managers learn from diplomacy
While there’s limited available literature on the connection between change management and international affairs practitioners, one change management coach has integrated lessons from the National Museum of American Diplomacy. He described two key diplomatic skills that directly parallel with effective change management:
- Seek first to understand.
- Uncover interests, not argue positions.
The author explains that these two skills are highly relevant to change management because resistance often comes from hidden concerns, not open disagreement. When people resist or hesitate, they often aren’t resisting change itself, but a sense of loss, risk, or confusion attached to their understanding of the change.
How international affairs practitioners can apply this lesson to ourselves
As we often say at International Affairs Thinker, practitioners are taught to analyze others, not ourselves. Learning to self-reflect and ask ourselves how we’re reacting to news of a change, and why we’re reacting this way is the first step. Once we’re clear on our own interests, conversations become less positional and more problem-solving oriented. Broadly speaking, diplomats who learn to identify interests can adapt more intelligently because they can propose solutions that preserve what matters most while still moving the work forward. The most effective international affairs practitioners know how to apply this to themselves as well.
According to a 2023 Harvard Business Review article titled “Change Management Requires a Change Mindset” the author emphasized this point that change management isn’t possible with a single solution. Practitioners must seek to understand wider interests and ask themselves questions about not just the situation but also their feelings to find the variety of possible options. That is especially relevant in international affairs because practitioners rarely get perfect information. Practitioners have to make decisions under ambiguity, revise assumptions quickly, and remain useful even when the policy environment changes before a project is complete. If we don’t keep track of how we’re feeling, our ability to navigate change narrows.
In international affairs, a growth mindset is essential because IAKI rewards fast learners. Policies shift, alliances evolve, and domestic constraints change. A practitioner with a growth mindset doesn’t need every answer in advance. Instead, they build the habit of learning quickly, revising assumptions, and improving their approach over time, while staying true to their analytic integrity and passion for the job.
Support to some international affairs practitioners
The United Nations (UN) System Staff College’s report on change management in the UN system is useful because it explicitly recognizes that practitioners who are not formal change managers still need to understand and effectively participate in internal and external changes for a leader’s global agenda to be achieved. The report titled “The State Of Change Management in the United Nations System“ emphasized that even within the United Nations, change is just as difficult as in other organizations resulting from a lack of leadership support, internal change resistance, limited alignment between leaders different organizational levels, as well a general lack of awareness.
Given that the UN facilitates major international changes for ambitious goals, the organization’s transparency on its own challenges with change management are commendable. Leading with transparency and self-reflection will hopefully empower individual practitioners to adopt a more self-reflective approach.
Shutdown
For international affairs practitioners, change management should not be understood only as a senior-leader discipline. It is also a personal practice rooted in self-reflection and willingness to learn.
Keeping the diplomatic principles of seeking first to understand who is leading the change and what the change entails, while also uncovering your and their interests, can help reveal more pathways to remaining effective amid change.
For more tailored mindset training for international affairs practitioners, visit the International Affairs Thinker blog category on mindset. Join the Practitioner’s Network to connect with current professionals seeking to fill the gap in their training to better support the mission while staying passionate about the work.
