The 5 Steps to Transformative Change: Unlocking Potential Through the DISAM Framework
Strap yourself in, its not short but it is valuable, guaranteed!
Transformative change is a journey—one that requires intentionality, awareness, and structure. Whether you’re an individual seeking personal growth, a manager striving to support your team, or an organisation aiming to align performance with strategic goals, the process of change can feel daunting.
That’s where C-Coach’s DISAM framework comes in. Grounded in the psychology of change and enriched by systems thinking, DISAM provides a robust structure to drive sustainable, meaningful transformations.
Here, we explore the five critical steps of the DISAM framework—Define, Identify, Set, Action, Measure—and explain how each phase is essential for individuals, managers, and organisations.
- Define: Setting Standards for Excellence and Expectation
The first step to any meaningful change is clarity. Define focuses on creating clear, tangible, and measurable standards of excellence and expectations.
This step ensures that individuals and organisations know exactly what success looks like. Without this foundation, efforts to change risk becoming fragmented, uncoordinated, or misaligned with goals.
- Why It’s Critical:
Clarity of purpose provides a sense of direction. For individuals, this means understanding what “better” looks like in their lives. For organisations, it ensures all stakeholders are aligned toward shared objectives, eliminating ambiguity and inconsistency.
- How It Helps Managers and Organisations:
By clearly defining expectations, managers can set the tone for their teams, establish shared goals, and create a common language for progress. This enables targeted investment in training, tools, and resources.
- Identify: Building Awareness Through Mindfulness and Reflection
The Identify phase is about raising awareness. This involves recognising the existence of problems, thought patterns, or behaviours through mindfulness and self-reflection.
For change to occur, individuals must first acknowledge what is holding them back, while organisations must diagnose systemic challenges.
- Why It’s Critical:
Awareness is the cornerstone of change. Without identifying current challenges, individuals and organisations may invest energy in the wrong areas. Recognising and accepting what needs to change—without judgment—lays the groundwork for transformation.
- How It Helps Managers and Organisations:
Encouraging self-awareness among team members enables managers to tailor their support. For organisations, this step helps uncover inefficiencies, biases, or cultural barriers that impede growth.
- Set: Acknowledging Reality and Focusing on Priorities
In the Set phase, individuals and organisations assess their current reality against the defined needs with compassion and decide where to focus. A guided journey highlights the top priorities that have the greatest impact.
This is the moment of honesty: What’s achievable? What matters most? This phase helps create alignment and acceptance between the present state and desired outcomes.
- Why It’s Critical:
Acknowledging reality without judgment prevents denial and defensiveness. It creates space for deliberate, compassionate goal-setting, ensuring that energy is directed toward areas that are accepted and agreed that yield the highest impact.
- How It Helps Managers and Organisations:
For managers, this step equips them to help their teams prioritise effectively, focusing support on high-impact changes. For organisations, it ensures resources are allocated to initiatives that align with strategic priorities, maximising ROI on change efforts.
- Action: Taking Deliberate Steps Toward Change
Change doesn’t happen without action. The Action phase involves taking deliberate, structured steps toward goals. This includes creating actionable plans, setting timelines, selecting suitable resources and connections and fostering accountability.
- Why It’s Critical:
Planning without action leads to stagnation. Intentional steps ensure progress is made, and momentum builds. By taking small, consistent actions, individuals and organisations can drive sustained growth.
- How It Helps Managers and Organisations:
Managers can use this phase to provide structured support for their teams, breaking large goals into manageable tasks. Organisations benefit from action plans that align initiatives across departments, ensuring every effort contributes to broader goals.
- Measure: Evaluating and Adjusting for Continuous Improvement
The final phase, Measure, focuses on evaluating the effectiveness of actions, gathering feedback, and making necessary adjustments. Reflection and adaptation ensure the change process remains dynamic and responsive to evolving needs.
- Why It’s Critical:
Without measurement, it’s impossible to determine whether progress is being made or if adjustments are needed. Feedback loops ensure individuals stay motivated, and new competence and habits become engrained while organisations remain agile in their approach.
- How It Helps Managers and Organisations:
For managers, this step provides the data needed to refine team strategies and recognise successes. For organisations, measuring results ensures investments in training, tools, and change initiatives deliver measurable returns.
The Power of Systems Thinking in DISAM
While each step of the DISAM framework is transformative on its own, the true power lies in how they work together as part of a systemic approach. Systems thinking integrates these individual steps into a cohesive framework that aligns personal growth with organisational goals. Here’s how:
- Individuals: Systems thinking ensures that personal change doesn’t happen in isolation. Instead, it connects individual progress to team and organisational success.
- Managers: Managers are equipped with a structured approach to identify where individuals and their teams need support, focus efforts, and measure success, reducing wasted resources and time.
- Organisations: By applying DISAM as part of an organisational strategy, businesses create scalable, repeatable processes for driving growth and well-being. This ensures targeted investments deliver measurable outcomes. Growth and development become embedded in a high performing, supportive and caring organisation.
How C-Coach Supports Transformative Change
Through its technology-enabled solutions and expertise, C-Coach operationalises the DISAM framework, offering practical tools, personalised insights, and organisational support. By defining clear standards, fostering self-awareness, prioritising efforts, driving deliberate action, and measuring outcomes, C-Coach enables individuals, managers, and organisations to achieve transformative change.
Explore how DISAM can drive your transformation at C-Coach’s How It Works page.
By embedding the DISAM framework into personal growth journeys and organisational strategies, C-Coach provides the structure, support, and systems needed to make change meaningful, manageable, and measurable.
Transformation isn’t just possible—it’s inevitable with the right framework.
