A diffusionless transformation is a phase change by some form of cooperative, homogenous movement of many atoms that results in a change in the crystal structure. These movements are small, usually less than the interatomic distances, and the neighbors of an atom remain close. The systematic movement of large numbers of atoms led to some to refer to these as military transformations in contrast to civilian diffusion-based phase changes, initially by Frederick Charles Frank and John Wyrill Christian.

The most commonly encountered transformation of this type is the martensitic transformation which, while probably the most studied, is only one subset of non-diffusional transformations. The martensitic transformation in steel represents the most economically significant example of this category of phase transformations, but an increasing number of alternatives, such as shape memory alloys, are becoming more important as well.