By Shane Tyrrell | Head of Advisory and Capability Enablement, Prosci ANZ
You have probably heard of ADKAR, most project managers have. It gets mentioned in change management workshops, it appears in those change methodology presentations or perhaps someone from the change team references it in a steering committee update. And then more often than not it disappears back into the background while the project gets on with the real work of delivery.
This is a missed opportunity. Not because ADKAR is a theoretical model worth knowing about but because it is one of the most practical change management diagnostic and planning tools available to a PM and most PM's never get shown how to actually use it.
This article is about closing this gap. Not ADKAR as a change management concept sitting alongside your project but ADKAR as a tool you can pick up on Monday morning and apply directly to what you are already doing.
Let's start with what ADKAR actually is
ADKAR is a goal oriented change management model developed by Prosci. It describes the five building blocks that every individual needs to move through in order to successfully adopt and sustain a change. In sequence they are:
- Awareness of the need to change
- Desire to participate and support the change
- Knowledge of how to change
- Ability to demonstrate the required skills and behaviours
- Reinforcement to sustain the change
The power of the model is not in the acronym, it is in the sequencing. Each element is a prerequisite for the next. You cannot build genuine desire in someone who does not yet understand why the change is happening. You cannot develop knowledge in someone who does not yet want to change. You cannot reinforce a behaviour that has not yet been demonstrated.
This sequencing is where most projects go wrong. Not because the project team does not care about people but because they tend to invest heavily in the Knowledge and the Ability, the training and the technical enablement while underinvesting in the Awareness and the Desire that has to come first.
Prosci research across more than 7,000 research participants consistently shows that the most common barrier to successful change is a lack of employee Awareness and Desire. The technology is often ready before the people are.
"Projects go wrong not because teams don't invest in people, but because they invest in the wrong stage of the journey at the wrong time"
The hypothetical that will feel familiar
Imagine you are 12 weeks out from a go live on a significant ERP implementation. Your project plan is tracking. Your technical workstreams are largely on schedule. The training program has been scoped and the sessions are in the calendar. On paper the people side of this program looks covered.
But when you talk to the business units most affected a different picture starts to emerge. The end users are not sure why this system is replacing the one they have been using for 8 years. Some of them have heard rumours about job changes that may or may not be connected to this program. Their managers are asking questions the project team has not yet answered publicly and the senior leader who sponsored the business case have been largely absent from program communications since the project moved into build phase.
The training is still a few weeks away but the awareness problem is already here.
This is not an unusual situation. In my experience it is a very common one and if you map it against ADKAR it tells you something precise about where the risk sits and what needs to happen next.
Using ADKAR as a diagnostic tool
The most immediate way to use ADKAR as a PM is as a diagnostic tool on your current projects. Not a full change assessment necessarily but as a structured way of asking the right questions about where your impacted stakeholders actually are. Take the scenario above and let's work through it:
Awareness: Do the people most impacted understand why this change is happening and why it is happening now? Not at an executive level. At the floor level, in the business units and with the people whose day to day work is about to change.
Desire: Are those same people willing to engage with the change? Is the sentiment broadly positive, neutral or resistant? And importantly does anyone in your governance structure know the answer to that question with any confidence?
Knowledge: Is the training program being built for people who are ready and willing to receive it or are you training people who still have unresolved concerns about why this is happening at all?
Ability: Once trained, will the people have the support structures, the coaching and the on the job reinforcement they need to actually apply what they have learned?
Reinforcement: Who is accountable for embedding this change 3 months after go live when your project team has moved on to the next project?
These are not change management questions sitting outside your project. They are delivery risk questions sitting squarely inside it. If you cannot answer them with confidence you have risk exposure regardless of how green your RAG status is.
3 things you can do on Monday
I am not suggesting that PM's need to become change practitioners. But I am suggesting that the most effective PM's I work with treat ADKAR as a working tool and not a theoretical concept. Here is what this looks like in practice.
First, run a quick ADKAR temperature check on your most impacted stakeholder groups. You do not need a formal assessment to do this. Talk to the business leads. Ask these 3 questions: Do people understand why this is changing? Do they want it to change? What are they worried about? The answers will tell you where on the ADKAR journey your stakeholders are and where your energy needs to go.
Second, use ADKAR language in your next sponsor conversation. Sponsorship is the single most important factor in change success in global Prosci research and it is also the most commonly under leveraged. When you talk to your sponsor be specific. Tell them that awareness is low in the operations team and that visible communication from them directly to that group is the intervention required right now. ADKAR gives you the language to have a precise conversation rather than a general one about people being resistant.
Third, reframe your definition of done. A project milestone is typically marked complete when a deliverable is produced. Training delivered. System live. Documentation published. But using ADKAR, knowledge delivered is not the same as ability demonstrated and ability demonstrated is not the same as change sustained. Build an ADKAR milestone checkpoint into your governance cadence alongside your technical milestones. Ask at each stage, where are our impacted groups on this journey and what does the evidence tell us?
Training delivered is not the same as ability demonstrated. And ability demonstrated is not the same as change sustained.
Why this matters more now than it did 5 years ago
The pace and complexity of change in most organisations right now is unlike anything we have experienced before. AI integration, operating model redesign, workforce restructure and digital transformation are running concurrently in ways that put enormous pressure on people's capacity to absorb change.
In this environment the assumption that a well designed system and a solid training program will be enough is not a risk management strategy, it is a wish. The organisations that are successfully navigating this complexity are the ones that are treating the people side of change with the same rigour and structure they apply to the technical side. ADKAR is one of the most accessible tools available to PM's to start doing exactly that.
You do not need to own the change management workstream to use it. You just need to know what questions to ask and when to ask them.
Start there, and Start on Monday!
