ADKAR

You announced the change at a Monday meeting. You explained it well. Three months later about a third of the team are doing it, a third are doing a version of it, and a third have quietly carried on as before. You are now irritated, and the irritation is aimed at the whole group.

ADKAR says that is the wrong unit of analysis. Change does not happen to a business, it happens to one person at a time, and each of those people is stuck at a specific, identifiable point. The model was developed by Jeff Hiatt and is used through Prosci. Its value is not motivational, it is diagnostic.

The five elements

They are sequential and they are per person. Somebody who has never understood why the change is happening cannot be trained into it, and somebody who understands and wants it but cannot physically fit it into their day does not need another explanation.

• Awareness. They know why the change is happening, in terms of the business rather than the announcement. Not "we are moving to job costing" but "we do not know which jobs make money and two of last year's biggest lost us cash."
• Desire. They personally want to take part, or at least accept it. This is the one you cannot instruct. Desire is a private answer to a private question about what this costs them.
• Knowledge. They know how. Which buttons, which order, what good looks like. This is the element businesses over-invest in, because training is the easiest thing to buy.
• Ability. They can actually do it under real conditions, at half past four on a busy Thursday, not in a quiet training room with someone sitting next to them.
• Reinforcement. It sticks, because someone looks at the output, uses it, and notices when it does not appear.

Why owners get this wrong

Because the whole team is treated as one thing. "They are resisting it" is not a diagnosis, it is a mood. Five people can be stuck at five different points, and the fix for each is completely different: a conversation, an honest negotiation, a half hour of training, a change to the workload, or a manager who actually opens the report.

The second reason is that Knowledge is the only element with an obvious product attached. You can buy training. You cannot buy Desire, and no amount of training fixes an Ability problem that is really a capacity problem.

What it looks like in practice

Take an eleven-person agency introducing time recording so it can see job profitability. Illustrative, but the sequence is the ordinary one. Announced at the March team meeting. Software bought. Training day in April, everyone present. By the end of June, four of eleven are recording time reliably, three are doing it in bulk on a Friday afternoon from memory, and four have effectively stopped.

The owner's instinct is a firmer email and another training session. Run ADKAR person by person instead and the picture separates out.

Two people never actually understood why. They were on client work during the March meeting and picked it up second hand as "the boss wants timesheets." That is Awareness, and it is a ten-minute conversation showing them the two loss-making jobs from last year.

Three believe it is surveillance. They think the real purpose is to find out who is slow, and they are recording defensively, which is why the Friday-afternoon reconstruction exists. That is Desire, and no training fixes it. It needs the owner to say plainly what the data will and will not be used for, and then to behave consistently for about two months, because they will be watching.

One was on holiday for the training day and has been guessing ever since. That is Knowledge, and it is the cheapest fix on the list. Half an hour.

Two can do it but it is costing them roughly fifteen minutes a day they do not have, because the system needs a job code they have to look up each time. That is Ability. The fix is not encouragement, it is a shorter code list and a default job per person.

And the rest drifted because in fourteen weeks nobody ever mentioned the output. No report, no review, no decision visibly taken as a result. That is Reinforcement, and it is the owner's own failure rather than the team's.

Five barriers, five different fixes, one of which costs half an hour and one of which requires the owner to change their own behaviour. A firmer email addresses none of them.

The mistake most owners make

Treating Reinforcement as optional because the change appears to have landed. Adoption at week six is not adoption. The honest test is week twelve, after the first busy fortnight, and the thing that carries it through is somebody senior visibly using the output to make a decision.

The other mistake is going straight to Desire and calling it attitude. If two people are not doing it, the useful question is not "why are they being difficult" but "which of the five is missing for them." Sometimes the answer genuinely is Desire, and then you have a real conversation with real consequences. Far more often it is Awareness or Ability, and you were about to have the wrong conversation entirely.

How to apply it this week

1. Pick the change that is currently half-landed. Everyone has one. The system, the process, the meeting discipline that nearly took.
2. Write the names down the side of a page and A D K A R across the top. Tick or cross each box for each person, from evidence rather than impression.
3. Find the first cross on each row. That, and only that, is the barrier for that person. Ignore everything to the right of it.
4. Deal with the Awareness gaps first, individually. Ten minutes each, with the actual business reason and a number attached. Do not do it in a group.
5. Ask the Desire cases the direct question. "What is the downside of this for you?" Then listen without defending. You will usually get an answer worth having, and occasionally one you should act on.
6. Fix one Ability blocker properly. Time it. If the new way takes fifteen minutes a day more than the old way, you have a design problem, not a compliance problem.
7. Put Reinforcement in your own diary. A fortnightly slot where you open the output and make one visible decision from it. Change dies where nobody looks.

The questions to sit with

• Out of 10, how confident are you that every person affected by your last change could explain, in their own words, why it was happening?
• Think of the last thing that failed to stick. Which of the five was actually missing, and how long did you spend fixing a different one?
• What are you currently calling resistance that is really a capacity problem you created?
• When did you last make a visible decision using the output of a change you introduced? If the answer is never, why would anyone keep feeding it?

This is the diagnostic underneath Leading Change. Announcing a change takes an hour. Landing one takes a grid, five names down the side, and the willingness to find out that the missing element is usually yours.