The 5 A's of Change

Most changes in a small business do not fail because the owner lacked commitment. They fail because a stage got skipped, and the change was built on a gap nobody looked at.

The five A's are a sequence: awareness, acceptance, action, accountability, adoption. Different versions label them slightly differently. The order is the part that matters, because each stage only holds if the one before it is genuinely done.

What the model is

Five stages, in order, each with a specific job. Skip one and the change collapses back to the stage you skipped, usually about six weeks later when everyone has stopped watching.

Awareness is seeing the thing as it actually is, with evidence attached. Not a feeling that quoting is a bit slow. A number.

Acceptance is owning it. This is the stage almost everyone skips, because it is the uncomfortable one. Awareness says "our quoting is slow". Acceptance says "our quoting is slow because everything goes through me and I have not been willing to let go of it".

Action is the first real change, started immediately and small enough to survive a bad week.

Accountability is a named person, a date and a review that actually happens. Without it the action is an intention with a good story attached.

Adoption is the change becoming how things are done. The test is simple and unforgiving: does it still happen when you are on holiday and nobody is asking about it?

Why it matters to an owner

Because you are usually two stages ahead of everyone else and do not notice. You have had months of awareness and acceptance in your own head. You then start the conversation at stage three, with an action, and are baffled when the team treat it as your latest idea rather than an obvious necessity. They have not been given the evidence, so they have no awareness, and they certainly have not accepted anything.

It matters more for the changes you are making in yourself. An owner can sit at stage one for years. "I know I'm the bottleneck" is a sentence some owners have been saying for a decade. That is awareness performing as acceptance. Nothing follows it, because acceptance would require doing something that costs, and awareness costs nothing.

The other reason it matters commercially: stages three and four are cheap, and stage five is where the return lives. A change that reaches action and stops has consumed the disruption without buying the benefit. You have paid for the dip and then walked away before the recovery.

A worked example

Illustrative figures, to show the sequence. A nine-person marketing agency. The owner writes every proposal.

Awareness. He counts them for one quarter. 41 proposals, averaging 70 minutes each, plus the waiting time before he starts. That is roughly 48 hours of his quarter, and the average gap between enquiry and proposal going out is 6 days. Two of the deals lost that quarter had already bought from someone quicker.

Acceptance. The first explanation is that the account managers are not experienced enough to price work. Under questioning that thins out. They price the recurring work already. The truth is that he rewrites their wording, so they stopped bothering to draft. He is not the safeguard, he is the reason.

Action. One change, not five. Anything under £5,000 is drafted and sent by the account manager using a standard structure, with no sign-off from him. Anything above it, they draft and he reviews once, for thirty minutes, on the same day.

Accountability. A shared log with three columns: enquiry date, proposal sent date, value. Reviewed for ten minutes every Monday. The number they are managing is days to proposal, and the target is two.

Adoption. Twelve weeks later the log is being filled in without him asking, days to proposal is running at 2, and the account managers have improved the standard structure twice without consulting him. He goes away for a fortnight and the number does not move. That is adoption. Before that fortnight, it was just a habit under supervision.

Where each stage fails

The sequence is only useful if you can spot which stage you are stuck at. Each one fails in a characteristic way.

• Awareness fails on opinion. "Our margins are a bit tight" is a feeling. "Our gross margin has fallen from 41% to 34% over two years" is awareness. Without a number there is nothing to accept.
• Acceptance fails on blame. If the explanation lives outside the business, in the market, the weather, the competition or a bad hire, the stage is not done. External factors are real. They are just not something you can act on.
• Action fails on size. The change is too big to start on a busy Tuesday, so it waits for a quiet week that never arrives. Anything that needs a clear diary to begin will not begin.
• Accountability fails on politeness. The review gets moved because everyone is busy, then moved again, then quietly stops. Nobody decides to abandon it. It simply gets outranked by things with other people waiting on them.
• Adoption fails on the owner. The change holds only while you are asking about it. That is not adoption, it is supervision, and supervision does not scale past the number of things you can hold in your head.

How to apply it this week

1. Write down the change you are attempting in one sentence. If you cannot, that is your finding. Vague changes fail at stage three because there is nothing specific to start.
2. Mark which stage it has actually reached. Be strict. If there is no number, you are not past awareness. If there is no date and a name, you are not past action.
3. Get the evidence for stage one. Count something for a week. Quotes, callbacks, rework, interruptions. A number ends an argument that an opinion cannot.
4. Say the acceptance sentence out loud. Finish this: "This is happening because I..." If the sentence ends with someone else's name, you are still at stage one.
5. Shrink the action until it is embarrassingly small. One threshold, one template, one meeting. Big actions announce commitment. Small actions produce adoption.
6. Diarise the review before you announce the change. Same day each week, ten minutes, and it happens even when there is nothing to report. The review is the accountability, not the intention.

The mistake most owners make

Jumping from awareness straight to action. It feels decisive and it is the most common way changes die. Everyone can see the new process, nobody has accepted why the old one had to go, so at the first inconvenience it is quietly abandoned and the people who never accepted it are proved right.

The other mistake is calling stage three a success. The new system is in, the meeting is in the diary, the process is written up. None of that is adoption. The only honest test is absence: take a fortnight off and see what survives.

The questions to sit with

• Out of 10, how honestly have you accepted your part in the problem you are trying to change, rather than described it?
• Which stage did your last three attempted changes die at? The pattern will be the same one.
• What would still be running exactly as designed if you disappeared for a month?
• What is the change you have been aware of for over a year and have never accepted?

This is the backbone of the Leading Change work. Coaching mostly earns its keep at stages two and four, because acceptance is hard to reach on your own and accountability is close to impossible to give yourself.