The ADKAR Model for Change Management

The ADKAR model is a change management framework that works on one person at a time. Its core claim is simple: an organisation only changes when the individuals inside it change, and each of those individuals has to pass through the same five states in the same order. Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, Reinforcement. Skip one and the change stalls, no matter how good the project plan looks.

This guide covers what each element means, how to measure where your people actually are, what an ADKAR analysis looks like on a real corporate rollout, how the model compares to Kotter and Lewin, and the mistakes that show up in almost every failed change programme.

What is the ADKAR model?

The ADKAR model is an individual change framework developed by Jeff Hiatt at Prosci in 1996, first published in the white paper "The Perfect Change" in 1999 and expanded into the book "ADKAR: A Model for Change in Business, Government and our Community" in 2006. It describes the five sequential outcomes a person must achieve for a change to stick:

• Awareness of why the change is needed. The person understands the business reason and the risk of doing nothing.
• Desire to support and participate. The person has decided, personally, to go along with it.
• Knowledge of how to change. The person knows the new process, tool or behaviour.
• Ability to apply the knowledge in daily work. The person can actually do it, not just describe it.
• Reinforcement to make it stick. Nothing pulls the person back to the old way.

The order matters and is not negotiable. Training somebody who has no desire to change produces a certificate, not a behaviour change. That is the single most useful thing ADKAR gives a change manager: a diagnosis of where the change is actually stuck, instead of a general sense that people are resisting.

The five ADKAR elements in practice

Awareness: why is this happening?

Awareness is not an announcement, it is understanding. People need the business reason, the consequence of standing still and a picture of what the future looks like. Awareness typically comes from the top of the organisation and from direct supervisors, and it fails when leadership communicates the decision but not the reasoning behind it.

What builds it: a clear why from the executive sponsor, the same message repeated through several channels, an honest description of what happens if nothing changes, and space to ask uncomfortable questions. What signals it is missing: rumours, repeated questions about whether the project is real, and people asking who decided this.

Desire: am I willing to do it?

Desire is the only element you cannot mandate. Awareness can be delivered, knowledge can be taught, ability can be coached, but the decision to participate belongs to the individual. It is driven by what the change means for that person: their role, their status, their workload, their sense of competence.

What builds it: involving people early enough that they influence something real, direct supervisors who visibly back the change, addressing the personal cost honestly instead of pretending there is none, and recognition for those who move first. What signals it is missing: polite agreement in meetings followed by no change in behaviour.

Knowledge: do I know how?

Knowledge covers both the new skills and the knowledge of how to change: new processes, new tools, new roles, new decision rights. It is the element organisations are best at, because training is the easiest thing to buy, which is why so many change programmes over-invest here and under-invest in awareness and desire.

What builds it: role-specific training rather than one generic session, job aids people can reach in the moment, and training delivered close to go-live rather than months before. What signals it is missing: people using the new tool in the old way.

Ability: can I actually do it?

Knowledge and ability are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where most rollouts lose their timeline. Somebody can pass the test on Friday and still be unable to run the process under pressure on Monday. Ability needs practice time, access to somebody who has done it, and a tolerance for the temporary dip in performance that always follows a change.

What builds it: hands-on practice in the real environment, coaching by supervisors, super-users in each team, and explicitly planning for a productivity dip instead of being surprised by it. What signals it is missing: workarounds, shadow spreadsheets, and quiet reversion to the old system.

Reinforcement: what keeps it in place?

Reinforcement is the element that gets cut when the project budget runs out, which is why so many changes are reversed six months after go-live. It covers everything that makes the new way the path of least resistance: measurement, recognition, removing the old system, and adjusting incentives that still reward the old behaviour.

What builds it: switching off the legacy option, measuring adoption rather than attendance, celebrating specific teams by name, and correcting incentive structures. What signals it is missing: adoption metrics that peak at go-live and decline every month afterwards.

How to run an ADKAR assessment

The practical strength of ADKAR is that it can be measured. In the Prosci method, each of the five elements is scored on a scale from 1 to 5 for an individual or a group. The first element scoring 3 or below is the barrier point, and that is where all effort goes until the score moves. Working on anything further down the chain is wasted effort.

A worked example. A team scores Awareness 4, Desire 2, Knowledge 4, Ability 3, Reinforcement 2. The barrier point is Desire, at 2. More training will not help this team, because Knowledge is already at 4. The correct action is sponsor visibility, supervisor conversations and addressing what the change costs these people personally. Once Desire clears 3, the barrier moves to Ability, and only then does coaching become the right investment.

Run the assessment per group rather than per organisation. Sales, operations and IT rarely share a barrier point, and an average across all of them hides exactly the information you need. In a matrix setup this matters even more, because the same person may receive contradictory signals from a functional and a project line, which is one of the practical costs of the matrix organizational model during change programmes.

ADKAR case study: rolling out a startup solution inside a corporate

The clearest way to see the model work is on a concrete case. Take a corporate that adopts an external startup solution, for example an AI-based tool that replaces a manual quality check in operations. The technology works, the contract is signed, and adoption still fails, because the people running the process were never taken through ADKAR.

• Awareness: operations staff hear about the tool through the pilot announcement, not through their own management, and assume it is a headcount measure. Score 2.
• Desire: the manual check is the part of the job that made them experts. Automating it feels like a demotion. Score 1.
• Knowledge: the startup delivers a solid two-hour onboarding. Score 4.
• Ability: nobody has run the tool during a real peak load. Score 2.
• Reinforcement: the old checklist is still in the quality manual. Score 1.

The barrier point is Desire. The fix is not more onboarding. It is the operations lead explaining what the change means for the team, redefining the role around exception handling rather than routine checking, and removing the old checklist so the new way is the only way. That reframing is what turns a technically successful pilot project into a permanent change instead of an expensive proof of concept that quietly gets switched off.

To know which groups to assess in the first place, map the change onto the activities it touches. Porter's value chain model is a practical lens here: a change to inbound logistics affects a different population, with different barrier points, than a change to marketing and sales. Mapping the value chain of your own business before the rollout tells you where the change is genuinely disruptive and where it is cosmetic.

ADKAR compared to Kotter and Lewin

ADKAR is often presented as an alternative to the other classic models. It is more useful to see it as the individual layer that the others do not cover.

• ADKAR (Hiatt, 1996): five outcomes per person, diagnostic, measurable, tells you exactly where an individual or a team is blocked. Weak on the organisational and portfolio level.
• Kotter's 8 steps (Leading Change, 1996): a sequence for the organisation, from creating urgency to anchoring the change in the culture. Strong on leadership choreography, but it does not tell you why one specific department has not moved.
• Lewin (unfreeze, change, refreeze, 1947): the underlying mental model that everything else builds on. Useful for framing, too coarse for running a programme.

In practice the combination works well: Kotter or a phased organisational process for the programme, ADKAR for the people inside it, with the assessment as the link between the two.

Where ADKAR fits and where it does not

ADKAR works best where a defined group has to adopt a defined new way of working: an ERP or CRM rollout, a new operating procedure in production, a compliance requirement, a reorganisation, a new tool in customer service. It is designed for changes with a clear before and after.

It fits less well where the destination is not yet known. In exploratory innovation work, where the point is that nobody knows what the future process is, an ADKAR plan built at kick-off will describe a target that no longer exists three months later. There, run the exploration first and apply ADKAR once the solution is defined. Startups face a different version of the same problem: they change constantly but rarely have the layers that create resistance in the first place, so the model is lighter to apply but also less necessary.

Common mistakes with the ADKAR model

• Starting with training. Training is the visible, budgetable part, so it happens first. If Awareness and Desire are low, it changes nothing.
• Assessing the organisation instead of the groups. An average hides the one department that is blocked, which is the one that will derail the rollout.
• Treating the assessment as a one-off. Barrier points move. An assessment from kick-off is worthless at go-live.
• Leaving the old way available. As long as the legacy path exists, Reinforcement cannot work.
• Delegating Awareness to the project team. People take the business reason from the executive sponsor and their own supervisor, not from a change manager they have never met.
• Declaring success at go-live. Go-live measures Knowledge and Ability at best. Reinforcement is measured months later.

ADKAR model: frequently asked questions

What does ADKAR stand for?

Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability and Reinforcement. The five outcomes an individual has to achieve, in that order, for a change to succeed and hold.

Who developed the ADKAR model?

Jeff Hiatt, founder of Prosci, developed it in 1996 based on research into how change actually succeeded or failed across hundreds of organisations. It was first published in a 1999 white paper and set out in full in his 2006 book.

What is a barrier point in ADKAR?

The barrier point is the first of the five elements to score 3 or below on the 1 to 5 assessment scale. It is where the change is stuck, and it is the only element worth working on until the score improves.

Is ADKAR better than Kotter's 8-step model?

They answer different questions. ADKAR diagnoses where an individual or a group is blocked. Kotter choreographs what leadership does across the organisation. Most mature change programmes run both rather than choosing.

Can ADKAR be used for small teams?

Yes, and it is often easier there. With a team of ten you can score each person individually in a single afternoon and act on the result the same week, which is not realistic across a division of two thousand.

Conclusion

The ADKAR model earns its place because it turns resistance into something you can locate. Instead of concluding that people are resistant, you find out that Desire scores 2 in operations and Reinforcement scores 1 everywhere, and you know exactly what to do next. That diagnostic quality, not the acronym, is the reason it has survived thirty years of change management fashion.

Change management gets hardest when the new way comes from outside the organisation. That is the everyday work of Wayra, the innovation hub of o2 Telefónica: bringing startup solutions into a corporate and getting them adopted by the people who have to use them every day.