Organizations don’t change — people do, one at a time.
ADKAR gives leaders a five-step model for guiding individuals through change: Awareness of the need to change, Desire to participate and support it, Knowledge of how to change, Ability to implement new skills and behaviours, and Reinforcement to sustain the change.
Most transformation initiatives fail because they focus on deploying a new process or platform while skipping the human side entirely. They announce, they train, they go live — and then they wonder why nobody changed their behaviour.
ADKAR reverses that logic. Before you can get people to change how they work, they need to know why the change is necessary and genuinely want to be part of it. Skipping Awareness or Desire means all the Knowledge and Ability in the world lands on resistant soil.
Key concepts
- A — Awareness: Do people understand the business reason for the change?
- D — Desire: Do they want to support and participate in it?
- K — Knowledge: Do they know how to change?
- A — Ability: Can they actually perform the new behaviours?
- R — Reinforcement: What keeps them from slipping back?
Progress through ADKAR is sequential — you cannot shortcut earlier stages by investing more in later ones.
What I got out of this book
In every platform migration, cloud adoption, or operating model redesign I have been part of, the failure modes trace back to ADKAR gaps. Every time I see that the technical people that I work with, quickly fall back in sharing Knowledge. And they constantly struggle to conince people to adopt that new things. In my opinion, Desire is often the missing piece. Teams understood what was changing and how to operate the new system — they just did not see why their old way was insufficient, so they never committed.
The model also makes problems diagnosable. If adoption is stalling, you can usually identify which stage is the constraint and address that specifically, rather than throwing more training at a desire problem or more communication at an ability problem.