By Jason Hreha

Glossary

ADKAR Model

Reviewed by Jason Hreha

Published 5 min read

Consider a hypothetical finance department that switches to new expense software. Every manager attends the training. Three months later, a third of them still email spreadsheets, so the project lead schedules a refresher course. The refresher assumes the managers do not know how to use the system. That may be the wrong diagnosis.

The ADKAR model was built for this kind of question: when people are not adopting a change, what exactly is missing?

What is the ADKAR model?

The ADKAR model is a model of individual change developed by Jeff Hiatt, Prosci’s founder. The acronym names five elements that, in Prosci’s definition, a person needs to achieve for a change to succeed and last: Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability and Reinforcement.

  • Awareness: understanding why the change is needed.
  • Desire: choosing to participate in and support the change.
  • Knowledge: knowing how to change and what success requires.
  • Ability: putting the new skills and behaviors into practice.
  • Reinforcement: sustaining the new way of working and preventing a return to the old one.

According to Prosci, Hiatt developed the model in 1996, published it in a 1999 white paper and wrote the first book on it in 2006. Prosci describes ADKAR as a model for individual change, not a complete change management methodology. Its premise is that organizational change is the accumulation of individual changes: a new system produces results only when the people expected to use it actually do.

Sequence and the barrier point

Prosci treats the five elements as a sequence: earlier elements must be sufficiently achieved before later ones can be realized. Training, for example, is described as ineffective for someone who lacks Awareness or Desire.

The practical tool that follows is the barrier point: the earliest element in the sequence where a person or group falls short. Prosci’s advice is to find the earliest barrier point and focus support where people need it most. The barrier point tells a team which element to work on before it chooses an activity.

Example: finding the barrier in the expense rollout

Return to the finance department. Suppose the project lead talks with ten of the managers who still send spreadsheets and asks about each of the five elements.

All ten can explain why the company changed systems, so Awareness is present. Eight can walk through a test claim in the new software, so Knowledge is mostly present too. But seven say they do not intend to switch. The new system requires a photographed receipt for every line, and these managers travel often and submit about forty receipts a month. Their monthly spreadsheet took about ten minutes; the new process takes about an hour.

Under ADKAR, the earliest barrier for those seven managers is Desire. The refresher course targets Knowledge, which comes later in the sequence and is already largely in place, so the model predicts it will change little. A useful response would address the reason for low Desire. The team could ask finance whether small receipts can be batched, or whether the rule is needed at all.

Low Desire here is not a defect in the managers. It is a reasonable reaction to a process that costs them an extra fifty minutes a month. Treating it as resistance to be managed would discard the information it carries.

Where the model leads a team astray

Change one condition. Suppose the managers want to switch and know how, but the expense app does not run on the sales team’s laptops.

Prosci describes ADKAR as a way to assess where individuals are in a change, so the team records each manager as low on Ability. Following the barrier-point rule, it books one-to-one coaching and practice time. Prosci’s guidance does ask whether barriers are inhibiting a person’s Ability, but the gap is still recorded against each person. Unless someone probes the setting, the plan aims at the people. Coaching cannot make the app run on those laptops.

The COM-B model separates these causes from the start. It distinguishes a person’s capability from the physical and social opportunity the environment provides, so the same facts point straight to the equipment. The general rule: ADKAR locates which element is missing, not whether the cause sits in the person or in the setting.

“Reinforcement” also differs from its technical meaning in psychology. Prosci uses it for actions, recognition, mechanisms and rewards intended to make a change more likely to continue. In behavioral science, a consequence counts as positive reinforcement only if it actually makes the behavior more likely. Whether a rollout bonus reinforces anything is an empirical question.

What the evidence shows

Prosci calls ADKAR prescriptive: it states the outcomes that must be present for change to succeed. The figures most often cited for its value come from Prosci’s own practitioner surveys. In what Prosci calls its most recent Best Practices study, more than 2,600 change practitioners rated the overall effectiveness of their change management program and reported to what degree their project met its objectives. Of those who rated their program excellent, 88% met or exceeded objectives, compared with 13% of those who rated it poor. Prosci summarizes this as projects being about seven times more likely to meet objectives with excellent change management.

Those figures concern change management in general; the article does not mention ADKAR. The same people rated both their program and their project’s result. And the comparison is correlational: well-funded projects with strong sponsors may have better change management and better results for reasons unrelated to the change management itself.

Independent studies are few. A 2021 systematic review by Reema Harrison and colleagues examined 38 studies of change management models in healthcare published between 2009 and 2020. Only one used ADKAR, alongside a second model, in a move to team nursing across 25 hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic. Most studies involved a single institution, and many were case examples. Across all models, the authors wrote, “it was not possible to detect whether the use of a model, method or process contributed to the success.”

The review found no study comparing an ADKAR-guided change with a similar change managed without it, and this entry found none elsewhere. ADKAR’s sequence and barrier-point logic are plausible and widely taught, but they remain untested in that sense.

Using ADKAR

ADKAR works at the level of the individual. Kotter’s 8-step change model addresses the leadership team and the organization, Lewin’s change model the forces that hold behavior in place, and the change curve people’s emotional reactions. The guide to change management models compares them.

In the expense example, the refresher course would have suited a Knowledge gap, but the managers had a different one. ADKAR’s value is that it makes a team ask which element is missing before choosing an activity. The next step is to ask why that element is missing, and whether the answer lies in the person or the setting.

References