Nova: Welcome to Aibrary. I'm Nova, and here's a number to start with: seventy percent. That's the percentage of change initiatives that fail. Not for lack of budget, not for lack of technology — but because of people. And one book has been quietly reshaping how the world thinks about that problem. ADKAR: A Model for Change in Business, Government and Our Community, by Jeff Hiatt.

Nova: That's exactly the question Hiatt set out to answer. He's the founder of Prosci, a change management research firm, and he spent years studying the change patterns of more than seven hundred organizations. His conclusion was remarkably simple — and radically different from what most consultants were saying at the time.

Nova: It's not about the process. Hiatt discovered that organizational change only happens when individuals change. Not when the Gantt chart looks perfect, not when the software is installed — when actual human beings, one by one, decide to do something differently. And from that insight, he built the ADKAR model.

Nova: Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, and Reinforcement. Five sequential building blocks that every single person has to work through for a change to stick. The book was published in 2006, but the model had been brewing since the late nineties — Hiatt first described it in a white paper called The Perfect Change in 1999. Since then, it's been adopted by thousands of organizations worldwide, from Microsoft to healthcare systems managing fifty thousand employees.

Nova: ADKAR is essentially a roadmap through the human experience of change. And the sequence is non-negotiable. You cannot skip a step. Let's walk through them.

Nova: Awareness means a person genuinely understands why the change is happening. Not just that it's happening — why. What's the risk of not changing? What's the business case? Hiatt argues that if you skip this, resistance is inevitable. In fact, Prosci's benchmarking research shows that a lack of awareness is the single biggest source of resistance, for both employees and managers.

Nova: Exactly. And that brings us to D — Desire. This is the trickiest one. Awareness alone doesn't create motivation. Desire is a personal choice. Hiatt writes that leaders can influence desire by addressing what's in it for me — the WIIFM factor — but they can't mandate it. You can't force someone to want something. And that's why this stage is where so many change efforts stall.

Nova: Knowledge is about knowing how to change. Training, education, job aids, coaching. But here's the crucial thing Hiatt emphasizes: training without awareness and desire is worse than useless. You're teaching people skills they have no motivation to use. It just breeds frustration.

Nova: Ability is where knowledge becomes action. This is the gap between knowing something theoretically and actually doing it in real life. Hiatt says this phase almost always takes longer than organizations expect. It requires coaching, practice, feedback loops, and safe environments to fail. One healthcare organization implementing a new software system across fifty thousand employees set up practice stations so people could get comfortable before going live.

Nova: Reinforcement is about making the change stick. Without it, people drift back to old habits. Hiatt points to celebrations, recognition, accountability mechanisms, and performance metrics. But the reinforcement has to be meaningful to the individual and tied to actual accomplishments. If you reward behavior that hasn't truly changed, you undermine the whole effort.

Nova: What's fascinating is how Hiatt arrived at this model. He didn't dream it up in an ivory tower. He studied over seven hundred organizations over nearly a decade, looking at why some changes succeeded and others failed spectacularly.

Nova: The pattern was unmistakable. Organizations that treated change as a purely technical problem — install the software, redesign the process, send out a memo — those initiatives crashed and burned. The organizations that succeeded were the ones that treated change as a human journey. They communicated relentlessly. They built desire before demanding new skills. They supported people through the awkward phase between knowing and doing.

Nova: Exactly. And the ADKAR model is the distillation of those patterns. It was first published in a white paper in 1999 called The Perfect Change, and then after nearly a decade of additional research and refinement, the book came out in 2006. It's a slim volume — really designed to be practical and immediately useful rather than academic.

Nova: That's a great description. One reader described it as short and to the point — nothing you don't need. Hiatt includes case studies of both successes and failures. What's interesting is that some of the failures he analyzes are not just business process rollouts — he applies the ADKAR lens to big societal failures too, like the failure to learn from the 1970s oil crisis. His analysis using the ADKAR scoring system showed that on a five-point scale, Awareness scored a one, Desire a two, Knowledge a three, Ability a two, and Reinforcement a one. When every element is weak, change simply doesn't happen.

Nova: That's precisely how Prosci recommends using it today. They have an ADKAR assessment that scores each person on a one-to-five scale for each element. If someone scores high on Awareness but low on Desire, you know exactly where to focus your energy. It's not a one-size-fits-all communication blast — it's targeted intervention.

Nova: Let's talk about ADKAR in practice. The model has been used in some truly massive transformations.

Nova: Microsoft used ADKAR when shifting to cloud services. They ran a six-month awareness campaign — not just announcing the change, but systematically building understanding through regular updates, industry trend analysis, and competitor comparisons. The result was eighty-five percent employee understanding of why the change was necessary before they ever asked anyone to do anything differently.

Nova: It does, and that's exactly why most organizations skip it. They want to jump straight to training. But Microsoft's approach validates Hiatt's core argument: the foundation has to be solid before you build on it.

Nova: Adobe's transition to subscription-based services is a great case study here. They succeeded by emphasizing how the change would provide more stable income for employees and better career growth opportunities. They connected the organizational change to personal benefit. That's the WIIFM factor Hiatt talks about — what's in it for me.

Nova: One European facility management group launching a new division tied successful change implementation directly to employee bonuses. The project sponsor stayed highly visible, giving positive feedback to groups demonstrating the new behaviors. Managers were equipped to coach struggling employees individually. Reinforcement isn't a one-time celebration — it's an ongoing system.

Nova: That's from a more recent book called The ADKAR Advantage, written by Karen Ball, a Prosci senior fellow. She describes a healthcare organization that guided fifty thousand people through a complex software change. And here's the fascinating part: they never even introduced the language of ADKAR to those fifty thousand employees. They simply acted through the lens of ADKAR. They built awareness, cultivated desire, provided knowledge, supported ability, and reinforced relentlessly — without ever saying the acronym.

Nova: That's the beauty of it. It's a framework for leaders, not necessarily a communications campaign. You use it to design the experience.

Nova: Of course, no model is perfect, and ADKAR has attracted its share of criticism over the years. Let's give those critics a fair hearing.

Nova: The most common criticism is that ADKAR is too linear. Change in the real world is messy. It doesn't always proceed in a neat sequence of five steps. Some critics argue that the model is to change management what the waterfall method is to software development — yesterday's thinking in an agile world.

Nova: Another criticism is that ADKAR lumps leadership and management together. One analyst pointed out that leaders drive change while managers deliver it, that leaders innovate while managers administrate — and the model doesn't really distinguish between those two functions. It also doesn't directly address the emotional dimension of change — the grief, the loss, the letting go that William Bridges and others describe so powerfully.

Nova: Exactly. And some argue ADKAR skims over that internal, emotional journey. There's also a practical concern: scaling ADKAR to truly massive populations is hard. Diagnosing where every individual is in their ADKAR journey across fifty thousand people requires serious resources and, increasingly, digital tools.

Nova: I think the honest answer is that ADKAR is not a complete change management methodology — and Prosci themselves don't claim it is. They position it as a foundational model, used alongside their three-phase process and the PCT model. Think of ADKAR as the diagnostic lens — it tells you what's wrong and what to focus on. It doesn't give you the entire project plan. And for many practitioners, that focused simplicity is exactly its strength.

Nova: That's a recurring theme in the critiques. The steps are necessary but not sufficient on their own. You still need leadership, you still need emotional intelligence, you still need program management. ADKAR won't replace those things. But what it does — and does brilliantly — is give you a shared language and a clear sequence for thinking about the human side of change.

Nova: Yes, they're surprisingly complementary. Kotter's urgency maps to awareness, building a coalition maps to desire, communicating the vision and empowering action map to knowledge and ability, and creating quick wins and making it stick map to reinforcement. You can use both frameworks together without contradiction.

Nova: So what should we take away from Jeff Hiatt's ADKAR? Let me offer three things. First, the central insight that changes the game: organizations don't change — people do. Every transformation, no matter how grand, succeeds or fails one individual at a time.

Nova: Second, sequence matters. You cannot train people into new behaviors if they don't understand why the change is happening and don't want to participate. Skipping awareness and desire to jump straight to knowledge is the most common — and most costly — mistake in change management.

Nova: Third, use ADKAR as a diagnostic tool, not a rigid prescription. Score each element. Find the gaps. Target your energy where it will actually make a difference. And remember that reinforcement is not optional — without it, even the most successful change will eventually unravel.

Nova: That's the uncomfortable truth behind the seventy percent failure rate. The principles are simple. Executing them with discipline across an entire organization is hard. But ADKAR gives us a map. And with a good map, the journey becomes possible.

Nova: Congratulations on your growth!