Created by Jeffery Hiatt (founder of Prosci), the ADKAR change management model is a bottom-up method which focuses on the individuals behind the change. It’s less of a sequential method and more of a set of goals to reach, with each goal making up a letter of the acronym.

By focusing on achieving the following five goals, the ADKAR model can be used to effectively plan out change on both an individual and organizational level:

• Awareness (of the need to change)
• Desire (to participate and support the change)
• Knowledge (on how to change)
• Ability (to implement required skills and behaviors)
• Reinforcement (to sustain the change)

The method

Awareness
The awareness stage is all about making sure that your employees understand the need for change. This is done much as you’d expect – by meeting with your employees and/or managers, presenting the current state of affairs, and how your proposed changes could benefit the situation.

The main difficulty here is remembering that you’re pitching this change to other people, and so you can’t just reel off a list of changes and expect them to be accepted. Instead, you need to justify those changes by using hard evidence to really drive the point home.

Similarly, forcing yourself to justify your changes will prevent you from over-reaching with drastic shifts or promoting those that you think are correct (but quite frankly aren’t).

Desire
Inspiring the desire to change is usually the most difficult part of ADKAR, since you’re appealing to both the logical and emotional side of your employees. If you can’t get both on your side, you aren’t going to get the total commitment you’ll need to deploy the change.

As with most other management models in this post, one of the best ways to grow this desire is to promote the benefits of the change relevant to the people you’re talking to.

Give real-world examples of what will happen after the change and compare it to their current position. Listen to their feedback and implement any useful advice to share the responsibility if creating the change.

Knowledge
The knowledge goal in ADKAR is to make sure that everyone knows how the change will be carried out and how to fulfill their specific part in that process.

So, here you need to break down the change into steps and analyze what various employees will need to know in order to complete them all. Once you know this, the team(s) need to be taught how the change will be completed and what their part in the process is.

Ability
While it might seem like knowledge and ability are the same thing, the time it takes to go from knowing how to complete a task to being able to actually carry it out can be immense. Just because you know how to do something doesn’t mean you’re good at it.

As such, you need to check the ability of each employee and assess whether they need extra experience (or knowledge) in order to reliably complete their tasks.

The required knowledge and ability to achieve your change can also be limited by creating a documented process which anyone can follow, no matter their skill set or experience. This will make your changes more consistent and measurable, since most variables can be locked in a constant state.

Reinforcement
Reinforcement here means implementing incentives and rewards to make sure that the change is maintained until it becomes the new norm. Remember that it’s a good idea to identify any mistakes in this stage as early as possible, as then you’ll prevent a flawed method becoming your employees’ default.