ADKAR Change Model

Jeff Hiatt's Background

Jeffery Hiatt had an atypical journey to joining the Mount Rushmore of change theorists with his ADKAR change model. Gaining an undergraduate degree in engineering from Colorado State and a masters degree from Rutgers, Hiatt did not go into academia. Instead, he worked as an engineer and program manager at Bell Labs.

While working as a program manager his main projects focused on restructuring business processes. This developed his fascination with changes. More importantly, he explored why some changes succeeded and why others didn’t. The role also gave him the opportunity to perform extensive research into change adoption which drove his finding that the common factor to change effectiveness centered on people.

In 1994 Hiatt formalized his ADKAR change model that focused on people instead of just the change. Opening the business under the name PROSCI, the model and company’s popularity surged throughout Corporate America. By 2016 over 35,000 PROSCI practitioners were trained and actively practicing.

ADKAR Model

Hiatt believed that change occurs in 2 dimensions, the organization’s perspective, and the employee’s perspective. A change can only achieve success when both perspectives occur. The organization will travel through the phases of preparing, designing, implementing and sustaining the change. However, the employee’s journey will begin with awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement or ADKAR for short.

When the change is announced to the workforce, the employee becomes aware of the change. Cognitively they grasp to understand the business need and the reason for the change. Next, they seek to understand what the change means on an organizational level and personal level on what all the changes will consist of. Lastly, they search for what long-term and day-to-day impacts those changes will make on their job.

The next gate the employee must travel through is their desire to support the change. Until they want to change with the organization the change remains in a standstill. The organization searches for the general motivation for the employees to change. This varies for each employee, yet the organization will typically focus on one or two highest motivators. Lastly, the change manager places a focus on peer pressure. Before the change adoption, peer pressure can push desire away. However, after a tipping point of employees have adopted the change, peer pressure can help pull the remaining stragglers into the change in fear that they will be left behind.

Knowledge

The stakeholders then shift their focus to the knowledge of the change. Understanding the new tools or processes or applications and how they can implement them. They learn their new rules and responsibilities. This closely resembles how a new employee approaches fitting in at a new company. They observe, question, and mimic behaviors so that they understand how they fit in this new world and how they will get work done.

With knowledge comes the ability. The stakeholders then focus on building the capability to implement knowledge and change. They must overcome the physical limitations to apply a new process or tool. Also, they must...Rest of the Article