ADKAR Model: Manage Change One Person at a Time
The ADKAR model gives managers a structured way to identify exactly where and why individuals stall during change, so they can intervene at the right point r…
Topic: Organizational Design & Change
Why It Matters
When a change initiative stalls, the natural instinct is to look at the plan. The timeline slipped. Communications were unclear. Training was rushed. These are real problems worth examining.
But in many cases the deeper failure is more individual than structural: people across the organisation, at different points in their own thinking, simply were not ready to change.
Organisational change is, at its core, a collection of individual transitions. A new system is deployed. A process is redesigned. A team is restructured. The announcement is made, the workshops are delivered, and then, weeks later, the adoption numbers tell a different story.
Not because people are obstructive, but because they are somewhere in the middle of a personal journey from "I don't fully understand this" to "I do this well." The ADKAR model was designed for exactly this gap.
Used across industries by managers and change practitioners, the ADKAR model breaks down the journey an individual must complete to successfully adopt a change. It functions both as a diagnostic tool and a planning guide: it tells you where someone is stuck, and it points to the kind of support most likely to help them move forward.
Before reading further, ask yourself three honest questions.
Have you rolled out a change that looked successful on paper but produced uneven adoption in practice?
Are some people on your team clearly on board while others seem to be going through the motions?
Have you found yourself pushing for results before the team was genuinely equipped to deliver them?
If any of these feel familiar, the ADKAR model offers a more structured way to understand what is actually happening.
Origin and Underlying Logic
The ADKAR model was developed by Jeff Hiatt, founder of Prosci, in the late 1990s. It emerged from research conducted across hundreds of organisations going through significant change, examining why some individuals successfully transitioned while others did not.
The central finding was straightforward: successful change is not primarily a project management problem. It is a people problem, and each person moves through a predictable sequence of stages before new behaviours become embedded.
The model rests on one important premise: you cannot skip stages. A person who lacks awareness of why a change is happening will not benefit from training. A person who has not made a personal choice to support the change will not engage meaningfully with the knowledge on offer.
Each stage must be genuinely present before the next can take hold. This sequential logic is what distinguishes ADKAR from broader organisational change frameworks and makes it particularly useful as a diagnostic: when change is not sticking, you can trace the failure back to a specific stage.
ADKAR sits within the broader tradition of individual behaviour change research, sharing conceptual ground with the Stages of Change model developed by Prochaska and DiClemente, and with Kurt Lewin's foundational work on force fields and unfreezing.
Its particular contribution is its manager-facing practicality. You do not need a change management qualification to use it. Most managers can learn the framework in under an hour and begin using it in conversations the same week.
Structure and Application
The ADKAR model comprises five sequential stages. Each represents a specific condition that must be met before an individual can move forward. Understanding not just what each stage means but why it exists is what makes the model genuinely useful in practice.
Awareness is the first condition: the individual understands why the change is necessary and what happens if the organisation does not make it. Without this, resistance is almost guaranteed, and it is often passive rather than visible.
Desire follows: the individual has made a personal choice to support and participate in the change. This is not a rational outcome of awareness alone. It is shaped by trust, by perceived personal impact, and by the quality of the relationship the person has with their manager and with senior leadership.
Knowledge is the third stage: the individual understands how to change, what the new processes or behaviours require of them.
Ability is the fourth: the individual can actually perform the new behaviours, not just describe them. This depends on practice, coaching, and time in real conditions.
Reinforcement is the final stage: the change is sustained because the environment continues to support it through recognition, feedback, and accountability structures. Without active reinforcement, even well-adopted changes frequently revert, particularly during periods of pressure or transition.
The ADKAR model is most commonly applied at the individual level, but it can also be used to map the progress of a team or cohort through a change. It is typically visualised as a linear progression, though managers often use it as a diagnostic grid, rating where each person sits on each dimension rather than treating the stages as a strict sequence of milestones. It takes the form of a conversation guide as much as a formal framework.
If you want a concrete starting point before reading further, begin here: identify one person on your team who is visibly struggling with a current change, and walk through the five stages in order. Ask yourself honestly where they actually are, not where the project plan says they should be.
That gap is where your attention belongs. As you do this, you will likely find yourself asking a question the Quick Guide cannot fully answer: once I know which stage someone is stuck at, what exactly do I do? That is where the deep dive begins.
FAQ
The following questions address what managers most commonly ask when they first encounter the ADKAR model.
Q: What does ADKAR stand for?
A: ADKAR is an acronym for the five stages of individual change: Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, and Reinforcement. Each letter represents a condition that must be present for a person to successfully adopt and sustain a change. The model was developed by Jeff Hiatt at Prosci and is now widely used in change management practice across industries and organisation sizes.
Q: How is the ADKAR model different from Kotter's 8-Step Model?
A: Kotter's model is an organisational change roadmap, designed to guide leadership actions through a transformation at the programme or enterprise level. ADKAR operates at the individual level, diagnosing where specific people are in their personal change journey. The two are not competing frameworks. Many practitioners use them in parallel, with Kotter guiding the overall programme structure and ADKAR informing the individual support and coaching decisions that sit beneath it.
Q: Is the ADKAR model only useful for large-scale organisational change?
A: No. While ADKAR is commonly applied in large transformation programmes, it is equally relevant for smaller changes: a new team process, a revised reporting structure, a shift in how meetings are run. Its value is in diagnosing individual adoption, and that challenge exists at any scale. Managers often find it most immediately useful for changes that directly affect their direct reports, regardless of whether a formal change programme is in place.
Q: How do I know if the ADKAR model is right for my situation?
A: ADKAR is most useful when you are managing a change that requires people to behave differently, not just be informed. If your challenge is purely informational, such as communicating a policy update that requires no behaviour change, ADKAR may be more than you need. But if you are facing inconsistent adoption, resistance you cannot fully explain, or a gap between people who understood the change and people who are actually doing it, ADKAR gives you a structured way to identify where the problem lives.
Q: Can ADKAR be used after a change has already been rolled out?
A: Yes, and it is often most valuable at that point. Post-rollout, ADKAR functions as a retrospective diagnostic: it helps you understand why adoption is uneven and where additional support is most needed. Many managers find that running an ADKAR assessment several weeks after go-live surfaces gaps that were not visible during the launch phase. The deep dive covers how to use the model at each stage of a change, including after implementation.