ADKAR Model

Foundations

ADKAR is a goal-oriented change management model created by Jeff Hiatt, founder of the research and advisory firm Prosci. First published in the early 2000s and grounded in Prosci's longitudinal research with thousands of organisations, it describes change not as a project milestone but as a personal journey. Its central premise is that organisations change only when individuals change, and that every successful change moves a person through five sequential building blocks: Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, and Reinforcement.

Methods

The five building blocks

1. Awareness of the need for change — The person understands why the change is necessary. Without a clear, compelling answer to "why?" people naturally resist, misread, or ignore the change. Awareness is built through a clear business case, two-way dialogue, and naming the real consequences of not changing. It is not the same as agreement — it is the cognitive foundation that makes engagement possible.
2. Desire to support and participate in the change — The person makes a personal choice to engage. Desire is the emotional and motivational shift that turns passive awareness into active support. It is shaped by what the individual stands to gain or lose, their trust in leadership, the degree of personal agency they feel, and how the change connects to their values. Because desire is personal, it cannot be mandated — it must be cultivated through involvement, honest conversation, leadership modelling, and removing the obstacles that make resistance feel rational.
3. Knowledge of how to change — Once a person wants to change, they need to know how. This includes the new skills, behaviours, processes, and ways of thinking the change requires. Knowledge is delivered through training, job aids, coaching, documentation, and practice. Crucially, ADKAR places knowledge after awareness and desire: training people before they understand the need or want to change is one of the most common — and most expensive — failures in change initiatives.
4. Ability to implement the change — Knowing how is not the same as being able to. Ability is the demonstrated competence to apply new knowledge in real work, under real conditions, at the required standard. It is built through practice, coaching, feedback, time, and support. Many changes stall here because organisations mistake training completion for capability. Ability takes longer than knowledge, and it is where coaching, on-the-job support, and tolerance of early mistakes matter most.
5. Reinforcement to sustain the change — The new way of working must stick. Without reinforcement, people drift back to familiar habits — the "old way" is always the path of least resistance. Reinforcement comes from recognition, accountability, visible results, celebrating wins, integrating the change into performance management, and continued leadership attention. It is the most often neglected of the five building blocks, and its absence is why so many changes are "completed" but not sustained.

Conditions

ADKAR is sequential and diagnostic. A gap in any earlier block undermines all the later ones. A common pattern: an organisation invests heavily in training (Knowledge) for people who do not understand why the change is happening (low Awareness) or do not want it (low Desire) — the training is wasted. Another: people are aware and willing but lack Ability, and are labelled "resistant" when they are actually under-supported. ADKAR lets leaders and change practitioners locate the real barrier and target it directly, rather than pouring more communication or training at a problem that sits elsewhere.

Risks

ADKAR is often compared with Kotter's 8-step process and Lewin's unfreeze–change–refreeze. Where Kotter describes change at the organisational and leadership level (a sequence of steps leaders drive), ADKAR describes change at the individual level (the psychological journey each person takes). The two are complementary: Kotter-style organisational change produces the conditions; ADKAR tracks whether individuals are actually moving through them. ADKAR's individual focus also makes it useful in one-to-one coaching, where organisation-wide models are too blunt.

Coaching Applications

For coaches and change practitioners, ADKAR is both a framework and a diagnostic. With an individual client — a leader driving change, a manager adapting to it, or an employee struggling with it — the coach can ask: where is this person stuck? What is the evidence? Is the gap in Awareness (they don't see the need), Desire (they see it but don't want it), Knowledge (they want it but don't know how), Ability (they know but can't yet do it), or Reinforcement (they could do it but aren't sustaining it)? Each gap calls for a different intervention, and misdiagnosing the gap is one of the most common reasons change efforts fail.

Limits & Critique

ADKAR's linear, sequential simplicity is also its main criticism. Real change is rarely a clean progression: people cycle, regress, and move through blocks in parallel, especially in complex, open-ended transformations. Critics argue that Desire in particular cannot be reduced to a single "step" — it is shaped by culture, power, trust, and identity over time. And because ADKAR focuses on the individual, it can underplay the structural and systemic factors (incentives, org design, workload) that constrain personal change. Skilled practitioners therefore use ADKAR as a diagnostic lens, not a rigid recipe, and pair it with organisational-level approaches.