ADKAR® Model

Each letter is an outcome a person reaches, not an activity the project runs.

1. Awareness. The person understands what is changing and why: the business reason and the risk of staying as things are.
2. Desire. The person decides to support and take part in the change. Desire is a personal choice; it can be influenced but not ordered.
3. Knowledge. The person knows how to work in the new way: the steps, the tools, the new responsibilities.
4. Ability. The person can actually do it, at the required level, in day-to-day work. Knowing how is not the same as being able to.
5. Reinforcement. Something keeps the new behavior in place: recognition, feedback, measures, and the removal of incentives to slip back.

The first two elements concern the decision to change; the next two concern the capability to change; the last concerns sustaining it.

The ADKAR® model therefore separates wanting to change from being able to change, which many plans treat as one.

The elements build on each other. Knowledge delivered to someone without Desire is often not absorbed; Ability cannot develop without Knowledge. The barrier point is the first element in the sequence where a person is weak.

The diagnostic logic follows from that order:

• Work out where the person stands on each element, usually through a conversation with their manager.
• Find the first weak element, not the weakest one overall.
• Focus support there before investing in later elements.

Averaging the five elements hides the barrier point. A person with strong Knowledge and Ability but low Desire looks fine on average, yet will not adopt the change.

Prosci provides its own assessment tools for this diagnosis; they are not reproduced here.

The barrier point makes the ADKAR® model a tool for deciding where to act next, not only a description.

At Brightwater Health, nurses are moving from verbal shift handovers to a structured electronic handover.

As a planning lens, the change team maps each element to activities:

• Awareness: ward leaders explain the patient-safety reasons, using local incident reviews.
• Desire: charge nurses discuss what the change means for each team and listen to concerns about time.
• Knowledge: short training sessions on the handover screens.
• Ability: floor coaches during the first weeks of live handovers.
• Reinforcement: handover quality is reviewed in team huddles, and the old paper sheets are withdrawn.

As a diagnostic, after a month one ward still uses paper. Conversations show that nurses know the system well (Knowledge) but doubt that it saves time (Desire). The barrier point is Desire, so more training would not help; a time study on that ward and a peer from another ward would.

Used this way, the ADKAR® model turns "they are not using it" into a specific gap with a specific remedy.

Hiatt's starting point is that organizations do not change on their own: results improve only when enough individuals do their work differently. A new structure, system or process delivers its benefits only once people adopt it.

The individual focus has practical consequences:

• People managers matter. Much of the work on Desire, Ability and Reinforcement happens in conversations between a person and their manager.
• Progress is uneven. Different people reach the barrier point at different elements, so one message for everyone rarely fits.
• Group views are aggregates. A team-level picture is built from individual positions, not assumed from the project plan.

The model sits inside the broader Prosci methodology, which adds project-level and organizational activities around it.

The ADKAR® model therefore complements, rather than replaces, models that guide the organizational side of change.

The model's strengths are its clarity, its useful split between Knowledge and Ability, and its diagnostic logic.

Its limitations:

• Evidence base. The model rests mainly on Prosci's own research and benchmarking. Independent, peer-reviewed tests of it appear to be few, so it is best treated as a practical framework rather than a validated theory.
• Linear sequence. Real people loop back: a setback in Ability can erode Desire. The fixed order can hide this.
• Individual lens. Low adoption can come from the change itself, such as a poorly designed process or conflicting targets. Framing it as a gap in a person's Desire risks blaming people for system problems.
• Little on leadership and sequencing. The model says what each person needs, not how sponsors build momentum across the organization.
• Proprietary materials. The name is trademarked, and the official tools and training belong to Prosci.

The ADKAR® model is therefore most useful alongside an organizational change model and with an open mind about what resistance is signaling.