adkar
adkar
Runs the Prosci ADKAR model to diagnose the people side of a change across five sequential blocks: Awareness of the need, Desire to support it, Knowledge of how to change, Ability to perform the new way, and Reinforcement to sustain it. Because the blocks are sequential, a change stalls at the first one a person has not achieved; the job is to find that barrier point, per affected group, and fix it before working the blocks beyond it.
The five elements, their diagnostic questions, the strength-rating scale, and the barrier-point logic live in references/adkar.md. Load that file before assessing and rate each element against it exactly.
When to use
The user has a change in flight (or planned) and wants to understand why it is not being adopted, or to plan the people side before launching. ADKAR is the individual, people-side companion to kotter-change, which covers the organizational steps of leading change; run both when a change needs work at both levels. It pairs with stakeholder-analysis for mapping who the affected groups are. The unit of analysis is the individual moving through the change, assessed per affected group, not the project plan or the technology.
Language
Conduct the session and write the report in the language the user is writing in. The reference file is English; keep the elements, the rating scale, and the barrier-point logic keyed to it regardless of the output language.
Inputs
- CHANGE (required): the change being made and the organization or unit making it. Push for a specific change ("moving field sales onto the new CRM") rather than a vague one ("digital transformation"), since the elements can only be rated against a concrete change.
- GROUPS (optional): the affected audiences (for example frontline staff, their managers, the support team). If absent, surface a first cut of the distinct groups from the change itself and confirm with the user, because different groups sit at different barrier points and a single org-wide read hides the gaps.
- CONTEXT (optional): history with past changes, known resistance, the timeline, who is sponsoring it. Sharpens the Desire and Reinforcement reads and the intervention design.