What you’ll find in this article
- What the ADKAR model actually stands for, and why it focuses on individuals rather than entire organizations.
- A walkthrough of each of the five stages: Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, and Reinforcement.
- Why change initiatives usually fail at the human level long before the technical rollout fails.
- Practical examples of how each ADKAR stage shows up in a real company.
- Common mistakes leaders make when they try to apply ADKAR without enough structure.
- How to know, through a few simple indicators, whether a change effort is actually sticking.
- How ADKAR fits alongside other change frameworks such as Kotter’s 8 steps.
- How connecting change management to strategic execution, instead of treating it as a side project, makes adoption last.
Introduction
Most change initiatives do not fail because the new software was wrong or the new process was poorly designed. They fail because people never really moved from their old habits to the new ones, and no one noticed until adoption numbers came in far below expectations.
This is exactly the gap the ADKAR model was built to close. Developed by Jeff Hiatt, founder of Prosci, ADKAR shifts the focus of change management away from the project timeline and toward the individual, since an organization only changes when enough of its people change first.
In this article, we will walk through each stage of the model, show how it plays out in practice, and explain why treating change management as a one-time announcement rather than a structured process is one of the most expensive mistakes a leadership team can make.
What is the ADKAR model, and why does it focus on individuals?
ADKAR is an acronym for Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, and Reinforcement, and each word represents a milestone a person needs to reach before a change becomes permanent.
Unlike frameworks that describe change at the organizational level, ADKAR zooms in on the employee experience, since a strategy only becomes real once the people executing it actually behave differently.
This distinction matters because many leaders assume that announcing a change is the same as achieving it. In reality, an employee can be fully aware that a change is happening and still resist it, simply because no one addressed their desire to support it or gave them the knowledge required to act differently.
Because ADKAR sequences these milestones, it also works as a diagnostic tool. When adoption stalls, a manager can ask which stage the team is actually stuck in, rather than guessing at the problem or assuming that more training will automatically fix it.
The 5 stages of the ADKAR model explained
Awareness
The first stage is about making sure people understand the business reason behind the change, not just the fact that it is coming. Employees who only hear that “things are changing next quarter” tend to fill that vacuum with their own assumptions, and those assumptions are rarely favorable.
Building awareness usually requires more than a single email or town hall. It means explaining the risk of not changing, connecting the change to a real business problem, and repeating that message consistently across different channels and leaders, so it does not depend on a single announcement being remembered correctly.
Desire
Awareness alone does not guarantee support. An employee may fully understand why a new process is being introduced and still prefer the old one, especially if the change threatens their routine, their sense of competence, or even their job security.
Desire grows when people see a personal benefit, not only an organizational one, and when leaders acknowledge the resistance instead of dismissing it. A sales team is far more likely to embrace a new CRM if managers show, with real numbers, how it reduces the tedious parts of their week rather than simply mandating its use.
Knowledge
Once people are aware of the change and willing to support it, they still need to know exactly how to behave differently. This stage covers training, documentation, and access to people who can answer questions as they arise during the transition.
A common mistake here is delivering a single training session and assuming knowledge has been transferred. In practice, adults retain new processes better through repeated exposure and hands-on practice than through a one-time presentation, especially when the new behavior competes with years of muscle memory built around the old way of working.
Ability
Knowledge and ability are not the same thing, and this is where many change programs quietly stall. An employee can know exactly what steps a new process requires and still struggle to execute it smoothly under real working conditions, with real deadlines and real interruptions.
Ability develops through practice, coaching, and, importantly, patience from leadership during the period when performance may dip before it improves. Cutting support too early, right when people are practicing the new behavior for the first time, is one of the fastest ways to push a team back toward the old process.
Reinforcement
The final stage is often skipped entirely, and it is arguably the one most responsible for changes reverting to old habits within a few months. Reinforcement includes recognition, feedback, and, when necessary, corrective conversations that make clear the old process is no longer an acceptable shortcut.
Without reinforcement, informal norms tend to win over formal ones, especially under pressure. A team that adopted a new reporting structure for two months, but was never asked about it again by leadership, will quietly drift back to the spreadsheet they always trusted more.
A practical example: rolling out a new CRM through the ADKAR lens
To see how the five stages interact in practice, consider a mid-sized sales organization replacing spreadsheets with a new CRM. Leadership announces the change in a single email, and within the first month, adoption sits at barely 20%, even though every rep completed the mandatory training session.
Looking at this situation through ADKAR reveals the real problem quickly.
Awareness was technically achieved, since everyone received the email, but the message never explained why the spreadsheets were becoming a liability, so most reps assumed this was simply another tool being added on top of their existing workflow rather than a replacement for it.
Desire was even weaker, because the sales team associated the new system with more administrative work and closer monitoring from managers, without any acknowledgment of what they personally stood to gain.
Once the company revisited its approach, awareness was rebuilt around a concrete business problem, namely that deals were being lost because follow-ups depended on individual memory instead of a shared system.
Desire improved once managers showed, using real numbers from a pilot team, that the CRM actually reduced the time reps spent on manual reporting each week.
Knowledge was reinforced through short, role-specific sessions instead of one long generic training, and ability was supported by pairing newer reps with colleagues from the pilot group during their first weeks on the new system.
Reinforcement made the final difference. Managers began reviewing CRM data, rather than spreadsheets, in every weekly pipeline meeting, which quietly signaled that the old habit was no longer an accepted shortcut.
Adoption climbed past 80% within two months, not because the software changed, but because the organization finally addressed all five stages instead of assuming awareness was enough.
Why change initiatives fail before the technical rollout ever does
Most change failures are diagnosed, after the fact, as a technology problem or a process design flaw. In practice, a large share of these failures trace back to the human stages of ADKAR being skipped or rushed, particularly awareness and reinforcement, since both require sustained effort rather than a single event.
Leaders under time pressure tend to compress the timeline, moving straight from announcing a change to expecting full ability within days.
Skipping desire and knowledge in this way does not save time overall, since the organization eventually pays for it through low adoption, rework, and a second, more expensive round of change management to fix what the first attempt never properly addressed.
Common mistakes when applying the ADKAR model
Treating the whole organization as a single ADKAR journey
One frequent mistake is applying ADKAR to the entire organization as if everyone were at the same stage simultaneously, when in reality different teams, and even different individuals within the same team, sit at different points in the sequence.
Treating the whole company as a single ADKAR journey usually means the communication is either too basic for some groups or too advanced for others.
Measuring only awareness
Another common issue is measuring only awareness, through survey questions like “did you hear about the change,” while never actually assessing desire or ability. A high awareness score can create false confidence, since people can be perfectly informed and still unwilling or unable to change their behavior.
Underestimating reinforcement
Finally, many leadership teams underestimate reinforcement because it does not have a clear end date the way a training rollout does. Reinforcement is ongoing by definition, and treating it as a task to check off once tends to produce exactly the kind of relapse that ADKAR was designed to prevent.
Assuming managers already know how to lead the change
A fifth mistake worth naming is assuming that managers automatically know how to support their teams through each stage simply because they hold a leadership title.
In practice, managers often need their own version of ADKAR before they can guide anyone else through it, since a manager who has not personally built desire for the change will struggle to build it in others, no matter how well the official communication plan reads on paper.
How does ADKAR compare to other change management models?
ADKAR is often used alongside, rather than instead of, other frameworks such as Kotter’s 8-Step Process or Lewin’s Unfreeze-Change-Refreeze model.
Kotter focuses more on organizational sequencing, such as building a coalition and creating short-term wins, while ADKAR zooms in on what needs to happen inside each individual for that broader sequence to actually work.
In practice, many change management professionals map Kotter’s steps to the ADKAR stages, using Kotter to plan the organizational rollout and ADKAR to diagnose why adoption is or is not happening at the individual level.
Choosing one model over the other is less important than making sure the human side of change is measured with the same rigor as the technical milestones.
Lewin’s model, meanwhile, works at a higher level of abstraction, describing change as a three-phase movement from a stable state, through a period of transition, back to a new stable state.
ADKAR fits naturally inside Lewin’s middle phase, since Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, and Ability all describe what needs to happen during that transition, while Reinforcement supports the refreezing into a new, lasting routine.
None of these frameworks compete with each other so much as they operate at different altitudes, from the broad organizational narrative down to the individual behavior that ultimately determines whether the change survives.
How to know if your change effort is actually sticking
A few practical indicators reveal whether an organization is progressing through ADKAR or simply hoping it is. The percentage of employees actively using the new process, measured through system data rather than self-reported surveys, is one of the clearest signals available.
Tracking how often people revert to old workarounds under deadline pressure also matters, since this usually points to gaps in the ability stage rather than a lack of desire.
And finally, the frequency of manager check-ins about the change, weeks or months after the initial rollout, tends to predict whether reinforcement is actually happening or was quietly abandoned once the launch date passed.
How Scopi supports change management as part of strategic execution
Change initiatives rarely fail because the plan was wrong on paper. They fail because no one kept track of how the change connected to the company’s broader objectives once the initial excitement faded, and adoption started to slip without anyone noticing early enough to intervene.
Scopi helps organizations treat change as part of the same strategic cycle as their goals, projects, and risks, rather than as a separate initiative running in parallel.
A change effort can be linked directly to the strategic objective it supports, with its own action plan, responsible owner, and deadline, so that reinforcement is not left to memory but shows up as a visible item on the team’s dashboard.
Because Scopi also supports risk mapping and indicator tracking within the same environment, leaders can flag the early warning signs of change fatigue, such as a stalled adoption metric, and act before the effort quietly reverts to the old way of doing things.
Conclusion
The ADKAR model works because it treats change as something that happens one person at a time, through awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement, rather than as a single announcement followed by an assumption that everyone adjusted automatically.
Skipping any one of these five stages tends to resurface later, usually at a higher cost than addressing it properly the first time.
If your organization is planning a change and wants it to actually last past the first few weeks, connecting that effort to your broader strategic execution makes the difference between a project that fades and one that becomes the new normal.
Reviewing how your teams currently handle change management is a useful starting point before applying ADKAR to a specific initiative, since the model works best once the organization already has a basic structure for planning and tracking change.
Request a Scopi demo and see how strategic planning, goals, and change initiatives can live in the same place, rather than in separate spreadsheets that no one revisits once the launch date has passed.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does ADKAR stand for?
Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, and Reinforcement, the five milestones a person needs to reach for a change to become permanent.
Why do change initiatives fail even after training is completed?
Because training only addresses the Knowledge stage. If Awareness and Desire were never properly built, or Reinforcement is skipped afterward, adoption stalls regardless of how good the training was.
Is ADKAR meant to replace frameworks like Kotter’s 8 steps?
No. ADKAR works at the individual level, while Kotter focuses on organizational sequencing. Many practitioners use both together.
How long should reinforcement last after a change is launched?
There is no fixed end date. Reinforcement should continue until the new behavior is fully embedded, often measured in months rather than weeks.
Can different teams be at different ADKAR stages at the same time?
Yes, and this is common. Applying ADKAR uniformly across an entire organization usually means communication is miscalibrated for some groups.
