Ask a project manager how the rollout is going and you will hear about milestones and risk. Ask the same question six months after go-live and the answer is often quieter: the system is in, and half the business still runs the old spreadsheet alongside it. ADKAR exists for that gap. It is a model of how one person gets through a change, and it gives the PMO a way to see, plan and measure adoption rather than hoping it follows delivery.
ADKAR stands for Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability and Reinforcement: five things that must each be true, in order, before a change sticks for an individual. Organisational change is then the sum of hundreds of these individual transitions. That sounds obvious written down. In practice it is the opposite of how most programmes behave, which is to treat “the business” as one block that receives a communication at the start and a training course at the end.
Origins and history
ADKAR was created by Jeff Hiatt, founder of the change management firm Prosci, and it is older than most people think. Hiatt developed the model in 1996 and Prosci first published it in a white paper in 1999, drawing on research into change patterns across several hundred organisations. The book most people cite, ADKAR: A Model for Change in Business, Government and Our Community, followed in 2006. Many sources, including at least one peer-reviewed journal, say the model was created in 2006. That is the book date, not the model date. ADKAR is a registered trademark of Prosci, which still maintains the model and the assessment products around it.
The model explained
The five elements are sequential. Each one is a prerequisite for the next, so the model works like a chain, and the practical question is always the same: where is the first broken link?
- Awareness of why the change is needed. People can know a change is coming without understanding why staying put is worse.
- Desire to take part. This is a personal decision, shaped by what the change means for someone’s own job and workload. It cannot be trained in.
- Knowledge of how to change: the skills and behaviours the future state requires.
- Ability to do it for real. Knowing how and being able to are different things. Ability comes from practice and coaching, and from being allowed to be slow at first.
- Reinforcement to make it last: recognition, measurement, and removing whatever still rewards the old way of working.
The sequence serves as a useful diagnostic. When a change stalls, find the first missing element for each group and put your effort there. Sending more training at people who lack Desire is money down the drain, because Knowledge sits two links further along the chain. The model also reframes resistance. What gets labelled “resistance to change” is usually a missing A or D, a person who has not heard a convincing why, or who has heard it and rationally concluded the change makes their week worse. That is a diagnosis you can act on, unlike a character judgement.
Ownership matters as much as sequence. Awareness and Desire belong to sponsors and line managers, the people staff actually listen to about why things are changing. Knowledge and Ability belong with trainers and coaches. Reinforcement belongs to leadership, with the PMO keeping score. When a programme hands all five to the training team, the first two elements are quietly orphaned.
ADKAR and McKinsey’s 7-S: two views of the same change
ADKAR describes change at the level of the individual. McKinsey’s 7-S Framework describes it at the level of the organisation: strategy, structure, systems, shared values and the rest. They answer different questions. 7-S tells you where the change will land and what it will disturb; ADKAR tells you whether each person affected will actually make the journey. Recent academic work bears out the pairing. Bari’s 2025 study of change management in university-industry curriculum design compares the leading models directly and finds ADKAR and 7-S pulling in the same direction on stakeholder buy-in, communication and embedding, with ADKAR supplying the individual mechanics that 7-S leaves abstract. Beckhard’s change equation makes a related point in a single line: without dissatisfaction with the status quo, which is Awareness and Desire by another name, no amount of vision or planning overcomes the cost of change.
How to use it
- Split the audience by impact, and by attitude. Segment people by how their day-to-day work changes, then remember the segments still contain individuals. A team can average out as “supportive” while its most influential member is quietly opposed.
- Assess each group against the five elements. Conversations beat surveys here. You are looking for the first gap in the chain, and people rarely tick “I have no desire to do this” on a form.
- Aim the intervention at the gap, through the right owner. An Awareness gap needs the sponsor on their feet explaining why, in plain words. A Desire gap needs line managers having honest conversations about what changes for each person. Only Knowledge and Ability gaps are training problems.
- Reassess Awareness and Desire throughout, and expect them to wane. These are the most perishable elements in the model. Perspectives shift, sponsors move on, people lose interest, and a workforce that wanted the change in January can be indifferent by June. Treat A and D as live measures at every stage gate, never as boxes ticked during mobilisation.
- Plan and budget Reinforcement before go-live. If the benefits case depends on new behaviour lasting, someone must own measuring it, recognising it and removing the old crutches. This is the element most organisations fund least and regret most.
We have put the five elements, their rightful owners and the diagnostic questions on a free one-page reference card you can keep beside your delivery plan.
>> Download the ADKAR Reference here <<
When the PMO should use this
For a PMO the model earns its keep twice over.
First, as a frame the PMO gives project and programme managers. Delivery plans model tasks, not adoption, and steering packs are usually silent about the people side until benefits fail to appear. ADKAR gives project managers a structured way to plan adoption alongside delivery, and it gives the PMO plain language for governance: “the claims team has Knowledge but no Desire, and here is what the sponsor is doing about it” is a sentence a steering committee can act on. A RAG rating of “change readiness: amber” is not.
Second, and closer to home: the PMO should point ADKAR at itself. Rolling out a new PPM tool, a new stage-gate process or a new reporting standard is a change programme in which the audience is project managers, and it fails in exactly the ways ADKAR predicts. The licences get bought, the configuration gets done, the training gets scheduled, and a year later the portfolio data still lives in spreadsheets because nobody made the case for why, and the PMs never wanted the extra admin in the first place. A PMO that preaches adoption to its projects while botching its own tool rollout should expect to be quoted back at itself.
The same blind spot shows up vividly in technology programmes right now. When organisations roll out AI tools such as Microsoft Copilot, attention goes to the technology, the security review and the licence bill. Yet even for a project that sounds this technical, success is about people. If staff do not engage, do not want to explore what the tool can do, and do not feel safe using it in front of their manager, the change will not stick, whatever the business case said. We see the pattern across sectors from insurance to retail to rail: the delivery went fine, the adoption never happened, and the wasted licence spend was invisible to a purely technical readiness review.
There is decent published evidence for the model used well. A 2026 case study in Healthcare Management Forum describes an Ontario hospital using ADKAR to structure workforce readiness for new regulation of personal support workers: 98% of staff completed registration and 97.5% reported improved skills in the situations the change targeted. Note what the initiative did: it worked through awareness and desire with named leaders before training anyone, which is the whole model in one sentence. For building the organisational momentum around individual change, pair ADKAR with Kotter’s eight step change model.
Criticism and limitations
ADKAR has real weaknesses, and it is better to plan around them than discover them. The model reads as linear, but people are not. Individuals slide backwards, which is why treating Awareness and Desire as one-off checkpoints fails; the model only works when the assessment is continuous. Its individual focus can also hide systemic blockers. If the process is broken or the incentives point the wrong way, no quantity of personal Desire fixes it, which is why we pair it with an organisational lens such as 7-S. Be aware of the commercial ecosystem too: much of the ADKAR literature is authored by Prosci itself, and the independent peer-reviewed evidence base, while growing, is thinner than the model’s popularity suggests. Finally, the trademark shapes what practitioners can build. You can use and describe the thinking freely with attribution; formal ADKAR assessments are Prosci’s product.
None of this dislodges our view: for the individual level of change, ADKAR is the most immediately useful model a PMO can put in front of a project manager, provided Reinforcement gets funded and A and D get remeasured.
How HotPMO can help
We help organisations build PMOs that treat adoption as seriously as delivery, and we embed alongside your team rather than advising from a distance. If your portfolio keeps shipping systems that people quietly work around, or your own PPM tooling is the change that never stuck, our PMO consultancy can help you build the change capability into your governance rather than bolting it on. As an ISO 9001 certified consultancy we practise the process discipline we recommend.
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Further reading
- Hiatt, J. M. (2006). ADKAR: A Model for Change in Business, Government and Our Community. Prosci Learning Center Publications. ISBN 9781930885509.
- Prosci, “The Prosci ADKAR Model” overview: Prosci: the ADKAR change model
- Bari, L. (2025). “Connecting academia and industry: Change management in curriculum co-design”. Industry and Higher Education, 39(4), 395-407. SAGE: change management in curriculum co-design
- Akerele, A. B., Cordon, C. P., Burns, B. J., Dlugosz, D., Johnston, K., and Rivera, T. (2026). “Preparing the Personal Support Workers Workforce for Regulation Through Competency-Based Training: A Transformational Change Initiative”. Healthcare Management Forum, 39(4), 344-349. SAGE: preparing support workers for regulation change