

Change Management Blog
Change is unpredictable, your reaction to it ISN’T!
September 13, 2022
Wajdi Essid
Time to Read: 2 Min

Change is unpredictable, your reaction to it ISN’T!
While change itself is most of the times unpredictable, your reaction to it ISN’T!
Created by Jeffrey Hiatt, the ADKAR change model helps facilitate change on an individual level since change is often less about the changes themselves and more about people’s reactions to them. ADKAR is an acronym for:
Awareness: Awareness of the need to change
Desire: Desire to participate in and support the change
Knowledge: Knowledge of how to change
Ability: Ability to implement the change
Reinforcement: Reinforcement to sustain the change
Since organizational change is directly dependent upon its employees for successful implementation, it’s critical for individuals to have a clear
How many total employees will engage in the change versus how many will opt out or find workarounds (i.e., ultimate utilization)?
How quickly will employees get on board with the change (i.e., speed of adoption)?
How effectively will the change be implemented at an individual level (i.e., proficiency)?
Because change is an individual phenomenon, these individual factors can drive or constrain the value a change creates.
Project managers and business leaders sometimes assume that ultimate utilization, speed of adoption, and proficiency—the human factors of change—will automatically reach 100% after being introduced. They fall into the common trap of believing that designing and implementing a business solution is enough to achieve intended results.
But without engagement from each employee who must do their job differently, we will not achieve tangible benefits from change.
The ADKAR model helps individuals process change through clearly defined stages that enable them to both understand and accept the changes at hand.
You just need to ask two questions to understand how important and essential is to manage the change:
For your project, what percentage of overall results and outcomes DEPENDS on employee adoption and usage of the change?
How much you are INVESTING (budget, people, energy) in driving and supporting employee adoption and usage?
Whether it is a business process reengineering project, a Technology implementation (ERP, CRM...Etc.) or a total Quality Management project, if 70% of your project success depends on employees adopting and using the new tool, process, technology…etc. but the budget foreseen to manage the people side of change is 3% of the global budget (and usually it is only technical trainings regarding the new tool/process) then it is only natural that the project won’t capture the full expected ROI of your change, and in the worst case you end up with a project failure.
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