ADKAR Explained: Why Change Is a Journey, Not an Event
- 12 hours ago
- 9 min read
Most change plans look fine on paper.
There is an announcement. A go live date. A training session. Someone builds a slide deck. The email goes out on a Friday saying the new system starts Monday.
Then three months later, half the team is quietly back on the old spreadsheet.
At Zeducation we work with businesses across manufacturing, logistics, construction, and tech. Different industries, same story. These are workplaces where something is always changing. New machinery. New software. A restructure. A merger. New health and safety rules. A new client contract that changes how everyone works. Most of them are not short of good intentions. What they are short of is a way to actually bring their people through it.
Because here is the thing most change plans forget.
Change is not an event. It is a journey. And in most workplaces, it is an ongoing one.
People Do Not All Respond to Change the Same Way
Put ten people in a room and announce a change. You will get ten different reactions.
One person is excited and already asking when they can start. One is quiet, working out what it means for their job. One is angry, because this is the fourth change this year and the last one was a mess. One nods along in the meeting and does nothing differently on Monday. One is not resisting at all, they simply do not understand what you said.
None of those people are a problem. They are just at different points on the same journey.
A leader who treats them all the same will lose most of them. A leader who can tell the difference can move the whole team.
That is exactly what the ADKAR model gives you.
What Is ADKAR?
ADKAR is a change management model created by Jeff Hiatt, the founder of Prosci. It has become one of the most widely used change frameworks in the world, and the reason is simple.
It does not treat change as something that happens to an organisation. It treats change as something that happens to one person at a time.
Your business does not change until your people change. A new system is just software until someone uses it properly. A new safety procedure is just a laminated sheet until a crew actually follows it on site.
ADKAR is five steps, and they happen in order:
A is for Awareness
D is for Desire
K is for Knowledge
A is for Ability
R is for Reinforcement
You cannot skip one. If a person is stuck at step two, no amount of step three will help them.
That single idea is what makes this model so useful for leaders.
Let's walk through each one.
A is for Awareness
Awareness means the person understands why the change is happening.
Not what is changing. Why.
This is where most organisations start and stop. An email. A toolbox talk. A slide that says "New ERP System, Go Live 1 March."
That tells people what. It does not tell them why. And without the why, people fill the gap themselves, usually with the worst version of the story. Someone is cutting costs. Someone is getting rid of us. Head office does not know what we do out here.
What this looks like on the job: A logistics operation is moving to handheld scanners. Awareness is not the training invite. Awareness is the supervisor explaining that we are losing three hours a day to manual data entry, our biggest client is asking for live tracking, and if we cannot give them that we are at risk of losing the contract.
Now the change has a reason attached to it.
What leaders do here: Explain the why in plain language, more than once, from someone the team actually trusts. A message from a direct supervisor lands differently than a message from an unnamed inbox.
D is for Desire
Desire means the person actually wants to take part.
This is the step nearly everybody skips, and it is the one that quietly kills most change.
Awareness is in the head. Desire is in the gut. A person can completely understand why the business needs this and still not want it, because their honest question is not "why does the company need this?" It is "what does this mean for me?"
Will I look stupid learning something new in front of my crew? Will this make my job harder? Is my role safe? Will I still be good at this?
You cannot force desire. You cannot email it into someone. It is a choice, and it is earned through honest conversation.
What this looks like on the job: A foreman who has run the same process for fifteen years is not being difficult. He is worried that a system he cannot use makes him look like he is past it in front of younger workers. That is a real fear, and it needs a real conversation, not another memo.
What leaders do here: Have the one on one. Ask what their concerns are and actually listen. Name what is in it for them. Be straight about what you do not know yet, because people can handle bad news far better than they handle being managed.
K is for Knowledge
Knowledge means the person knows how to do the new thing.
This is the training piece. The how to. The process, the buttons, the new steps, the new expectations.
Most organisations are reasonably good at this part, because it is the visible part. It is a booking, a room, a trainer, an attendance sheet.
But notice the order. Knowledge is step three, not step one. If you deliver excellent training to a person who has no Awareness and no Desire, you have delivered excellent training to someone who is not listening.
What this looks like on the job: Everyone gets shown the new scanner. Good. But knowledge also includes the things nobody thinks to teach, like what to do when it does not scan, or who to call when it drops out at 5am.
What leaders do here: Make training practical and role specific. A yard hand and an office administrator do not need the same session. Teach the exceptions, not just the perfect run.
A is for Ability
Ability means the person can actually do it in real conditions.
Knowledge and ability are not the same thing. This is the gap that costs businesses the most money.
I can teach you how to swim in a classroom. That is knowledge. Whether you can swim is a different question, and you only find out in the water.
In a workplace, ability is doing the new thing while it is raining, while you are behind schedule, while your phone is going, while someone is waiting on you. That is real life, and that is where people fall back to the old way, because the old way is what their hands remember under pressure.
What this looks like on the job: A crew learned the new reporting process in a two hour session. Three weeks later they are on a tight deadline and the reports stop coming. They have the knowledge. They do not yet have the ability under pressure.
What leaders do here: Give people time to practise before it counts. Expect a temporary dip in performance and say so out loud, so nobody thinks they are failing. Put support close by in the first few weeks, not a helpdesk in another city.
R is for Reinforcement
Reinforcement means the change sticks.
This is the step that gets cut when the project team moves on to the next thing.
Old habits are comfortable. Without something holding the new way in place, people drift back, usually within a couple of months, and usually so gradually that nobody notices until the numbers slip.
What this looks like on the job: Six months after go live, are we still using it properly? Is anyone measuring? Did we ever say thank you to the crew who got behind it first? Or did we announce the next change before this one had settled?
What leaders do here: Celebrate early wins publicly. Keep measuring. Notice and back the people who adopted it. Make sure the old way is genuinely switched off, because if the old spreadsheet still works, someone will still use it.
The Same Model at Home
Here is why ADKAR clicks for people. It is not really a business model. It is a people model. You have already lived it.
Think about a father who goes to the doctor and gets told his blood pressure and his sugar levels are heading the wrong way.
Awareness. He now knows why something has to change. The numbers are on the page in front of him.
Desire. But knowing is not wanting. What actually moves him is not the chart. It is the thought of walking his daughter down the aisle. It is wanting to be around for his mokopuna. That is the moment it becomes his change, not the doctor's.
Knowledge. Now he needs to know how. What do I actually eat? How do I read a label? What do I cook on a Tuesday night when I get home late?
Ability. Then comes the hard part. Knowing what to eat is not the same as doing it at a family gathering, at church, at a funeral, with the food already on the table and an auntie telling him to have some more.
Reinforcement. And it only lasts if something holds it in place. The family starts cooking differently. Someone walks with him. He checks his numbers each month. Without that, he is back to the old way by winter.
Same five steps. Whether it is a father's health or a company's new operating system, people change the same way.
Where Your People Actually Get Stuck
This is the part HR and L&D teams tend to find most useful.
ADKAR is not just a plan. It is a diagnostic tool. When a change is not landing, you do not need to guess or throw more resources at it. You work out which letter people are stuck on, and you treat that one.
Stuck at Awareness? They do not understand why. More training will not help. Better communication will.
Stuck at Desire? They understand and they are not on board. More training definitely will not help. Honest conversations and visible leadership will.
Stuck at Knowledge? Now training is the right answer.
Stuck at Ability? They need practice, coaching, and time, not another workshop.
Stuck at Reinforcement? They need recognition, measurement, and follow through.
Look at that list again and notice something. Only one of those five problems is solved by training.
Yet training is the default response in most organisations. That is why so many L&D teams end up delivering a good session for a change that still fails, and then wearing the blame for it.
When you can name the real blocker, you stop spending money in the wrong place.
Why This Matters for HR and L&D
If you sit in HR or L&D, you already know the pattern. You get brought in late. The decision is made, the date is set, and your job is to "get the people ready."
ADKAR gives you the language to change that conversation.
It lets you show a leadership team, in plain terms, that a communication problem and a capability problem are not the same thing, and that they need different answers. It lets you ask for the right budget for the right barrier. It gives you a way to measure adoption, not just attendance.
And it moves your team from being the group that books the training to being the group that guides the change.
There is one more piece worth naming. Most of the businesses we work with are not managing one change. They are managing five at once, on top of last year's three that never fully bedded in. That is change saturation, and it is real. People are not tired of change because they are lazy. They are tired because nothing ever gets to Reinforcement before the next thing lands.
Naming that honestly is often the first step to fixing it.
How Zeducation Works With This
We work with manufacturing plants, logistics operations, construction firms, and tech companies. Different sectors, but the same human reality underneath.
Our approach is practical, not theoretical. We do not hand a leadership team a model and walk away. We work with the people who have to lead the change on the floor, on the site, and in the depot, and we build the skills that each stage of ADKAR actually demands:
Explaining the why so people believe it
Having the honest conversation that earns buy in
Coaching people through the messy middle, when confidence dips
Holding the new way in place long enough for it to become the normal way
We keep the language plain on purpose. A model is only useful if the leading hand on a night shift can use it, not just the executive team in a strategy session.
Because change does not happen in the boardroom. It happens on the floor, one person at a time.
Final Thought
If you take one thing from this, take this:
Change is not an event. It is a journey, and usually an ongoing one.
The announcement is not the change. The training is not the change. The go live date is not the change. The change is what your people are actually doing six months later, when nobody is watching.
ADKAR gives you a map for that journey, and a way to find the person who has fallen behind before you lose them.
Let's Talk
If your organisation is going through change and you want your leaders equipped to bring people with them, we would love to help.
👉 Learn more about our leadership programmes at zeducation.co.nz
👉 Book a conversation with the Zeducation team. We will design something that fits your people, your industry, and the change you are actually facing.
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