Once people understand the Prosci ADKAR® Model, they tend to fall in love. They shamelessly wear ADKAR glasses at conferences and start using ‘ADKAR’ as a verb (e.g., “I just ‘ADKAR-ed’ that senior leader big time!”). And I’ve had more than one person threaten to get an ADKAR tattoo. Why are people so fanatical about the ADKAR Model? We set out to answer this question and understand how change professionals are using it in new and unique ways, in the Applications of ADKAR research study.
How will organizations embrace change management this year? And next year? And the year after that? And how will the change management discipline respond? When we asked 1,778 change practitioners to tell us what they expect to happen from now until 2020, they identified the following trends.
A structured approach to the change process is a critical concept in developing a successful and sustainable organizational change strategy. Organizations that employ a structured process within their change strategy benefit from a smoother transition, increased adoption rate, and higher implementation rates amongst impacted groups. Industry-leading organizations leverage a structured change approach to create a formal and dependable process that is replicable throughout the organization on all projects. One crucial element in building a successful and sustainable change strategy is dedicating a portion of your structured approach to the individual employee and their success.
As we prepared for the release of our tenth Best Practices in Change Management report over twenty years of research, I couldn't help but notice how many things have changed in twenty years. Let’s take a moment to reflect:
Managers have always been a key lever to success in change management work. They are the frontline troops in helping get their employees through a change successfully. Prosci’s research has continued to demonstrate that employees want to hear about change from their managers, managers can help proactively mitigate employee resistance, and having managers bought into the why of a change is crucial for success. The Prosci ADKAR Model is a uniquely valuable tool that, when used successfully, can help managers positively impact a change. In Prosci’s Applications of ADKAR research effort, change practitioners shared their experience, insights and advice on empowering managers with the ADKAR Model (read the full research report here).
Since the beginning iterations of Prosci’s change management research, we’ve known about the importance of senior leader engagement on a project. Nearly every change manager has navigated the tension between understanding the importance of senior leader engagement on a project and the difficulty of getting this necessary engagement. What is more, it is not enough to have senior leaders involved in a change project. We must ensure that they are equipped with the tools that they need to be effective, active, and visible leaders throughout the project.
The path of organizational change is littered with good ideas that never delivered on the results they promised. Creating successful change is not easy, but we have the opportunity to learn lessons from others, thanks to best practices in change management. Prosci’s research studies provide data on what works and - sometimes more importantly - what does not work when implementing change.
Peter Drucker famously observed, “what gets measured gets managed.” In the change space, measurement has often been an elusive frontier. With its individual and results orientation, the Prosci ADKAR Model is uniquely valuable as a measurement mechanism. In Prosci’s Application of ADKAR research effort, change practitioners shared their experience, insights and advice on using the ADKAR Model as a measurement framework. And, as it turns out, it works –two thirds of participants using the model as a measurement framework said it was extremely effective. As one participant noted, “ADKAR allows you to measure where individuals are in the change process so change management activities can be tailored and timely.”