The ADKAR Barrier Finder
Your change isn't stuck everywhere — it's stuck somewhere. Score a person or team on the five ADKAR elements — Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, Reinforcement — and this tool finds the barrier point: the first element that's failing, and the only one worth spending on right now. Everything you pour in downstream of it evaporates.
ADKAR in brief
ADKAR is Prosci's model of individual change, built by Jeff Hiatt from studying thousands of organisational changes. Its core claim is disarmingly simple: organisations don't change — people do, one at a time. A "transformation" is just the sum of many individual journeys, and every one of those journeys passes through the same five milestones, in the same order.
The barrier point — why sequence matters
The five elements aren't a menu; they're a chain. Each one only holds if the one before it holds. Desire without Awareness is loyalty, not commitment — it snaps at the first rough patch. Knowledge without Desire is a training certificate in a drawer. Ability without Knowledge is improvisation. Reinforcement without Ability is rewarding something that isn't happening.
So the diagnosis rule is blunt: the barrier is the first element scoring 3 or below, reading left to right. That's where the chain is broken — and every dollar, hour, and email you spend downstream of the break is largely wasted, because it's building on a link that isn't there. Fix the barrier, re-score, and the barrier moves. That's what progress looks like in change work: the barrier point marching to the right.
The most common money-burner in change
A team scores low on Desire, so leadership responds with — more training. It feels productive: sessions get scheduled, attendance gets tracked, boxes get ticked. But you're running Knowledge programs for people who haven't decided to participate. They attend, they nod, and nothing changes, because the problem was never that they didn't know how. It was that they hadn't said yes.
The reverse failure exists too: a team full of genuine enthusiasm — high Desire — left to flounder because nobody built the Knowledge and Ability to act on it. Same lesson either way: the fix must match the barrier, not the tactic you happen to have budget for.
Diagnose before you prescribe
Blanket programs — "communicate more, train more" — are what change management looks like when nobody has diagnosed anything. They treat every person as identically stuck, so they spend on all five elements at once and move none of them far. A barrier assessment replaces the blanket with a map: this group needs a reason, that group needs practice time, and the two should not be sitting in the same workshop.
The heat strip above is the payoff. When you score people individually, patterns surface that a survey average would smear away. Everyone stuck at Desire? That's not a training problem — that's a leadership problem, and no amount of e-learning will touch it. One segment stuck at Ability while the rest cruise? They need coaching and reduced load, not another all-hands. Listen for the language — people tell you their barrier all day long: