The Inner Game of Change
Welcome to The Inner Game of Change podcast, where we dive deep into the complexities of managing organisational change. Tailored for leaders, change practitioners, and anyone driving transformation, our episodes explore key topics like leadership, communication, change capability, and process design. Expert guests share practical strategies and insights to help you navigate and lead successful change initiatives. Listen in to learn fresh ideas and perspectives from a variety of industries, and gain the tools and knowledge you need to lead transformation with confidence. Explore our episodes at www.theinnergameofchange.com.au, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Youtube or anywhere you listen to your podcasts.
The Inner Game of Change
E82 - Reimagining ADKAR: The Evolution of The Change Model
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Welcome to The Inner Game of Change, the podcast that explores the evolving landscape of change management, leadership, and transformation.
In this episode, I’m joined by the remarkable Karen Ball, Senior Fellow at Prosci and author of The ADKAR Advantage: Your New Lens for Successful Change. Released in April 2024, Karen’s book offers a fresh and practical take on navigating change by embracing the power of the Prosci ADKAR Model.
With over 40 years of experience, Karen has helped countless individuals and organisations unlock the real benefits of successful change—both professionally and personally. As a seasoned change advisor, instructor, and CCMP™ professional, she brings a wealth of knowledge, energy, and passion to the conversation.
Today, we’ll unpack Karen’s insights from her book, explore why the ADKAR lens is more relevant than ever, and hear some real-world lessons from her extensive journey in the field of change.
I am grateful to have Karen chatting with me today.
About Karen
Karen Ball is author of "The ADKAR Advantage: Your New Lens for Successful Change", a Prosci publication released in April 2024. Her passion through the book is to help individuals and organizations realize the benefits of successful change, personally and professionally, by looking at change through the lens of the Prosci ADKAR Model.
Karen is a Senior Fellow at Prosci. Previously, she served as Prosci’s Executive Vice President of Research, Product and Marketing. She is a Certified Change Management Professional™ (CCMP™), Prosci executive instructor, and change advisor with over 40 years of professional experience. As a public speaker, Karen frequently shares her passion for all things ADKAR and change management in webinars, customer presentations, podcasts, and conference keynotes.
Contacts
Karen’s Profile
Ali Juma
@The Inner Game of Change podcast
Follow me on LinkedIn
So the model itself hasn't changed. What has changed is all of the different ways that we contextualize ADKAR. So, whether it's project milestones you mentioned waterfall versus agile, where you can have knowledge and ability outcomes at each release or sprint you can embed ADKAR from a milestone project planning perspective. You can also use it as a diagnostic framework to go back and examine what went wrong and what can we do better the next time. So I think it's more in the applications of ADKAR and going way beyond right.
Speaker 2If it's an onion, you're just peeling back all of Welcome to the Inner Game of Change, the podcast that explores the evolving landscape of change management, leadership and transformation. I am your host, ali Juma. In this episode, I am joined by the remarkable Karen Ball, senior Fellow at ProSci and author of the Ad Car Advantage your New Lens for Successful Change. Released in April 2024, karen's book offers a fresh and practical take on navigating change by embracing the power of the ProSci Ad Car model.
Speaker 2With over 40 years of experience, karen has helped countless individuals and organizations unlock the real benefits of successful change, both professionally and personally. As a seasoned change advisor, instructor and CCMP professional, Karen brings a wealth of knowledge, energy and passion to the conversation. To the conversation Today, we will unpack Karen's insights from her book, explore why the Ad Car lens is more relevant than ever and hear some real-world lessons from her extensive journey in the field of change. I am grateful to have Karen chatting with me today. Well, karen, thank you so much for joining me in the In a Game of Change podcast. I'm grateful for your time today.
Speaker 1Thank you, I'm so pleased to be here. Appreciate it.
Speaker 2Thank you so much, karen. So lovely to get another professional from the ProSci Institute and we're going to talk about the ad car reimagined I suppose I can say that and that's you, based on your new book. But before we start talking about the book and the content and you which which angle you're tackling, it would be fantastic for you to introduce yourself to my audience.
Speaker 1Sure, thank you. Well, it's such a pleasure to be here and to your listeners. You know there's so many amazing topics that you've covered through the years, and I know one of the things that comes up often when you talk to people in the discipline of change or change management is what is everybody's origin story coming into this discipline? Many of us have found our way to this discipline from another path and, for myself, I was spending time in the information technology space working with a systems integrator who was out there developing and delivering, you know, multimillion dollar solutions for organizations to help them manage their information more effectively, and I kept getting tripped up by what I saw was a significant problem across all industries and across all organizations, which is so much attention was paid to the solutions and the way the solutions were being developed and delivered, and time and attention was not given to the people to prepare them for those solutions, to help them come alongside and I actually called it end user advocacy. I didn't even know what it, what the discipline was. I just knew that there was a big missing hole, which is how do we support people through those train change journeys that they have to go on when they work with an organization who is in continuous improvement or responsive to challenges that sit in their marketplaces or their industries.
Speaker 1So I got introduced to change management and I knew that was the place I belonged, because I am such such an empathic conductor for people who are impacted by change.
Speaker 1And then you added structure and discipline and research and knowledge and understanding and learning that the change is can be modeled and successful change can be modeled and repeated. So when I found change management, I knew I found my home, and I've been working in the discipline of change management since 2006, working with just about every industry, lots of different types of changes, and I joined ProSci in 2016 as I was using and leveraging almost all of the full suite of models and methodology and tools from ProSci and I really found that they were the most applicable and accessible and effective, and so I joined ProSci and have been part of the product team, the executive team and then, over the last year and a half, had an opportunity to rewrite or provide an update to the original ADKAR book that was written in 2006. So I find myself here from an IT background and, of course, the focus is on people and the adoption side of the story.
Speaker 2I think we all come from different backgrounds and we usually land in this beautiful discipline. Let's talk about your book. You looked at the book that was published in 2006, and then you decided that it's time for a revision, an upgrade, a new way of looking at this. And this is a precise attempt to upgrade, to make the framework more relevant to the current situation. So just walk us through very quickly about your journey around writing the book.
Speaker 1Yeah, you know it was gosh. You know, anybody who's written a book has stories to tell. But it was an opportunity. You know the first book, the first book, was published in 2006. And Jeff Hyatt, who is ProSci's founder and actually the creator of the ProSci AgCar model it was his first publication to fully disclose, unpack, describe, apply all of the different ways that he was bringing the AgCar model to life. And, of course, almost 20 years has passed since he wrote that first book.
Speaker 1And what has happened since Jeff published the ADKAR book in 2006 is, of course, we want to continue to amplify the promise of ADKAR, the promise of having an individual model that allows people to make sense of change and to find their way through change at the individual level. There's also, you know, the proof of ADKAR. There's been almost 20 years of demonstrated benefit in organizations around the world. So when I was preparing the book, I wanted certainly to introduce ProSci's new research as a research organization. There's lots of new validations or extensions of ADCAR from a research perspective, but the promise is all about the outcomes and what people are realizing as a result inside of the proof and the evidence.
Speaker 1So, from promise to proof and I collected stories in the book. So I reached out to ProSci customers and clients around the world. There's over 50 AgCar stories, 20 countries, six continents, just about everywhere around the world, lots of different industries to have people share their outcomes of applying AgCar, both individually and organizationally, personally and professionally. So the proof and the examples and the success stories are critical. And then, of course, the practice. We wanted to take more extension around how change practitioners leverage recommendations and guidance to help lead and guide organizations through those individual change journeys. So I'd say what's new, better, different in the update is more around the promise, the proof and the practice.
Speaker 2That's a huge undertaking for you to go around and ask for stories and validations and you would have heard the good stories. What would be some of the misconceptions that you've come across?
Speaker 1you know, when you talk about ADKAR to practitioners and non-practitioners, yeah, that's a great question and I think you know one of the things that's a clarifying point that we continue to talk about. I hear lots of people say the ADKAR methodology. We follow the ADKAR methodology. Well, actually, adkar is a model and, just for your listeners who may not be familiar, it is an acronym and it stands for awareness, desire, knowledge, ability and reinforcement. And when Jeff was originally imagining this, what he was doing, it was interesting. He was studying the change patterns inside of organizations in the late 1990s and he was fascinated by the question of why do some changes succeed and other changes fail. So he started researching he's an engineer, so the question was really challenging to him. So he looked at change patterns across oh gosh, 700 organizations over four years and started coming to, you know, the pattern spotting Anytime you look at a significant amount of data and information, and what he discovered is that the secret to successful change is in how we support every single person who's impacted by change, going through their own change journey, and that's what ADKAR represents is the individual model for change. And then, as a methodology, it sits inside of the pro-sign methodology, which is a three phase process that goes into greater detail about engagement and preparing an approach and looking at the risk of a change from a people perspective, articulating you know how to engage senior leaders and people managers and to do communications and training, and then assessing whether or not the change is successful and adapting as you go along the way. So ADKAR one of the misconceptions is ADKAR is a methodology and that's all there is, but it's actually the model. It's a model that describes the individual change process and it helps us make sense of change and it helps us know if the things that we're doing are working. Know if the things that we're doing are working. So it informs what to do, who should be doing it, what we should say, how we should engage, and then we can measure our accomplishment through an ADKAR journey and determine if it's working. So again, I continue to the words sense making right.
Speaker 1Adkar helps us make sense of change at the individual level and its way finding, so we can scan and act Right. We can scan and say, oh gosh, everybody's really not able to articulate very clearly why a particular change is needed. We need to go back and make sure our communications are from the right senders with the right messages, hitting people at the right times with the right information to help them go through awareness at the very beginning of the model. So that's one of the misconceptions. So the other thing is it's you know, it's all we need.
Speaker 1Adcar is the helper model, I think of it. So if you're going on a hike right, and we're doing a big hike, you might need a compass right to keep you on path. So ADCAR is like a compass. But if you're doing a big, complex hike, it'd probably be useful to also have a trail guide and a map. Right, maybe you need a topography that tells you what the elevations are across the hike. So ADCAR keeps us continuously pointed in the right direction. But we incorporate lots of other elements in the process of change management to make sure we're getting to the destination of our hike, which is the end where successful change is found.
Speaker 2I want to ask you a question around what is the adverse effect of people calling it a methodology rather than a model?
Speaker 1Yeah, I think they lose some of the nuance of its context. Right, in a simple change, just articulating an ad card journey can be quite useful to determine awareness. We just communicate. Why why now? What if we don't? We just communicate. Why why now? What if we don't?
Speaker 1Desire is about the personal choice that every person makes to come alongside a change, right to of leaders, engagement of key influencers, communication, training, integration with change agent networks, all of the different levers that we might pull inside of a change strategy or set of change management plans. That ADKAR is our compass to keep us on track. So I think it's just, you know, adkar works. You know, in an individual change, working with a personal scenario. Right, adkar is quite powerful, but I think it's just the intensity of taking it into the discipline of change management and how much more we are able to focus our time and attention on the right things at the right time to deliver the outcomes that we're trying to achieve. So it's just the difference of a compass that keeps us on point and right in direction versus all of the other supporting resources that might surround ADKAR to accomplish a particular change and deliver outcomes to an individual or an organization.
Speaker 2And from the number of interviews and interactions that you've had with the clients over the years. I want to ask you two questions. One is that where have you seen ADCA being applied and you thought this is really a creative way of applying ADCA? And the second question, I suppose, is where would most organizations struggle, you know, is it in the awareness? Is it from the knowledge to ability that transfer? The microphone is yours.
Speaker 1Yeah. So to your first question, right, some really creative examples of ADKAR application. As I said, you know, I collected, you know, over 50 stories coming into the creation of the book and I was going through and reading them and it was quite fascinating how people had done, you know, in different countries with cultural adaptations. There was one, an organization in Japan that you know again, culturally things are different for businesses inside of Japan versus some other countries. So the way that they developed a grassroots effort around a particular set of changes and it was employee driven they felt like they weren't able to connect all the dots, if you will, between lots of different changes that were going on. So they started, you know, crowdsourcing information from lots of different sources so that it became people impacted by change, helping other people impacted by change versus a top down approach. So it was very interesting. It was all around, you know, awareness of why, why? Now, what if we don't? Most of them were fully engaged in trying to support the changes and then getting the knowledge and ability tasks.
Speaker 1There's another organization that decided not to introduce the language of ADKAR. They didn't want to create the common language that's so frequently adopted across organizations, because they just didn't want to have to go and talk to every person in the organization, leveraging ADKAR as the language, but yet they took the steps of ADKAR without describing it. So, for example, they talked about a workshop that they delivered for lots of people who were impacted by a significant change, and they had everybody's mark on a poster. You know, oh, I'm fully, I'm fully aware of why this change is happening, or I have chosen to participate and to come alongside this change. I know how to do what I'm being asked to do. And people were just marking each of those and little did they know they were actually doing an ad car assessment so that the people who were implementing that change could step back and go. Oh my gosh, an awful lot of people are not understanding why they were doing this and haven't chosen participate. We've got awareness and desire barriers. So then they went back and focused on, you know, filling the gaps and making sure they were delivering the information that was needed to help everybody through those two critical aspects. Because it's a sequential model, you know, if you don't have awareness and desire, you know it's. It's not email on Monday for training on Tuesday, for go live on Wednesday, where you give people a chance to to understand the change, come alongside it and then develop their knowledge and ability to reinforce it. There's an organization that's in there. It's a pharma, you know, a global pharmaceuticals organization with 50,000 people impacted by they said gosh almost 1500 digital migrations into a completely new technical platform and they completely architected that change effort through the lens of ADCAR. They described every impacted group's change journey and activated all of the steps and actions around ADKAR journeys.
Speaker 1So, you know, quite large and complex, all the way down to individual change. There's a story in the book of a gentleman by the name of Graham who taught himself to swim in his 30s. His wife challenged him that that was a life skill she wanted him to have as they were stepping into parenthood, and so he tells a funny story about going through his own learning journey of learning how to swim with awareness and desire. And so much of it was the knowledge to ability going, you know, being you know, knowing what you're supposed to do to swim but being able to swim are two different things. And then, of course, reinforcement having that skill and keeping up that skill. So lots of different stories, lots of different examples.
Speaker 1I think the common pattern in all of this is that ADKAR allows us to make change, which can be quite complex complex at the organizational level and it makes it personal and individual, and that's why so many change practitioners work with the ADKAR models. It's simple to describe it. It resonates with people because it captures the essence of what truly is the process of change. It's also very actionable and it builds a lot of confidence. You know your question about where do people get stuck Most of the time. Well, lots of the times that I'm doing ADKAR journeys for personal change, we teach ADKAR through applying it to a personal change a friend, a family member, a neighbor, a colleague, someone in our close circle who's struggling with a change, and oftentimes, when you put it in the context of a personal change, people come back with desire as the hardest step right.
Speaker 1The choice that we all make to participate and engage in a change and that's because you know what needs to, needs to be clear is what are, you know, how does this resonate with me? My personal motivators, what's in it for me? What is the reason that I want to choose to participate in this change? Inside of organizations A lot of times, the barrier or the place where people get stuck or we encounter a lot of resistance, is right at awareness, because organizations aren't necessarily great at articulating why for a change?
Speaker 1Not that a change is happening. Right, we're going to implement a new ERP system. Right, why are we implementing this system? You know what are the organizational benefits, what are the project objectives? Why should I want to come alongside this change in support of the health of the organization? So desire often shows up in personal changes as the barrier, but a lot of times it's awareness right at the front end of the AgCar model and once we unlock that, you know, it's very clear what the steps are and what people need and how you can support them through their AgCar journeys and the tailored interventions that come out of it. If I've got a particular employee, for example, who just isn't really it isn't connecting and they're not coming alongside the change, you can go in with very specific coaching conversations and find those interventions to help them through their ADKAR journey.
Speaker 2And these interventions are very critical because ADKAR is not a linear process. So sometimes you create an awareness and you think you've informed everyone. And then you do some pulse check, sense making, and then you discover that you probably need to go back to the awareness and create that Because organizations change, especially when you're driven by lots of complex things happening within the organization. My personal experience, karen, is that and I always think that that is a good test of a good change management practitioner is that jump from the knowledge to ability. Do I want, do I know what I need to do? Yes, I know. Do I know how to do it?
Speaker 2And unfortunately that is usually sacrificed because, um, because a project is good at timeline, they've got a budget, they've got a scope, you know that they need to finish. So there's always this tension between the challenge managers trying to do to to spend more time to you, time to bridge that gap, and then you've got the project managers saying we've got only two weeks to do that. And my counsel has always been we need to be fully aware between what learning is and what training is, and then the application of all of these, and that's where the secret. So I always think that most of my observations anyway, working with other change managers, is that we pretty much are okay with the awareness and create what's in it for the people, but unfortunately sometimes we move very quickly away through that particular period or those two stages of the model and because we move very quickly and then we spend very minimum time in reinforcement and then we leave it and then, as you and I would know, and that's the problem right.
Speaker 1I mean, the change is actually real when it's happening. Right Up to that point I can only imagine, right, I went to training and I learned what I'm supposed to know, how to do, but just because I know how doesn't mean I'm able. And that knowledge to ability gap is one that we see organizations push far too quickly through and just as you've said, right, well, what about the time to do that? We've got new measurement, we've got new performance criteria. You know whether it's a mindset or a process or a tool, or you know there's, there's an adoption piece that happens after the changes is instantiate, right, it's very real to me what's what's happening.
Speaker 1And what I'd say is if you don't do that work right, if you don't do the work of filling the gap from knowledge to ability and that could be a very small gap or it could be, you know, quite large, depending on the nature of the change you're going to pay for it somehow, right, you're going to have less than complete adoption. You're going to have people pushing back and demonstrating resistance and and sometimes even, you know, trying to sabotage the change itself because they're not able to do what they're being asked to do. So you'll pay for it some way, you know, through a rework or relaunch or redo or retreat, where we retreat from the change because there's so much demonstrated pushback, and and then you just create more of a history of failed change back, and then you just create more of a history of failed change. And that's one of the things that makes me, you know, sad for organizations when they don't do the right things and they continue to create this history of failed change which erodes trust, and trust is really hard to regain once it's eroded.
Speaker 1So, yeah, to just sit down and figure out what is the knowledge to ability gap and how are we going to support people, and we can be quite creative, you know, with coaching or peer influences or time away from desk work to get into learning mode. What you said, you know educating somebody and then understanding and learning are two different things. Telling and applying are two different things. So it's an intentional step in the process and one that we know is critical to successful outcomes, because, you know, the ROI of a change comes from ability, not from training. Right? It's once people are able to work in the new environment that we actually get the benefits of the change that's being introduced.
Speaker 2Where would you see? Usually resistance heightens up.
Speaker 1Yeah, and that happens right. We know from research that you know, resistance peaks at a dot at the time of go live, whatever the go live event is, because that's when everything feels quite real. But I'd also say we really, you know, at ProSag we've been doing a lot of reframing, especially with, you know, the new extension of demonstrating ADKAR in use and in practice and the benefits and results is to think about ADKAR as your tool for change readiness. That will eliminate a significant amount of the resistance that could occur or would occur otherwise. So instead of talking about change resistance, it's so much more positive to talk about change readiness.
Speaker 1And the reason people get resistant to change is they weren't made ready for those changes. So readiness versus resistance is a great conversion. And then, once you see resistance happening, you can get to the root cause and say, well, it could be on the technical side of the change. You know the solution that's being implemented may miss the mark. Right, the requirements weren't defined correctly, or the solution that was developed, the process, the system, the role, clarity that we intended just didn't land, whatever it is. So then you can just get to that emergent resistance and so much of what we could have smoothed the process from the current state to the future state occurs by intentionally helping everyone through those ad card journeys.
Speaker 2Talking about the emerging resistance and it's actually a very valid topic I want to ask you, maybe bordering on a philosophical question Is it in our nature, Karen, to resist change anyway, regardless of what you do? Is that part of who we are as humans?
Speaker 1You know resistance to change is something that you know you can talk to psychologists, neuroscientists. You can talk at the psychology of change you know people talk about. You know fight and flight and the things that feel very threatening to us. Right, and, and a threat could just be a threat to my knowledge base. It could be a threat to my ego. It could be a threat to, um, you know where I see myself in the future, because the organization's going in a path that I didn't plan for when I was mapping out what my journey was going to look like. So there's lots of places it can derive from, and I and I, and there's always going to be something that's natural about resistance. You know it is one of those you know as humans, right, at any time we're being feel, feeling any sense of threat, right, there's a fight or flight response to that. But I think that we're also quite capable of putting the logic around why resistance might occur and figuring out how to head it off before it does.
Speaker 1And I've been involved in many large scale change journeys where you know the day that the change is live, right, let's just say it's a systems change and we're turning on new tools and going live with a replacement platform of technology and all of a sudden you're looking around waiting for the resistance to come up and it just doesn't.
Speaker 1Because we engaged people in the process. They had input into the design of the solution. They gave us the opportunity to share what they were most concerned about early in the process and we went to root cause and mitigation early in the process. And we went to root cause and mitigation early in the cycles and we gave them the language to ask for what they needed in the change process. And all of those things lend themselves to an incredibly smooth introduction of change. And, of course, things are going to pop up and you're going to have unanticipated results or responses or somebody has been sitting in the sideline waiting for something to go wrong and pouncing on it. But that's where you engage your leaders and you engage your people managers and give them the skills to coach people and to help them. You know, be the be the resistance managers at the front line.
Speaker 1But you know, I'm not one to believe that, you know, resistance can completely be eliminated, but it sure can be mitigated and managed throughout the process.
Speaker 2My personal belief is that, of course, they're going to have to be suspicious about the change. That is normal. That's natural, in fact, if I've got complete apathy to change, if I've got complete apathy to change, then I should be worried, I would too right.
Speaker 1If it's too quiet, then people aren't listening right when they're responding and they've been giving the safety of speaking up and there's a culture of listening and understanding what their concerns are. That is so culture building. It is so resonating to people to feel like their voice matters and to be part of the process and, after all, really that's that's what we all want, right? We want to be appreciated and to be part of the process and know that our voice matters and that I'm bringing something to this conversation. I see something that others don't and I love those conversations. To me, those are the places where you find you find the little, the little cracks that if we can hit them now, right, the end product is going to be so much better. But if it's too quiet, to me that's that's a warning sign that they're waiting or they're not paying attention.
Speaker 2Yeah, yeah, talking about management and I think you mentioned that in your response how important is it to educate management on the ADKAR model?
Speaker 1Yeah, it's, it's. It's critical. Putting you know, it's two different things. Right ADKAR introduces a mindset that we can describe the individual change process. It's back to sense, making. Right. Adcar makes change, make sense, and it's so simple in its elegance of clarity around each of the milestones that ADCAR describes.
Speaker 1Adcar is an outcome, it's not an activity. Awareness is an outcome, not an activity. Communication is the activity. Awareness is the outcome. Training, not an activity. Communication is the activity. Awareness is the outcome. Training is an activity. Knowledge is the outcome. Coaching is an activity. Ability and reinforcement are the outcomes.
Speaker 1So, to put that into the, oh my gosh, I've seen some of the most amazing coaching conversations through the lens of ADCAR. Do you know why this change is happening? Yes, I'm fully on board. Have you chosen to participate? Yes, I get it. I understand the benefits to the organization and what's in it for me. Do you have the knowledge that you need? Yes, I do. I feel comfortable. What about ability? And I go? You know there's a problem there. Right, I was the subject matter expert on the software we're shutting down. I'm really threatened by that. How can we step me into that role in the new environment?
Speaker 1And the people manager now has a place to have a really purposeful conversation with very specific interventions for a particular person. So it's mindset and tool set and it's one of those things that just becomes intuitive, right. I can look at a situation and immediately assess the sponsors not engaged or the people managers don't know how to support their people and the people in the organization don't want the change practitioner or the project leaders to do that work. They want their own managers or supervisors to come alongside them. You know it's like I walk in and they go who are you and why are you here? But I can sit down with that people leader and say if you do this conversation or you look at the challenge through the lens of ADCAR, look what's available to you, right, you can see what it is, you can look around and it can make sense. You can engage with others in the organization with the common language and the common understanding of that individual change process.
Speaker 1And what I've heard in senior leaders you know, middle line managers, front line managers is how how much confidence it boosts and how efficient it is that you don't get lost in the tangential things around change but you have very purposeful conversations and you give people a chance to engage in a way that they feel seen and heard, but also it's in the intention of helping them through the process. So it's quite useful and to me, you know, universally it should be part of you know management training programs to introduce this. I do sponsor briefings and I do people manager training and and at car, you know, people just resonate so quickly and I get emails all the time. I did one last week for a bunch of a group of people leaders and the response was ADCAR is so empowering for me and my leadership role. So I think it should be universal. It teaches us to see things differently and to respond differently.
Speaker 2And that's. I think you mentioned the idea that a challenge manager becomes the coach for the manager of the team, because we need them to be on board. They will be the one sharing the messages, not us. Yes, and I want to shift gear and I want to ask you about and, by the way, I just want to for clarification that ADCA applies in an agile methodology and the normal, you know, waterfall methodology whatever that is actually applies. It applies as an individual, at a team level, at an organizational level. I'm testing my knowledge here, karen, but I want to share with you something that I've been experimenting with and please give me critique my work. I've been using generative AI nowadays to help me co-pilot in Microsoft, to actually help me with my planning, with looking at what areas perhaps I need to, you know, analyze more and pay attention to more. Is that a conversation that you started to hear nowadays about?
Speaker 1Absolutely, and you know precise early development. Already we have an engine called Kaya that leverages our over 25 years of research in this space and you know, the amazing thing is it, it does. It's like the first draft. So if I'm going to be doing a briefing with a sponsor, you know I've got a client next week. I'm going to be working with that. I've been told the client sponsor, the senior leader, sees the value of change management, but they just don't really understand their role in change management.
Speaker 1What is it that I need to do? So I can, you know, look at, you know the research and go to Kaya or the generative AI tools and say what are the key points, what are the three things I should tell a senior leader about the importance of their role, of being an effective sponsor of change? And immediately it's research based. I get you know three answers quickly and then I can look at it and say, ok, now, in this context, do those make sense? So I feel like the fast first right, the fast first draft. You know, build me a two hour workshop for people leaders and what should be on the agenda. Boom, boom, boom. You know, you have a two hour workshop for people leaders and what should be on the agenda. Boom, boom, boom. You know you have to introduce that car. You need to talk about their role, you know. You know all the things that we know from our research and our and our practice.
Speaker 1So I feel like it's you know, it's like an intern sitting there next to me I can say hey, you know, run me a quick first draft and then I can use my knowledge and intuition and my context. Right, we have to take it into the context of an organization. So what is the culture of the organization? What is the history of that particular senior leader? What is the style of people engagement inside of an organization? Are there key influencers I can reach out to? I mean, those are where my knowledge and intuition kick in. But absolutely I can get a fast first draft of you know, steps and actions. That's research informed. That helps me. You know, focus on the intuition side versus on the building side. Does that make sense?
Speaker 2Thoroughly love the idea of a fast first. I'll use that actually today, karen, so thank you for that. You're welcome. Of a fast first. I'll use that actually today, karen, so thank you for that. Actually, actually, sometimes generative AI can give you the fast second as well, so if you're paying with it, the second right answer.
Speaker 1Right, because once you get to that place of intuition and you can say tell me more here. Right, I want to push into this nuance or this pattern, but it's telling me what it knows from the body that it's been given. So sometimes the collection of what it's reacting to isn't everything that it needs Because, again, there's so many disciplines that come into play, there's so many adjacencies to change work in other disciplines, that again, that's where you could sit down with a team of people and say here's our fast first or our even better second, and then you put your intuition and your knowledge against it and you end up with a really good outcome from that process.
Speaker 2My application recently was when I had a first meeting with a project group and I was able to obviously summarize the meeting using generative AI and I questioned, based on all the transcription, I've asked Co-Pilot, which is a Microsoft application based on the ADCA model, to really highlight where the issue is, and it's actually giving me good rationale around. Awareness is probably okay, but somebody mentioned this and Ali mentioned this, and, based on all of those nuances, I've got a case to think. Well, perhaps I need to focus on what's in it for them, and this is what's going to come back in my communication Again, when I emphasize the point that you mentioned. The context is important and that's where we come, as a human, in the loop when it comes to generative AI.
Speaker 1Absolutely, because the culture is the culture of an organization.
Speaker 1You know, I've worked in so many different organizations over the years and sometimes the culture is quite hierarchical and other times that is much more collaborative. And if I'm in a hierarchical, top down driven scenario, I'm going to recommend different tactics than if it's in a very, you know, collaborative. Then if it's in a very, you know collaborative and you know a tactic in a collaborative environment is to get people together and, you know, do the problem solving and the pattern spotting as a team versus trying to help a leader of an organization, do that cascade Right and top down. We have to be an effective cascade, you know scenario Right. We have to have the tactics to cascade the message versus, you know, delivering the co-created solutions. So context is critical and I think the AI tools are going to be amazing aids to us in the process to free up that research time, thinking time and put it into the more you know intuition, application and what we do, you know, day to day to fit inside of the context that we're working in.
Speaker 2I love this. Thank you, I am aware of time. There is a question that I want to ask you. What would be your advice to me? I've been in the business of change for quite a while. What would be your advice for people like me to rethink and maybe revise the way we look at ADKAR from where you sit?
Speaker 1Yeah, I mean. What I know to be true and this is, you know, bears out in research and in application is the five elements of ADKAR have not changed since Jeff Hyatt imagined the model and articulated it in the 1990s, and the reason is it is the description of that individual change process. It is the process that every single one of us goes through to adopt and sustain a change. So the model itself hasn't changed. What has changed is all of the different ways that we contextualize ADKAR. So, whether it's project milestones you mentioned waterfall versus agile where you can have knowledge and ability outcomes at each release or sprint you can embed ad car from you know, a milestone project planning perspective. You can also use it as a diagnostic framework to go back and examine what went wrong and what can we do better the next time.
Speaker 1So I think it's more in the applications of adAR and going way beyond right. If it's an onion, you're just peeling back all of the layers and you know, even to the point where we think of ADKAR, as you know, the building of change capability and to build change capability through the lens of ADKAR, because we have a current state, we have a future state, we have people who are impacted. We have the journeys. So I would say you know it's just continue to push into the applications and you know it continues to be true, it continues to grow in relevance and use because it does represent what happens in reality and it makes it such an actionable framework. So I'd say, you know, when you're ready and people are ready to go deeper than the individual model, you know, start looking at all the advanced applications of Adcar.
Speaker 2I love this. I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation, Karen. How would people connect with you?
Speaker 1Yeah, the best way to contact with me, you know. Connect with me, you can, you know, for information on ProSci, of course, reach out to you know, proscicom. I'm available to be connected in LinkedIn. That's my sweet spot for where I spend my time and spend most of my professional connections. So it's KarenBall26 at LinkedIn and I'd love for people to reach out and ask these deep dive questions. The more we think about this together, the better outcomes we're all going to achieve.
Speaker 2I love that, and you mentioned the word outcome so many times, so congratulations. You got your message loud and clear during the podcast. I hope I can get you back, karen, in the future at some stage and talk more about the advancement of the model and the applications in particular and the stories. But until next time, stay well and stay safe, karen, and thank you so much for your time.
Speaker 1Thanks, ali, great spending time with you.
Speaker 2Thank you very much. Thank you for joining me on the Inner Game of change. I hope today's conversation offered you something to reflect on, something to challenge or something to carry forward in your journey of change and growth. As always, I'm grateful for your time, your curiosity and your willingness to explore the inner game that shapes the outer impact. I will leave you with this thought Change is hard at first, messy in the middle and gorgeous at the end. That's what Robin Sharma said. Until next time, take care and keep leading with courage and curiosity.
Speaker 1The focus is on the simplification of the language. Right. The way to get something out to more people is it needs to make sense. Right. And then it needs to be useful. Right, usable and useful. And that's what we know to be true. Ad car is incredibly usable and useful and you know we're better off with it than we would be without.
.JPG)