ADKAR is a change management model that focuses on guiding individuals through the change process. The acronym stands for:
• Awareness: Understanding the need for change.
• Desire: The willingness to support and participate in the change.
• Knowledge: Knowing how to change and what the change entails.
• Ability: Having the skills and behaviors to implement the change.
• Reinforcement: Ensuring the change sticks and is sustained over time.
The model is used in organizational change initiatives, helping leaders and teams manage transitions effectively by addressing the human side of change.
Karen Ball has been using ADKAR in her work, while raising her children, and navigating her own personal desire to change. She is the SME of ADKAR. That might be too many acronyms :) however, this episode lays out how ADKAR works and how you can adopt these change management strategies, systems, and smarts into your life, career, and business too!
In this episode, you’ll hear:
• All about the ADKAR Model originally developed by Jeff Hiatt
• Stories of How Individuals and Businesses have Effectively Used ADKAR
• The Reality that CHANGE Happens One Person at a Time
• Strategies about How you Can Influence Your Organization’s Change
• And, Ultimately How you Can Shift your Organization into a CHANGE AGENCY full of CHANGE AGENTS
I am grateful to Karen Ball for sharing her wealth of knowledge and passion for Change Management. Her insights on change readiness, gaining sponsors for your change, and leaders modeling the role of change agent are sure to inspire HR professionals and leaders alike to BUILD A Vibrant Culture.
ADKAR is a change management model that focuses on guiding individuals through the change process. The acronym stands for:
• Awareness: Understanding the need for change.
• Desire: The willingness to support and participate in the change.
• Knowledge: Knowing how to change and what the change entails.
• Ability: Having the skills and behaviors to implement the change.
• Reinforcement: Ensuring the change sticks and is sustained over time.
The model is used in organizational change initiatives, helping leaders and teams manage transitions effectively by addressing the human side of change.
Karen Ball has been using ADKAR in her work, while raising her children, and navigating her own personal desire to change. She is the SME of ADKAR. That might be too many acronyms :) however, this episode lays out how ADKAR works and how you can adopt these change management strategies, systems, and smarts into your life, career, and business too!
In this episode, you’ll hear:
• All about the ADKAR Model originally developed by Jeff Hiatt
• Stories of How Individuals and Businesses have Effectively Used ADKAR
• The Reality that CHANGE Happens One Person at a Time
• Strategies about How you Can Influence Your Organization’s Change
• And, Ultimately How you Can Shift your Organization into a CHANGE AGENCY full of CHANGE AGENTS
I am grateful to Karen Ball for sharing her wealth of knowledge and passion for Change Management. Her insights on change readiness, gaining sponsors for your change, and leaders modeling the role of change agent are sure to inspire HR professionals and leaders alike to BUILD A Vibrant Culture.
Don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe to the Build a Vibrant Culture podcast for more insights on creating thriving workplaces!
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Nicole:
Welcome everybody to the build a vibrant culture podcast. My name is Nicole Greer and they call me the vibrant coach. And I am so glad you're here at the podcast. We've got another amazing guest today. Her name is Karen Ball, and she is the author of this, the ADKAR advantage.
Nicole:
And if you don't know about ADKAR, you are asleep at the wheel. You should know all about this model. And today, Karen Ball is gonna unpack it. But let me tell you all about her. Karen Ball is a senior fellow at pro site for over 40 years.
Nicole:
She has helped individuals and organizations implement effective change. Don't miss that. That's a lot of years of effective change people, And she helps them figure out the benefits not thought possible. Carrie often shares her passion for all things ADKAR and change management and webinars, customer presentations, podcasts, and conference keynotes.
Nicole:
Welcome to the show, Karen. I'm so glad you're here, and thank you for my present you sent.
Karen Ball:
No. You're welcome. Thanks, Nicole, for having me.
Nicole:
No. We're so glad you're here. So tell us
Nicole:
a little bit about how you got to Prosci, and then tell us a little bit about Prosci.
Karen Ball:
Yeah. Thanks. I appreciate the opportunity to share. You know, it's so funny. We all look back on our careers, and I'm 40 years in to my professional career.
Karen Ball:
So I started as a very young child.
Nicole:
12 years old, and she's using some kind of cream. We'll put it in the show notes. Okay.
Karen Ball:
We look back, and there's, like, markers in all of our professional careers. Right? Those moments where we imagine a different future. We think about what really fascinates us, what we're most curious about. And I started my professional career in the information technology industry.
Karen Ball:
So I was working across multiple vendors who sold technology, and then I went to work with the systems integrator who sold technology. And every time I looked at it, I I imagined that there was a possible different future for the people who were impacted by the technologies we were implementing. So these were large scale, you know, large strategic implementations, multimillion dollar investments. And I always called myself an end user advocate because I was always so concerned about the people who were being impacted by the technology implementations. Now, of course, the organizations who were buying them had very solid business reasons.
Karen Ball:
A lot of the technology was compliance driven. I worked a lot in oil and gas industry and highly regulated industries where compliance of information was critical. But at the end of the day, if each person who is touched by the technology doesn't know how to do their work or how it's going to be impacted, Those many multi $1,000,000 investments are are oftentimes suboptimized significantly. So I was sitting at a client site many years ago in Boise, Idaho, and it's so funny. Again, these markers, what are those markers?
Karen Ball:
And I remember the day and the weather and the conversations and everything that was happening. The client had brought Prosci in to do some professional development for their people leaders. And they said, well, you know, we're gonna be in this training all afternoon once you join us. You know, me, I'm always open for learning anything new.
Nicole:
Right. That was a little Christmas present.
Karen Ball:
It was a Christmas present. And I sat there that day thinking, oh my goodness. Right. There is a process and a discipline and an organization who is really focused on the same things I cared about. So the connection was almost immediate, both with the people who were there, but I realized that there was a discipline called change management.
Karen Ball:
I had never put my thinking around, and that was in 2006. So it was early enough in the professional progression of discipline of change management that a lot of people weren't using those words. So that's how I, that's how I found my way to prosci is all of a sudden there was an unlock for something I cared about. And that was not only helping the organizations who were implementing the technology to realize the benefits of their investments, but to help every single one of those people who was impacted by change to have a more successful transition. So that's how I found prosci.
Karen Ball:
And over the course of the following years, I just dove in head first and learned about the discipline and started to change management practice and really started developing my professional acumen in that space. So that's where I've been since the late 2000 and for almost 20 years now, I'll be stepping into this space, and I'll stay in this space. So it really is purpose driven.
Nicole:
Mhmm. That's fantastic. So don't don't miss that little thing she just dropped at the end, everybody. Like, this is her mission in life is to help people change and to help organizations put this change. And she said it's a process and a discipline, so don't miss that.
Nicole:
Great businesses have awesome processes, and they have awesome discipline. That's how you that's how you make the profit. Alright. So, again, the book is called the AD Car Advantage, everybody, your new lens for successful change. And so I have been, like, digging around in here.
Nicole:
And part 1, you start out with, which I think is so good, exactly what she just said, how one person makes a change. So the end user of the change or the person that has to actually rubber hits the road, make the change happen. So will you talk a little bit about how one person makes a change?
Karen Ball:
Yeah. It's fascinating. You know, I want to give people who haven't heard ADKAR. It tells the model to everyone. Right?
Karen Ball:
It it's actually a model and it's an acronym. So ADKAR stands for awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement. And the model itself was developed by a gentleman by the name of Jeff Hyatt in, the 19 nineties. Jeff was working for Bell Laboratories, and I always call him a curious engineer. He was so curious about why some projects succeeded and others failed.
Karen Ball:
So as an engineer, he set off to look underneath the covers and say, well, what is it about successful changes? What can we, what are the patterns? What are the differences that we hear the language, the difference that makes a difference. And what he did is he started discovering he kind of went down a path. And the first path he went down was, oh, it's resistance.
Karen Ball:
Right? It's just resistance to change. People naturally resist change, which I'm not a big believer in. I'd rather talk about readiness than resistance. People aren't made ready for change.
Karen Ball:
People aren't made ready for change. And if they're made ready for change, then of course, what we call resistance, which is a natural pushback could be mitigated or or in fact, eliminated. So Jeff settled on this path. He left Bell Laboratories and he started studying change patterns in organizations. So he spent about 4 years discovering change patterns across 700 organizations.
Karen Ball:
And he studied all of the things organizations did. And he, of course, unpacked the discipline of change management. And he said, oh, it's communications and it's training and it's people manager engagement and it's good sponsorship and it's all of these things. And what he discovered that the secret to successful change was not all of those activities. It wasn't the activities that surround change.
Karen Ball:
It was how to facilitate change with one person, because there really isn't anything called collective change. It's only the collective outcomes of all of the individual changes. So he started looking at, what are the outcomes of individual change and that's where ad car came from. So it's awareness of why the change is happening. Not that the change is happening.
Karen Ball:
Awareness of a change happening is interesting. Understanding awareness of why a change happens takes us to a different mental state. And then desire is about choosing to participate. We have to choose to participate in change. And as employees of our organizations, it's our role to help organizations continue to grow and improve so that we can continue to be successful in our disciplines.
Karen Ball:
So the knowledge, right? People have to know how to do something. And then the transition from knowledge to ability, which Nicole is one that people often miss. They think that just by telling people how will mean that they know are able. So the difference between knowing and being able is it's perfect example is me learning how to play golf.
Karen Ball:
I know how to stand and hold the club and swing the club and address the ball and all of those things, but that doesn't mean I have the ability to play good golf. And then a reinforcement, if we don't reinforce change, people have a a tendency to to revert to what they know and love, even if it's not good. Right? People go back to places that aren't always the best, but that's where they've been comfortable or they've been successful. So that's how it all started is Jeff sent out, set out on this mission to figure out what is successful change.
Karen Ball:
And, and he discovered that it's change at the individual person level and ad car is the articulation of the outcomes that we all go through. And it's so funny because if you think about any change, we become aware that we need to change and then we choose, then we know how, I mean, it's really the natural pattern and you can see it in television commercials. You can see it in individuals who have really compelling messaging. They've gone underneath the high level understanding of change and dug into it at that individual level.
Nicole:
Yeah. And so you've got stories in the book, which I am beyond excited about people being storytellers. I think that it helps us see what you're talking about. So you've got stories in the book, a whole section on stories on individual change. Could you share a story of saw how he went through the ADKAR model, but, like, for them personally?
Nicole:
And then let's maybe talk about a change that a company went through. So I know you've got stories in your pocket.
Karen Ball:
Yeah. I love, you know, the stories. And that was one of the things I was really intent on when I was started imagining the book. Prosci asked me as an executive leader of the organization to craft a new book. Jeff Hyatt wrote a book in 2006, and over time, we've got 20, almost 20 years of additional research and stories and application evidence from thousands of individuals and organizations around the world who have leveraged the pro site I car model.
Karen Ball:
So I wanted to bring stories forward. So as I was starting to craft the content for the book, for anyone who's written a book, right, starting doing your mind mapping, your outlining as I knew story had to be a part of this. Right? The compelling why comes from the storytellers, not from the, not from the data, but from the stories. So there's over 50 storytellers that I summarized in the book, 20 countries, 6 continents.
Karen Ball:
That really is a global footprint. So I started in the first part of the book to just talk about individual change, because once you understand how one person goes through change, then you can scale it to tens, to hundreds, to thousands of people, which are represented in the content. But, yeah, let me tell you a little bit about Graham. And so Graham is a gentleman in Canada who shared his personal ADKAR story. So ADKAR is both individual and organizational.
Karen Ball:
It's both personal and professional. So if you think of a little 2 by 2 grid with those as the horizontal and vertical axes, ADKAR applies in all quadrants. So Adcar came into to Graham's life as a change practitioner. And he said he was laying in bed one night and his wife said something to him about, so don't think you should learn how to swim. Well, his wife was pregnant and for whatever connection she was making that life skill of you're going to be
Nicole:
a parent, we're going to be parents. We're going to be
Nicole:
children to the beach.
Karen Ball:
Yeah. We're going to the beach and you need to know how to swim. And and Graham shares that he had kind of a traumatic experience as a child and never really learned to build that capability and competency. So he decided to take himself through the journey of being a non swimmer to being a proficient swimmer through the lens of ADKAR. And, of course, he said awareness was very high.
Karen Ball:
We actually have something called an ADKAR assessment, so we can give numbers to your levels of each of the ADKAR elements. So he said, on a scale of 5, 1 to 5, I was 4 or 5 on awareness. And then he got to desire the choice and he said, that's where he really struggled is he knew he had to choose this for himself in order to take himself through that individual change journey. So he he struggled with that and he shared that he really did have to think about it was as important to his wife and how much of a life skill. And he got to the point where he said, yeah, I choose this.
Karen Ball:
I choose to support and participate in this change. And then he went on through knowledge and ability, and he's got some great anecdotes in there about learning from a 15 year old instructor who is teaching him how to swim. And then he took multiple lessons at the same time, trying to fast track his progress. But at the end of the day, it was that knowledge to ability and being being in the water. And then of course he says at the end, reinforcing the fact that for his daughter who was born and then later a son, they can have beach vacations and they can have water experiences and he feels comfortable and confident.
Karen Ball:
So it was fun to hear him go through that story and and share the ups and downs and how the ADKAR model was really the roadmap and the template that he used for himself. There's another story of a woman named Anna Belay who was challenged to get her son, Joachim to eat broccoli. And she, he was a 6 year old and she wanted him to eat those, nutritious foods and help him do it through his own lens. And her story is one of motivation, right? What she would have as motivation as a parent to want her child to grow up with nutritious foods and become healthy.
Karen Ball:
Her son saw through the lens of being good at sports. So she turned it into his motivators, being good at sports to help him go through that transition. And what I love about that story is she talks about the 2 of them now. Shopping together and talking about food, nutrition, what an amazing conversation as a parent, right? To have those food, nutrition conversations.
Karen Ball:
Cause Joe Acam would say, will this help me be better at sports? Will I grow stronger? And so she talked about that. So, you know, those are individual stories. There's also one of Catherine who takes on a new role in an organization through the lens of ADKAR.
Karen Ball:
And, she actually got to the point where she regressed. She was progressing through her ADKAR journey and, started questioning her confidence to take on a new role. And was she able, and she kind of said, you know, maybe I'll be, maybe I'm happy where I am, but she challenged herself to go back and look at her own motivators and recollect herself and then continue on through that progression and secured the role that she really had as her dream job. So there's some great stories in there, personal and professional, individual, and organizational.
Nicole:
Yeah. That's fantastic. Yeah. And so that's, you know, what's so crazy, Karen, is I had page 73 open to Graham's story. That's the one that I had March, so I think that is so crazy.
Nicole:
Alright. And the 2 by 2 model that she's talking about is on page 72. So that's all right there in the book. Alright. So so let's just regroup.
Nicole:
So ADKAR. Right? You've got our model, and it stands for awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and what's the r?
Karen Ball:
Reinforcement.
Nicole:
Reinforcement. Okay. Very good. So we've got
Karen Ball:
Because it's ADCA. ADCA would not be a great model. Right?
Nicole:
Right.
Karen Ball:
The reinforcement is so critical. It's that sustaining at the end that keeps us right. To make sure the change sticks. A lot of individuals and organizations go through change, but they don't make the change stick. They don't do the sustainment work at the end.
Karen Ball:
Occasionally, that might mean new performance metrics. I might have different performance metrics, but if I measured against the same old, same old, then my behaviors may revert because I'm gonna go back and do what I'm rewarded for doing. So reinforcement is really a critical component of the model.
Nicole:
Yeah. Yeah. And and I think that, you know, that's another place for, employee performance management, which is the drum I've been beating for about a year now. We've got to sit down with our people, have true employee engagement, and I think that's kind of what you're saying here. And applying ADKAR to the human, you've that's part of that that one on one coaching session you have with your employee once a month to talk to them about how they're doing and checking in.
Nicole:
It's like, you know, we're gonna change the oil. We're gonna check, make sure the spark plugs are still going and everything's working inside the engine. So I love what you're saying. Okay. So the first thing, the first part of the book is about how one person makes a change, but then you multiply it and you say how groups of people make a change.
Nicole:
So we've got the 1 on 1, but now we've gotta get this department, this area, this unit changing. So tell me a little bit about that.
Karen Ball:
The yeah. The transition first of all, I wanna just reiterate one key element. This is one that Jeff Hyatt I reached out to Jeff. He's no longer in his founder role at ProSci, but I reached out to him because I would wanted him to write the foreword for the book. And, one of the things he can which he did, and it was really such a pleasure to get to meet him through this process.
Karen Ball:
But one of the things he really reinforced is that ADKAR is outcomes. So awareness is an outcome. Desire is an outcome. Knowledge is an outcome. And so is an outcome.
Karen Ball:
Desire is an outcome. Knowledge is an outcome and so on. And then we have activities that drive those outcomes. So we communicate with people to drive awareness. We engage sponsors and being role models of change to drive awareness.
Karen Ball:
We build stories, we create narrative. All of those things are intended to drive ad car outcomes. So when we think about scaling ad car, we've got outcomes. So these are the milestones, if you will. And one of the fascinating things is to embed ad car milestones.
Karen Ball:
The people side of change milestones inside of your project plans. You can build an awareness milestone where you check and see at this point in the project, how are people doing in regards to their understanding of why the change is happening? Why is it happening now? What is the risk? If we don't change what is and what isn't changing, those are the awareness messages.
Karen Ball:
So when we scale ad car, we're behaving more holistically. So if I am a manager of an organization, and there's an example in the book, let's say I've got 25 people in my customer service department and I need to get all 25 of those people successfully adopting a new piece of software for customer relationship management. So they're implementing a CRM. And so each person of the 25 has their own current state. Each person of the 25 has their own future state, but we share the current state.
Karen Ball:
We're using a current vision of implementing this new technology quite successfully and adopting the changes that we need to adopt to be successful in our department and meet our goals and objectives and contribute to the organization and all of those things. So as a leader in this group, I'm going to need to make sure that every single individual makes a successful AD car journey, their own transition from current state to future state, which as you mentioned mentioned Nicole, that might be sitting down with each person. If I'm a people leader of 25, it's, it's doable. I'm a sit down with 25 people and say, Hey, this is where we're going. What questions do you have?
Karen Ball:
I need you to step in. I might have someone who's been a subject matter expert on the old software, so I can connect with them and say, where are you in your at car journey? And that person might say, I really don't feel comfortable and confident stepping into a SME role. This is all very new and different to me. And I've kind of really enjoyed being the subject matter expert in the old software, and I'm concerned about losing that place in the team.
Nicole:
That's right. That title and that status. That's where the fear pops up.
Karen Ball:
Oh my gosh. It does.
Nicole:
My place on this on the stand where I get my gold medal.
Karen Ball:
Absolutely. And to have other people come to them and maybe they have the historical knowledge and the legacy knowledge that carries with that of understanding the really critical why. So instead of losing that person, which we very well could, we can engage them through the lens of Adcar and say, well, let me get you through your knowledge journey a little bit sooner than everybody else. Here's what I'm going to do. Let's get you to some expert training.
Karen Ball:
Let me sign you up for something that the vendor offers. Is that something you're willing and able to do? Getting to ability, right? Knowledge is one thing. Ability is another.
Karen Ball:
And then will you help be the change agent for this change? So all of a sudden I'm creating my network of somebody who I'm going to guide through their ad car journey faster, because I know how critical they are to the team. But see, these are all the tactics, right? Those are tactics that a people manager who's looking at the train through the lens of ad car would have with their
Nicole:
people differently than someone who's just saying, okay, everybody just
Karen Ball:
do it. Just eat the broccoli. Differently than someone who's just saying, okay, everybody just do it. Just eat the broccoli. Right.
Karen Ball:
Just, we got to eat the broccoli. So, get on board or get off the train. And that's not how we treat our people. And it's not how we should. So when you scale ad car, you can see how a people manager is so critical to that individual engagement, but we can also scale all the way up to, you know, certainly getting our executives or our senior leaders to be the sponsors of change and actively and visibly participate, to help build coalitions of support and to continue to communicate with employees, explaining the why messages.
Karen Ball:
So I would look to somebody who's a senior leader of the organization to give me context organizationally, whereas I'm going to look for my people later to give me context for myself and for the others that I work with on my team. So Adcar is scalable because we can do these activities, the things we think of, right? Communications and training and sponsoring engagement, people, leader engagement, and, and identifying where resistance might occur and mitigating it in advance. And all of those things can be done in the context of getting people ready for the change when the change is ready for them. And ability at go live is one of the critical concepts in the progression so that we get people, you know, ready for beyond knowledge and into abilities.
Karen Ball:
So proficiency goes up immediately at go live. So there's a lot of, intricacies in that. That's where the pro side methodology comes along the ad car model and helps us describe what activities matter when they matter. But at the end of the day, you know, without ADKAR, it's why we do what we do. Right.
Karen Ball:
ADKAR articulates why we do what we're doing, and then it helps us measure if it's working. Yeah. So measuring if it's working is critical. So if everyone has a knowledge barrier, the week before we go live, we've got to do some recovery actions. We've got to do some things to help people figure out what their role is.
Karen Ball:
Maybe the training missed the mark. Maybe people weren't able to connect broad training to their specific role. So there's lots of interventions, but we've got to know what the barrier is in order to know what the right interventions are at any moment in time.
Nicole:
Yeah. That's fantastic. So I kinda heard something. I want you to talk about it for a second. So we have the ADKAR model, but then we have the ADKAR methodology.
Nicole:
Can you just doing distinguish those two things for me?
Karen Ball:
Ad car is a model, right? It's a template, but the methodology is the pro sign methodology. So ad car sits inside of a really robust change management methodology. So when we're preparing people for change, we're doing it through the lens of ADKAR. When we're managing change, we're doing it through the lens of ADKAR.
Karen Ball:
When we're sustaining the change, we're doing it through the lens of ADKAR. So precise three phase methodology is all about preparing our approach, managing the change, and then sustaining the change. And ad car sits at the middle of that. So ad car is not a methodology. It's a model.
Karen Ball:
So it's the model that is articulating again, why we're doing what we're doing and measuring progress. So it's the I always talk. So if we're going on a hike, right? So if we're going on a hike, we can take a compass with us and a compass will keep us directionally accurate. And that's what ADKAR is.
Karen Ball:
It's keeping us directionally relevant. So which way is north and where is the sunsetting and where things are happening in terms of progression. But the methodology is my trail guide and my map. It gives me the topography, and it gives me responses if, right, if you have an emergency, here's the things that you should do. So I CAR is the compass, and the methodology is like having a personal trail guide and map in my pocket.
Nicole:
Yeah. I love that.
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Nicole:
Okay. So you said one of the activities that we do as we're implementing a change is that we're going to need a sponsor. And so I think this is so essential. One of the things that I do is I go in and I do training. And a lot of times, I'm brought in, but there's not the buy in from the upper leadership.
Nicole:
Right? But what are we training for? We're training for leadership change. We're train training for emotional intelligence for all sorts of different things, but there's gotta be in that that buy in up at the top. So I'd like to hear from Karen Ball about getting sponsorship in place.
Nicole:
How do we enroll the senior leaders to pay attention to the changes we're trying to make? In in particular, like, around leadership, what maybe you have a story or you could give me some insight on that. Yeah. Teach me a little bit.
Karen Ball:
Absolutely. Well, one of the things I would just to share with you and for those of you who don't know, Prosci is an organization as a research company. So for over 25 years, we've been studying what works and what doesn't. It was born out of Jeff's Hyatt's curiosity about why do some changes succeed and others fail.
Nicole:
Mhmm.
Karen Ball:
And what we've known from research for over 25 years is the number one indicator of change to success is active and visible sponsorships.
Nicole:
And then people did hear that.
Karen Ball:
Number 1 for over 25 years. Right? It's been the number one for over 25 years. And when I use the word sponsor, it's interesting. People are talking to leadership.
Karen Ball:
Sponsorship. So think of this right. There are people inside of our organization, somebody fought for the change that's coming to life. Somebody fought for and prioritized and budgeted and went through the acquisition process or the design process. So if I'm going through the introduction of agile methodology for it changes, or I'm implementing a process change or a systems change or something related to compensation plans or location structures.
Karen Ball:
We just all went through massive changes around location and work location. Somebody had to design the change and somebody had to sponsor that change. Somebody had to say, this is the right thing for us to do. Now, maybe in my 25 person department, I can sponsor a change that impacts only my 25 people. But if a change impacts my 25 people and the 50 people in finance and the 117 people and supply chain management and the 50, 1500 people in a plant, there's going to be somebody who sits above those departments or functional areas who has to sponsor the change.
Karen Ball:
They're accountable for the outcomes and the results, or they should be. And they're responsible for sponsoring that this change to happen. So oftentimes those are leaders. And again, we can think of leadership as an architecture of our org design or, pro se everybody leads from where their chair is. Right?
Karen Ball:
You have a leader in your role inside of the organization. But sponsorship means that somebody is accountable for the outcomes and we need that person who's accountable for the outcomes to care what the process is to deliver those outcomes. And I've had this conversation, I've been doing sponsor briefings and, I've been in the C suite of major corporations sitting with the CEO of marathon petroleum or sitting with, leaders that are in very high levels of organizations and explaining to them what their role is through change. And, and I've had senior leaders say, watch him. No, but hasn't anybody ever taught me this?
Karen Ball:
And we break it down into Right.
Nicole:
Because they're told with the Yeah. They'll say
Nicole:
that. Delegate this.
Karen Ball:
Right. That they need to be active and visible. Yeah. A, they need to build coalitions of support, the B and they need to communicate directly the C. So it's the ABCs of sponsorship.
Karen Ball:
So, you know, I've seen it happen in practice. I was working with 1 organization. It was a pharmaceuticals organization who was going through some major transitions in their office spaces and getting to more hoteling and open space. And, really the shift in the hierarchy of the organization was getting reinforced through our design and structure. And I went to the organization to do some training and I walked in and there's this whole floor that's completely empty.
Karen Ball:
It's all been built out, but it's waiting for the people to move in and sitting over in the corner with 3 people. And I said to the person who has hosting my visit, who who's that? And she said, those are the 3 leaders of the teams that are going to move into this space.
Nicole:
Nice.
Karen Ball:
They have stepped out of their physical offices are now are going to be working in this open space. So when we are touring the individuals who are going to be shifting into this physical space, they can sit there and say, oh, those are our 3 leaders. So talk about active invisible sponsorship. It doesn't get any better than putting their bodies where they were asking people to make changes where people get very attached to their physical space as
Nicole:
we know. Goodness. I had a whole conversation about a with a client about how they changed the desk she sat at. She sat at that desk for 20 years, and they took her desk away and gave it to somebody else. She was so upset without, like, without notice.
Nicole:
So, I mean, it is very important. Just think if somebody said, you don't live in this house anymore, you live in that house. Because your
Karen Ball:
your desk can keep your car going away. House. I mean, sure the
Nicole:
people just don't do that to people.
Karen Ball:
Yeah. When you start seeing things through the lens of ADKAR, you can't unsee it. You can't you can't watch a television commercial without seeing a description of an ADKAR journey, awareness of a condition for which we have a pharmaceutical option. All of, you know, the car that you want to drive. Right?
Karen Ball:
Awareness of it and desire and knowledgeability and reinforcement. So sponsorship is the number one indicator of successful change, and so we've got a challenge on our hands to make our sponsors aware of their role. Sounds like an ADKAR journey. So you can actually take leaders in your organizations through their own ADKAR journey of how to be effective leaders of change. We've got another set of key elements for people managers that are taking their own individual direct reports.
Karen Ball:
And again, all research based that they need to communicate and they need to be liaisons and they need to advocate and they manage resistance and then they coach individuals through change. So part of it is skilling up people inside of our organizations to be effective leaders of change and all of that's in the book. And it's in the part about being from individual change to organizational change because we have to integrate with structure and process.
Nicole:
Mhmm. I love it. Well, we have just a few minutes left on the clock, but I don't wanna miss the 3rd part of the book, which is how organizations become better at change. So let's just kinda regroup. So the first part was it's about 1 person at a time, and then we're going to take the model, put it in the middle of the methodology, and take the group through the change.
Nicole:
And now we're at the part where we're thinking about, okay. How do I, like, make this part of our OD? Right? Our organization development. Like, we are a company that has a culture where we do change great.
Nicole:
So how do you do that?
Karen Ball:
Yeah. I and I'd love to say that every organization has where they do change great, but it is not true. Not at all. Prosci actually uses a maturity model. So for those of you who have seen maturity models, a level 5 maturity model from level 1 being change management is ad hoc or absent all the way up to level 5 where it's baked into the DNA of our organizational culture that we welcome change and we embrace change, and we're good at this.
Karen Ball:
Right? We know how to do this. Yeah. So organizations can actually do a maturity model assessment of where their capability sits in terms of change. And all of a sudden, now we've got a current state of our current state maturity.
Karen Ball:
We can articulate a future state maturity, and then we can start making the steps and it requires sponsorship just like, an IT change or a cultural change or an OD change where we're going in and doing performance management differently. Building change muscle is a change. So we can take that all on with where are we, where do we people need to go? What are the knowledge, skills, and tools people require? What are the mindsets, attitudes, and beliefs?
Karen Ball:
So much of this is mindset, attitude, and belief, and, the way we think about change and the way we welcome it. But the goal is to build a culture where we can look around us and see a history of successful change and not a history of failed change because people put that evidence in their pockets and they pull it out when they need it.
Nicole:
That's right.
Karen Ball:
So they're involved in this big ERP implementation and we're going through agile transformation and we're implementing in CRM and all of these things are happening concurrently. And what I'm a CRM, and all these things are happening concurrently. And what I'm describing is exactly what's going on inside of organizations is multiple complex changes happening concurrently. They look around and they go, oh, gosh. We're not good at this.
Karen Ball:
This isn't going to go well. Versus we need to train them to say, this is hard. This is complex, but we can do it because we've proven that we can do it and having the right sponsors through that change capability. So the last part of the book is all about building it as a maturity model, a capability. You can do that through the lens of ad car, making sure you've got people in the right roles that are responsible for your change outcomes and how we push that down into the individual.
Karen Ball:
So it's quite, it's quite, again, the stories continue throughout and I use the words, inform individual change, influence Organizational change and inspire building change capability. And you can do that from wherever you sit. You can inspire a model, a bright spot, a place where people look and say, what's different with that change? What did that team do differently? And you start building the success breeds success, and you start getting it through the lens of the ADKAR model, and and you can see a path forward.
Nicole:
I love it. And you do have in chapter 11 ADKAR stories on building change capability. So could you drop a couple stories in to show us how we could bake it in as you said? We are a vibrant culture full of change agent. We love it.
Nicole:
We're good at it. We welcome it. That's that's kind of what you said, but, man, I love that.
Karen Ball:
Yeah. But at the same time, you need process. You, you need, how do changes happen inside of your organization? Do you use a project frame for that? Do you have project management professionals who sit in a PMO who, for example, are responsible for bringing the technical side of the change to life?
Karen Ball:
They design, develop and deliver what's changing. And then do you have the other side covered the people who are responsible for engage, adopt, and use. So there's a technical side of change and the people side of change. And without the 2 working together, we're not going to take me back to my, my early story, you know, implementing 1,000,000 of dollars of technology that is not going to have the adoption story. And I guarantee the person who did the ROI for that particular technology did not imagine a less than perfect adoption story for the ROI.
Karen Ball:
So, and let me just kind of leave you with a couple of critical questions people can ask is number 1, when you look at a change, you look at it and say, what percent of the benefits of this particular change are dependent upon people changing the way they do their work. And that's not just processing technology. It is mindsets and attitudes and beliefs and critical behaviors as well. But what percentage of the benefits depend on adoption and use, and then how much are we investing to acquire that adoption and use? So the stories in there about organizations that have gone through their maturity model and saying, you know, we were a 1.6 and now we're a 3.9 because they put the intentionality around embedding change management into project management, training the leaders of the organizations to help their people, to coach and empower people through the lens of ADKAR, to make sure sponsors know that they have an ABCs role, active, invisible building, a coalition, and communicating.
Karen Ball:
And all of those things are the levers. I like to think of them as levers that we pull that moves the whole organization forward in the context of successful change outcomes. So it's the right people, it's the right training, and it's making sure that we're making a decision to build change capability as part of our DNA.
Nicole:
Yeah. So I love that. Okay. So there's 3 parts to the book. You gotta get the book.
Nicole:
Let me tell you the name of the book again, everybody. The ADKAR Advantage, Your New Lens For Successful Change. And I'm talking with Karen Ball who is an executive with Prosci, and she has written this amazing book. It's gonna put all the tools in your toolbox. And don't we wanna fill that toolbox up and be more effective?
Karen Ball:
Yeah. And you can attach all of your tools to this. This doesn't mean that ADKAR is your only tool. It's another tool that if you've got a whole list of tools you already like, I guarantee that when you look at them through the lens of Adcar, you're going to be able to place them where they belong differently. It's really a fascinating complexity that sits on the other side.
Karen Ball:
You can get to the simplicity of this model and how each person goes through change.
Nicole:
Yeah. Yeah. And so there's one last question I have that I'm just curious about. So ProSci has changed 25 years of research and that kind of thing. So how do you guys measure up in terms of change?
Nicole:
What do you guys do intentionally to live, eat, and breathe, and model at CAR and the methodology and the model?
Karen Ball:
Yeah. I'm really proud and honored to say we follow our own process and our own methodology. So every change that gets put into our strategic planning exercises, our operational exercises, we look at it through the lens of adoption. There are for every organization. I'm sure there are tens of or 100 of changes that we know we need to make, but what's the adoption story.
Karen Ball:
So we look at it through the lens of ADKAR initially and say, will this change be successful? Do we have capacity? Do people have the capability? Is this the right things to be doing right now? Where is everyone in their ADKAR journey?
Karen Ball:
Our senior leaders are the most amazing examples of sponsorship. And it's very frequently you'll have conversations inside of the organization around embedding the ICAR milestones in our project deliverables. So, you know, we do exactly what we tell people to do, and we reap the benefits as a result just as you can as well.
Nicole:
Yeah. Yeah. So that's great. So they're walking the talk. That's fantastic.
Nicole:
Alright. So I know people are saying they're going, wait. Don't let Karen go. Does she have one more nugget about change? One thing that I need to know that we didn't cover, that would just be one more thing I could put in my pocket before we we we stop the podcast.
Karen Ball:
Yeah. I love that. And, again, I reflect back on my journey in 2,006 when I was sitting in a room and I just had a moment and I knew, I knew that moment was going to change the trajectory of my career, which it did. I I've launched in left the technical side of change and went into the people side of change and built a change management practice and a career with Prosci, the organization that I honor to have the knowledge and the research to support this work. And at the end of the day, you're just trying to make change make sense.
Karen Ball:
And when you look at a change through the lens of ad car, it makes change make sense. And it built a framework that you can build on to make those rather complex organizational changes. Like I was trying to implement with the organizations I represented in. I've got some great stories of people who went all Aaron trusted the process and reap the benefits as a result. And it's just, it's an honor and a privilege to be attached to this body of work and through the book.
Karen Ball:
I certainly was honored to be able to ask, be asked to write that. So Icar makes change make sense and creates a framework for successful organizational change.
Nicole:
Mhmm. That's fantastic. Alright. Everybody, this is the book right here. Car Advantage, the new lens of successful change, and my amazing guest, Karen Ball.
Nicole:
I'm so grateful to have you on the show. So people are like, okay. So how do I learn to do this? Where do I go? What what's available to me?
Nicole:
Tell us how we can become an ADKAR ProSci certified. Tell us all the things.
Karen Ball:
Sure. Yeah. Sometimes we call them ADKAR ists.
Nicole:
Okay.
Karen Ball:
But you can certainly go to prosci.com, p r o s c I. We operate globally. We have partners and direct services, and the practitioner program is a 3 day certification program to get trained up on the methodology. But you can certainly there's so oh my gosh. Webinars and blog posts and so many free things.
Karen Ball:
If you're on a learning journey, book some time in your calendar, 20 minutes, 30 minutes a week to just jump over to prosci.com, watch a webinar, read a blog post to just learn more about how all of this unpacks. And, of course, you can reach out to Mitri directly through LinkedIn, Karen Ball 26 on LinkedIn, and I'm happy to connect with you personally.
Nicole:
Alright. Fantastic. Alright, everybody. That's another episode of the build a vibrant culture podcast. I'm so grateful that I've had Karen Ball on the show today, and here's what we would absolutely adore.
Nicole:
Would you wherever you're watching this, we can go down and hit the like button and leave a little love note for Karen. Tell her, thank you for writing the book. Tell her, thank you for showing up on the podcast and being part of this so that I can become a better leader, a better professional. I can become a change agent. I can be part of making the world a better place instead of sitting around complaining about the whole situation out there.
Nicole:
So please do that and we can get lit from within with this information, and we can, go out there and brighten up the world with these changes that are needed. Thank you so much, Karen.
Karen Ball:
Thanks, Nicole. Appreciate it.
Nicole:
Thank you for joining us on this episode of the Build A Vibrant Culture podcast. If you found value in today's episode, please take a moment to leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. Your feedback helps us improve and reach more like minded listeners. Remember, the journey to building a vibrant culture never stops. Stay inspired.
Nicole:
Keep nurturing your vibrant culture, and we can't wait to reconnect with you on the next exciting episode of Build A Vibrant Culture podcast.