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[00:00:00] Announcer: This is the Build a Vibrant Culture Podcast, your source for the strategies, systems, and smarts you need to turn possibility into purpose. Every week we dive into dynamic conversations as our host, Nicole Greer, interviews leadership and business experts. They're here to shed light on practical solutions to the challenges of personal and professional development. Now, here's your host, a professional speaker, coach and consultant, Nicole Greer.
[00:00:33] 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. 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 going to unpack it. But let me tell you all about her.
[00:00:58] Karen Ball is a senior Fellow at ProSci. For over 40 years 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. Karen often shares her passion for all things ADKAR and change management in webinars, customer presentations, podcasts, and conference keynotes. Welcome to the show, Karen. I'm so glad you're here. And thank you for my present. You
[00:01:28] Karen Ball: Oh, you're welcome. Thanks, Nicole, for having me.
[00:01:31] Nicole: Yeah, we're so glad you're here. So tell us a little bit about how you got to ProSci, and then tell us a little bit about ProSci.
[00:01:39] 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. So I started as a very young child.
[00:01:51] Nicole: But yeah, she's using some kind of cream. We'll put it in the notes.
[00:01:55] 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. 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 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.
[00:02:39] 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. 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 million dollar investments are oftentimes, suboptimized significantly. So I was sitting at a client site many years ago in Boise, Idaho.
[00:03:24] And it's so funny, again, these markers, what are those markers? 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 going to be in this training all afternoon once you join us. You know, me, I'm always open for learning anything new.
[00:03:48] Nicole: Right. That was like a little Christmas present!
[00:03:50] 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 with the people who were there. But I realized that there was a discipline called change management. 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. And over the course of the following years, I, just dove in headfirst 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 two thousands 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.
[00:05:10] Nicole: Hmm. That's fantastic. So 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 and she said, it's a process and a discipline. So don't miss that. Great businesses have awesome processes and they have awesome discipline. That's how you, that's how you make the profit. All right. So again, the book is called The ADKAR Advantage, everybody, your new lens for successful change. And so I have been like digging around in here and part one, 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?
[00:05:56] Karen Ball: Yeah, it's fascinating. You know, I want to give people who haven't heard ADKAR, it isn't known to everyone.
[00:06:02] Nicole: Yeah, yeah.
[00:06:03] Karen Ball: 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 1990s 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. 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, 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, right? It's just resistance to change. People naturally resist change, which I'm not a big believer in. And I'd rather talk readiness.
[00:07:01] Nicole: I agree.
[00:07:01] Karen Ball: Than resistance. 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 in fact eliminated. So Jeff set out on this path. He left Bell Laboratories and he started studying change patterns in organizations.
[00:07:20] So he spent about four years. Discovering change patterns across 700 organizations. 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.
[00:07:40] And what he discovered that the secret to successful change was not all of those activities. It wasn't the activities that surround. change. 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.
[00:08:05] So he started looking at what are the outcomes of individual change? And that's where The ADKAR Advantage came from. So it's awareness of why the change is happening. Not that the change is happening. Awareness of a change happening is interesting. Understanding awareness of why a change happens takes us to a different mental state.
[00:08:26] 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. So then knowledge, right? People have to know how to do something.
[00:08:48] 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. 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.
[00:09:14] to play good golf. And then of reinforcement, if we don't reinforce change, people have 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.
[00:09:30] So that's how it all started is, Jeff sent out, sat out on this mission to figure out. What is successful change? And he discovered that it's change at the individual person level. And ADKAR 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 and we know how, I mean, it's really the natural pattern and you can see it in television commercials, you can see it in.
[00:10:02] Individuals who have really compelling messaging, they've gone underneath the high level understanding of change and dug into it at that individual level.
[00:10:13] 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 how Somebody went through the ADKAR model, but like for them personally, and then let's maybe talk about a change that a company went through.
[00:10:38] So I know you've got stories in your pocket.
[00:10:41] 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 ProSci ADKAR model.
[00:11:08] So I wanted to bring stories forward. So as I was starting to craft. That's the content for the book for anyone who's written a book, right? Starting doing your mind mapping, your outlining is a new 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.
[00:11:26] So there's over 50 storytellers that I summarized in the book, 20 countries, six continents. It 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.
[00:11:48] But yeah, let me tell you a little bit about Graham. So, Graham is a gentleman in Canada who shared his personal ADKAR story. So, ADKAR is both individual and organizational. It's both personal and professional. So if you think of a little two by two grid with those as the horizontal and vertical axes The ADKAR Advantage applies in all quadrants.
[00:12:10] So The ADKAR Advantage 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 something. So don't you 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 a parent, we're going to be parents. We're great.
[00:12:30] Nicole: We're going to the beach.
[00:12:32] Karen Ball: Yeah. We're going to the beach and you need to know how to swim. 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 The ADKAR Advantage.
[00:12:51] And of course he said awareness was very high. We actually have something called an The ADKAR Advantage assessment. So we can give numbers to your levels of each of the The ADKAR Advantage elements. So he said on a scale of five, one to five, I, I was four or five 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.
[00:13:18] So he struggled with that and he shared that, he really did have to think about It was important to his wife and how much of a life skill. And he got to the point where he said, yeah I choose this. 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 that he took multiple lessons at the same time, trying to.
[00:13:43] 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.
[00:14:03] So it's fun to hear him, go through that story and share the ups and downs and how the The ADKAR Advantage model was really the roadmap and the template that he used for himself. There's another story of a woman named Anna Belayne who was challenged to get her son Dracum to eat broccoli. And she, he was a six year old and she wanted him to eat those nutritious foods and help him do it through his own lens.
[00:14:26] 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. 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.
[00:14:46] And what I love about that story is she talks about the two of them now, Shopping together and talking about food, nutrition. What an amazing conversation as a parent, right? To have those food, nutrition conversations because Joe Ackam would say, will this help me be better at sports? Will I grow stronger?
[00:15:03] 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 AgCar. And she actually got to the point where she regressed, she was progressing through her AgCar journey. And started questioning her confidence to take on a new role.
[00:15:22] And was she able, and she kind of said, you know, may I 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.
[00:15:43] 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 marked. So I think that is so crazy All right, and the two by two model that she's talking about is on page 72. So that's all right there in the book All right.
[00:16:01] So so let's just regroup. So add car, right? You've got our model and it stands for awareness desire knowledge, ability, and what's the R?
[00:16:12] Karen Ball: reinforcement.
[00:16:14] Nicole: Okay, very good. So
[00:16:16] Karen Ball: Yeah, because it's ADCA, ADCA would not be a great model, right? The reinforcement is so critical. It's that, sustaining at the end that keeps us right to make sure that change sticks. A lot of individuals and organizations go through change. But they don't make the change stick.
[00:16:32] They don't do the sustainment work at the end. Organizationally, that might mean new performance metrics. I might have different performance metrics, but if I'm measured against the same old, same old, then my behaviors may revert because I'm going to go back and do what I'm rewarded for doing. So reinforcement is really a critical component of the model.
[00:16:51] Nicole: Yeah. Yeah. 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.
[00:17:08] 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. 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.
[00:17:22] 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. So we've got the one on one, but now we've got to get this department, this area, this unit changing. So tell me a little bit about that.
[00:17:40] A
[00:17:41] Karen Ball: The, yeah, the transition, first of all, I want to, 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, uh, one of the things he can, which he did, and it was really such a pleasure to get to meet him through this process.
[00:18:00] But one of the things he really reinforced is that The ADKAR Advantage. is outcomes. So awareness is an outcome. 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.
[00:18:27] We build stories. We create narrative. All of those things are intended to drive. The ADKAR Advantage outcomes. So when we think about scaling The ADKAR Advantage, we've got outcomes. So these are the milestones, if you will. And one of the fascinating things is to embed The ADKAR Advantage milestones, the people side of change milestones inside of your project plans.
[00:18:50] 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.
[00:19:09] So when we scale The ADKAR Advantage, 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.
[00:19:32] 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. We're using a current software and we share a future state. We've got a vision of implementing this new technology quite successfully and adopting the changes that we need to adopt to be successful in our department, meet our goals and objectives and contribute to the organization and all of those things.
[00:20:04] So as a leader in this group, I'm going to need to make sure that every single individual Makes a successful The ADKAR Advantage journey, their own transition from current state to future state, which, as you mentioned, Nicole, that might be sitting down with each person. If I'm a people leader of 25, it's doable. I can sit down with.
[00:20:26] 25 people and say, Hey, this is where we're going. What questions do you have? 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 Ag Car journey? And that person might say, I really don't feel comfortable and confident stepping into a SME role.
[00:20:47] 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.
[00:20:57] Nicole: That title and that status. That's where the fare pops
[00:21:00] Karen Ball: oh my gosh, it
[00:21:01] Nicole: taking away my place on this, on the stand where I get my gold medal. That's
[00:21:05] 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 ADKAR and say, well, let me get you through your knowledge journey a little bit sooner than everybody else.
[00:21:25] Here's what I'm going to do. Let's get you to some expert training. 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. And then will you help be the change agent for this change?
[00:21:41] So all of a sudden I'm creating my network. of somebody who I'm going to guide through their EdCard 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 change through the lens of The ADKAR Advantage Would have with their people differently than someone who's just saying, okay, everybody just do it.
[00:22:03] Just eat the broccoli, right? 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 The ADKAR Advantage You can see how a people manager is so critical to that individual engagement,
[00:22:19] Nicole: hmm.
[00:22:20] Karen Ball: 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.
[00:22:33] of support and to continue to communicate with employees explaining the why messages. 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 leader to give me context for myself and for the others that I work with on my team.
[00:22:52] So ADKAR is scalable because we can do these activities, the things we think of, right, communications and training and. Sponsoring engagement, people, leader engagement 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.
[00:23:17] 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. So proficiency goes up immediately at go live. So there's a lot of intricacies in that. That's where the ProSci methodology comes along the ADKAR model and helps us describe what activities matter when they matter.
[00:23:41] But at the end of the day, You know, without The ADKAR Advantage, it's why we do what we do, right? The ADKAR Advantage articulates why we do what we're doing, and then it helps us measure if it's working,
[00:23:55] Nicole: Yeah.
[00:23:55] Karen Ball: 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.
[00:24:04] We've got to do some things to help people figure out what their role is. 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.
[00:24:24] Nicole: Yeah. That's fantastic. So I kind of heard something. I want you to talk about it for a second. You said we have the The ADKAR Advantage model, but then we have the The ADKAR Advantage methodology. Can you distinguish those two things for me?
[00:24:35] Karen Ball: ADKAR is a model, right? It's a template. But the methodology is the ProSci methodology. So ADKAR 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.
[00:24:56] When we're sustaining the change, we're doing it through the lens of ADKAR. So ProSci's three phase methodology is all about preparing our approach, managing the change, and then sustaining the change. Sustaining the change and The ADKAR Advantage sits at the middle of that. So The ADKAR Advantage is not a methodology. It's a model 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 so if we're going on a hike, right?
[00:25:24] 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 The ADKAR Advantage is, it's keeping us directionally relevant. So which way is north and, where's the sun setting and where things are happening in terms of progression. But the methodology is my trail guide and my map.
[00:25:46] 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 The ADKAR Advantage is the compass and the methodology is like having a personal trail guide and map in my pocket.
[00:25:59] Nicole: Yeah, I love that.
[00:26:00] Announcer: Are you ready to build your vibrant culture? Bring Nicole Greer to speak to your leadership team, conference or organization to help them with their strategies, systems, and smarts to increase clarity, accountability, energy, and results. Your organization will get lit from within! Email her at nicole@vibrantculture.com and be sure to check out Nicole's TEDx Talk at vibrantculture.com.
[00:26:32] 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, Okay, the upper leadership, right? But what are we training for? We're training for leadership change. We're training 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. How do we enroll the senior leaders to pay attention to the changes we're trying to make? And in particular, like around leadership, what maybe you have a story or you could give me some insight on that. Teach me a little bit.
[00:27:20] Karen Ball: Absolutely. Well, one of the things I just to share with you. And for those of you who don't know, ProSci is an organization is a research company. So for over 25 years, we've been studying what works and what doesn't, is born out of Jeff's Hyatt's curiosity about why do some changes succeed and others fail? And what we know from research for over 25 years is the number one indicator of change. The success is active and visible sponsorship. And when we Yeah,
[00:27:46] Nicole: People. Did you hear that? Number one reason.
[00:27:48] Karen Ball: 25 years, right? It's been the number one for over 25 years. And when I use the word sponsor, it's interesting. People talk about leadership, 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 process change or a systems change or something related to compensation plans or location structures. 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 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 in 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.
[00:29:02] They're accountable. for the outcomes and the results, or they should be. And, they're responsible for sponsoring the, this change to happen. So oftentimes those are leaders. And again, we can think of leadership as an architecture of our org design, Or, at ProSci, everybody leads from where their chair is, right?
[00:29:22] 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.
[00:29:56] And, and I've had And senior leaders say, why didn't nobody, why hasn't anybody ever taught me this? And we break it down into
[00:30:03] Nicole: Cause they're told with, you know, delegate this, delegate this.
[00:30:06] Karen Ball: Right. That they need to be active and visible, A, they need to build coalitions of support, the B, and they need to communicate directly. Right. This. So it's the ABCs of sponsorship.
[00:30:18] Nicole: Mm.
[00:30:19] Karen Ball: So you know, I've seen it happen in practice. I, I was working with one 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 org design and structure.
[00:30:39] And I went to the organization to do some training and I walked in and there's this whole floor that's completely empty. It's all been built out. But it's waiting for the people to move in and sitting over in the corner were three people. And I said to the person who was hosting my visit, who, who's that?
[00:30:56] And she said, those are the three leaders. of the teams that are going to move into this space. They have stepped out of their physical offices and 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 three leaders.
[00:31:16] 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
[00:31:27] Nicole: Oh my goodness. I had a whole conversation about it 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. 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,
[00:31:45] Karen Ball: Right. And that's an ad
[00:31:47] Nicole: is your house away from the house. I mean, you know, they just don't do that to people.
[00:31:50] Karen Ball: Yeah, when you start seeing things through the lens of The ADKAR Advantage, you can't unsee it. You can't, you can't watch a television commercial without seeing a description of an The ADKAR Advantage journey, awareness of a condition for which we have, a pharmaceutical option.
[00:32:04] All of, you know, the car that you want to drive, right? 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 ADKARd journey, so you can actually take leaders in your organizations through their own ADKARd journey of how to be effective leaders of change.
[00:32:31] We've got another set of, key elements for people managers that are taking their own individual direct reports. 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.
[00:32:48] 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 getting from individual change to organizational change because we have to integrate with structure and process.
[00:33:03] Nicole: I love it. Well, we have just a few minutes left on the clock but I don't want to miss the third part of the book, which is how organizations become better at change. So let's just kind of regroup. So the first part was, it's about one 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.
[00:33:26] 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. So how do you do that?
[00:33:43] Karen Ball: And I'd love to say that every organization has a culture where they do change great but it is not true.
[00:33:49] Nicole: Not at all.
[00:33:50] Karen Ball: Proci actually uses a maturity model. So for those of you who have seen maturity models, a level five maturity models from level one being change management is ad hoc or absent all the way up to level five, where it's baked into the DNA of our organizational culture.
[00:34:07] That we welcome change and we embrace change and we're good at this, right? We know how to do this. 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. We can articulate a future state.
[00:34:29] Maturity, and then we can start making the steps and it requires sponsorship, just like a. 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 on with, where are we? Where do we people need to go?
[00:34:49] What are the knowledge, skills, and tools people require? What are the mindsets, attitudes, and beliefs? 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.
[00:35:10] change because people put that evidence in their pockets and they pull it out when they need it. So they're involved in this big ERP implementation and we're going through Agile transformation and we're implementing a CRM and all these things are happening concurrently and what I'm describing is exactly what's going on.
[00:35:29] 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. 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.
[00:35:51] So the last part of the book is all about, build, building it as a maturity model, a capability. You can do that through the lens of ADKAR, 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. So it's quite it's quite, again, the stories continue throughout.
[00:36:11] 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 is it different with that change? What did that team do differently?
[00:36:33] And you start building this, success breeds success and you start getting it through the lens of the model. And you can see a path forward.
[00:36:42] 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 agents. We love it. We're good at it. We welcome it. That's, that's kind of what you said, but man, I love that.
[00:37:02] Karen Ball: Yeah. But at the same time, you need process. 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?
[00:37:20] They design, develop, and deliver What's changing? And then do you have the other side cover 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 two working together, we We're not going to take me back to my, my early story, you know, implementing millions of dollars of technology that is not going to have the adoption story.
[00:37:47] 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. So, and let me just, kind of leave you with a couple of critical questions people can ask is number one, when you look at a change, you look at it and say, what percent of the benefits.
[00:38:07] What percentage 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?
[00:38:28] 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 ABC's role, active, invisible, building a coalition and communicating.
[00:38:59] 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.
[00:39:20] Nicole: Yeah. So I love that. Okay. So there's three parts to the book. You got to get the book. 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 going to put all the tools in your toolbox and don't we want to fill that toolbox up, be more effective.
[00:39:41] Karen Ball: Yeah. And you can attach all of your tools to this. This doesn't mean that The ADKAR Advantage 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 The ADKAR Advantage, you're going to be able to place them where they belong differently.
[00:39:57] It's really a fascinating complexity that sits, on the other side, you can get to the simplicity of this model and how each person goes through change.
[00:40:06] 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? What do you guys do intentionally to live, eat and breathe and model ADKAR and the methodology and the model?
[00:40:25] 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 hundreds of changes that we know we need to make, but what's the adoption story.
[00:40:47] So we look at it through the lens of AgCar 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 AGCAR journey? 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 AGCAR milestones in our project deliverables.
[00:41:12] 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.
[00:41:18] Nicole: Yeah. Yeah. So that's great. So they're walking the talk. That's fantastic. All right. 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 stopped the podcast.
[00:41:36] Karen Ball: Yeah, I love that. And again, I reflect back on my journey in 2006 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 launched and left the company. The technical side of change. I went into the people side of change and built, a change management practice and a career with pro side, the organization that I honored to have the knowledge and the research to support this work.
[00:42:01] And at the end of the day you're, you're just trying to make change, make sense. And when you look at at change through the lens of ADKAR, it makes change make sense. Sense, and it builds 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.
[00:42:22] And I've got some great stories of people who, went all in, 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, I certainly was honored to be able to ask, be asked to write that. So I CAR makes change makes sense and creates a framework for successful organizational change.
[00:42:46] Nicole: Hmm. That's fantastic. All right, everybody. This is the book right here. The ADKAR Advantage Advantage, The New Lens of Successful Change. And my amazing guest, Karen Ball. 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? Tell us how we can become The ADKAR Advantage ProSci certified.
[00:43:07] Tell us all the things.
[00:43:09] Karen Ball: Sure. Yeah, sometimes we call them ADKARists, you can certainly go to ProSci. com, P R O S C I. We operate globally. We have partners in direct services and the practitioner program is a three day certification program to get trained up on the methodology. But you can certainly, there's, oh my gosh, webinars and blog posts.
[00:43:28] and so many free things. If you're on a learning journey book some time in your calendar, 20 minutes, 30 minutes a week to just jump over to pro side. 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 me directly through LinkedIn.
[00:43:47] Karen Ball, 26 on LinkedIn. And I'm happy to connect with you personally.
[00:43:52] Nicole: All right. Fantastic. All right, 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. Would you, wherever you're watching this, will you go down and hit the like button? 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. Uh, 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 this changes that are needed. Thank you so much, Karen.
[00:44:35] Karen Ball: Thanks, Nicole. Appreciate it.
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