I’ve watched dozens of change management projects follow a framework to the letter and still end up in the same place: no one can tell you whether it actually worked.
Not because people didn’t try. Not because the framework was bad. Because no one asked the two questions that matter most.
Question One: “What Are We Trying to Answer?”
Before you build a coalition, before you create urgency, before you unfreeze anything — you need a measurable question. Not a goal statement. Not a vision. Not something that sounds good in a town hall. A question that has a specific, measurable answer.
“How do we increase customer retention by 15% over the next two quarters?” is a measurable question. “Improve the customer experience” is not. The first one tells you exactly what to measure and when to measure it. The second one could mean literally anything, and six months from now everyone will claim success based on whatever metric makes them look good.
The difference between these two starting points determines whether you’ll be able to evaluate the project at all.
And here’s what gets me: most change management frameworks skip this step entirely. ADKAR starts with Awareness. Kotter starts with Urgency. Lewin starts with Unfreeze. Bridges starts with Ending. All valid starting points for their respective purposes. But none of them require you to define what success looks like in measurable terms before you begin. They assume someone has already done that. And in my experience? Someone usually hasn’t.
Question Two: “Did We Answer It?”
This is the question that almost never gets asked. Projects end. The new process gets adopted. The tool gets rolled out. Everyone moves on to the next fire. And nobody circles back to check whether the original question got answered.
Kotter’s final step is “Institute Change” — embedding the change into culture. ADKAR ends with Reinforcement — making the change stick. Both important. Neither one is the same as measuring whether the change produced the outcome you set out to achieve.
You can reinforce a change that didn’t work. You can institutionalize a process that doesn’t solve the problem. “It stuck” and “it worked” are two very different things.
I’ve lived this. I’ve been in the room at the end of a major initiative where everyone is congratulating themselves and I’m the one asking “but did we hit the number?” And the room goes quiet. Not because they don’t care — because they genuinely don’t have an answer. The project didn’t fail. It just never had a way to prove it succeeded.
The Framework That Forces Both Questions
The 5P Framework by Trust Insights was built to close this gap. It starts with Purpose — your measurable question — and ends with Performance — the answer to that question. Everything in between (People, Process, Platform) serves the Purpose and gets validated by Performance.
Two questions. That’s the difference between a project that “went well” and a project that actually worked.
The Moral of the Story
Every framework has value. But no framework works if you don’t know what you’re trying to achieve and you don’t check whether you achieved it. Start with a measurable question. End with a measurable answer. Everything else is the work in between.
For the full side-by-side comparison of how five major models handle (or don’t handle) these two questions: The 5P Framework vs. Other Change Management Models.
Ready to put the 5P Framework to work? Start with Change Management or go to Getting Started for the full walkthrough.