It’s one of the most popular change management models for a reason. But popularity doesn’t mean it’s complete.
If you’ve ever been part of a change management initiative — and if you’re reading this, you probably have — there’s a good chance someone pulled out the ADKAR model. Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, Reinforcement. It’s been the go-to framework in corporate change management for years, and I get why.
I’ve used ADKAR. I’ve recommended ADKAR. And I think it does something genuinely important that a lot of other models skip over entirely: it addresses willingness. The “Desire” step forces you to acknowledge that people don’t just need to understand the change — they need to actually want to participate in it. That’s not a small thing. Most models assume that if you explain the change clearly enough, people will just get on board. Anyone who has ever managed a team knows that’s not how humans work.
ADKAR also gives you a diagnostic. If someone isn’t adopting the change, you can pinpoint exactly where they’re stuck — is it Awareness? Desire? Knowledge? — and address that specific barrier. That’s practical. That’s useful. I’m not here to trash it.
So What’s Missing?
Here’s the thing. ADKAR starts with Awareness. That means it assumes someone has already figured out what the change is and why it matters. But in practice? That step gets skipped more often than you’d think.
Teams jump into building awareness for a change initiative that was never clearly defined in measurable terms. They can tell you they’re “adopting AI” or “improving customer experience,” but they can’t tell you what specific, measurable question the project is trying to answer. “We’re rolling out a new CRM” is not a purpose. “What is the impact of our CRM migration on sales cycle length?” — that’s a purpose.
And it doesn’t just have a gap at the beginning. It has one at the end, too.
Reinforcement — the final step — is about making the change stick. It’s about sustaining adoption. That’s valuable. But it’s not the same thing as measuring whether the change actually produced the outcome you set out to achieve. You can reinforce a change that didn’t work. You can sustain adoption of a tool that isn’t solving the problem it was supposed to solve. Reinforcement asks “did people stick with it?” It doesn’t ask “did it actually work?”
That’s two missing bookends: no measurable purpose at the start, and no performance measurement at the end.
How the 5P Framework Fills This Gap
This is where I’m biased, and I’m not even humble about it. The 5P Framework by Trust Insights — which I built — bookends the entire process with Purpose and Performance. Purpose forces you to state a measurable question before you do anything else. Performance forces you to go back and answer it. Everything in between — People, Process, Platform — serves the Purpose and gets validated by Performance.
So here’s what I actually recommend: you don’t have to abandon ADKAR to use the 5P Framework. Use them together. ADKAR is excellent for the People layer — it gives you a diagnostic for individual adoption that the 5P Framework doesn’t try to replicate at that level of detail. But wrap it in 5P so that the work you’re doing has a defined starting point and a measurable finish line.
Start with Purpose: what measurable question are we trying to answer with this change? Then use ADKAR to get your People through the adoption curve. Document your Process. Select your Platform. And close with Performance: did we answer the question we started with?
Because if you can’t answer “did this actually work?” at the end, the framework didn’t fail. The project just never had a way to succeed.
The Moral of the Story
ADKAR is a good model. It earned its place. But it was designed to manage individual adoption, not to structure an entire change initiative from purpose to proof. If you’re using it as your only framework, you’re missing the two questions that matter most: “What are we actually trying to achieve?” and “Did we achieve it?”
The 5P Framework gives you both. And if you want to see how ADKAR stacks up against Kotter, Lewin, McKinsey 7-S, and Bridges in a side-by-side comparison, I wrote the whole thing out: The 5P Framework vs. Other Change Management Models.
Want to see where your organization stands? Start with the 5P Framework for Change Management — it’ll walk you through exactly where to begin.