Jeff Standridge:
Welcome to season five of the Innovation Junkies Podcast. In this season, you’ll learn from successful innovators who have influential stories, practices, and strategies that will have your gears turning. Prepare to be inspired, challenged, and empowered. This is the Innovation Junkies Podcast.
Jeff Standridge:
Hey guys, welcome to another episode of the Innovation Junkies Podcast. I’m Jeff Standridge.
Jeff Amerine:
Hey, this is Jeff Amerine. Glad to be back on.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah, good to see you, man. Y’all finished a big night, big weekend, Saturday night, the Startup Crawl.
Jeff Amerine:
Little bit beer buffet, little bit rock concert, little bit Startup Expo,
Jeff Standridge:
All on the square in Fayetteville.
Jeff Amerine:
Exactly. Yeah, it was good fun people. Six or seven time we’ve done it.
Jeff Standridge:
Very good. Very good. Well, hey, I want to talk about change management. We have Tim Creasey, who’s been with us several times from Prosci, and today we have another Prosci executive with us. Karen Ball is a senior fellow at Prosci and she’s the author of their latest publication, the Adkar Advantage, your New Lens for Successful Change, which was published in 2024. Prior to that, she was the executive vice president of research product and marketing teams. Karen, great to have you with us on the Innovation Junkies podcast.
Karen Ball:
Thank you so much for having me.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah. So tell us a little bit about you fill in the blanks, tell us a little bit about how you came to be involved in change management and what’s the path that took you there?
Karen Ball:
Yeah, and that’s a great story and it’s so funny. That’s such a great question to ask just about anybody who finds their way into the discipline of change management. Most of us have a story of from somewhere else into the discipline. So for myself, I am 40 years into my professional career and I started in the information technology industry. So I was working right out of college and all through several decades actually working with organizations who were implementing large scale, expensive technology changes, and many of them in the space of information management, information compliance, heavily regulated industries. And I was watching organizations spend millions of dollars on these technologies and not deliver the benefits and out that were intended. And also just a really bumpy process of getting there. And I always knew there was a big miss in the way that technology projects were being implemented. And I was actually at a client site surprisingly enough in Boise, Idaho, and I found out later that Tim Creasy was actually in the room, but I didn’t even know him at the time back in 2006. And Prosci was coming in to do a training program for the client and they invited me to join them.
And it was the first time I had an opportunity to put language to something that I cared deeply about. And what I cared deeply about was all of the people who were impacted by the technologies that were being implemented and whatever guidance and assistance could be provided to help them smooth the path of transition from their current state to the future state. And that’s the discipline of change management. So I was introduced to change management to Prosci and to the Agar model back in 2006. And it was the moment I made a complete change in the progression of my career. And I just did a total immersion into the discipline of change management to the point where I launched change management practice with the organization I was working for so that we could build services right alongside the technical side of changes to introduce the people side of change. So that’s how I found my way. It ignited in me the purpose that I had always known that I had in my work, and it just gave language to that. That’s how I found my way into the discipline.
Jeff Standridge:
Very good, very good. I came to entrepreneurship and innovation from the world of entrepreneurship and change management in a technology organization. So I understand that transition. So let’s talk about change management for a moment. What we do at Innovation Junkie is pretty much focused around helping organizations achieve sustained strategic growth. And what we find in that is that many times to fuel that sustained strategic growth, we have to engage in some innovation exercises, some innovation sprints and what have you. And we also begin to observe elements about their culture and about leadership. And all of those things are part and parcel to the concept of change management. They weave themselves in and outside of this world of change management. So tell us a little bit about Adkar and how you guys go about and approach change management.
Karen Ball:
Sure. So in all of that, whether it’s innovation or continuous improvement, again from the background that I have, I spent a lot of time with organizations that had very mature continuous improvement initiatives and around operating procedures. And every time the organization was trying to get better at something or to do something completely differently, whether the business drivers were taking them in a direction there was different. Inside of all of that, there is at any moment in time a current state of the way things are done and a future state. So there’s some description of how things could be improved either incrementally or dramatically making very dramatic changes or shifts. And as I mentioned, the people side of that is everybody sitting in the work of the organization doing what they do on a day-to-day basis basis. What we have them do in a current state is build out the standard operating procedures and the way that work is done and all of a sudden something comes in and new ideas are new drivers that cause us to do something differently and they have to move to a future state.
So as organizations, we’re really good actually at describing or building a vision around where an organization needs to go, where intends to go, but we’re not so good at coming alongside each of the people who sits in their own current state who needs to make that transition. So the Prosci Adkar model, so there’s two elements. So Adkar is a model and it was developed by Jeff Hyatt who is Prosci founder back in the late 1990s. And he set out on a path, he’s an engineer and he sat off on a path of understanding what are the key drivers of successful change and articulated very clearly that successful organizational change is the combined addition of every successful individual change. So Adkar is the individual change model and it articulates the five building blocks or stepping stones or sequential elements of getting through change and it’s awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement. So by uncovering that successful changes actually an individual process that’s then attended to collectively as an organization, we find ourselves on a completely different and better path towards outcomes that we’re trying to deliver.
Jeff Amerine:
Let me ask a follow up to that a little bit. Whenever I think about change or adoption of anything new, I think about that classic chart that has innovators and tinkerers, early adopters, fast followers, kind of mass majority and Luddites. And I think that’s kind of characteristic in some ways of the human psyche in terms of how we’re all wired. As you think about change and the personas that you have to deal with when you’re trying to enact change, is there a model around the way you think about that or you just assume that the motivations are going to be similar for everyone? Talk a little bit about that human element
Karen Ball:
And we all come to change from a very different space. And it’s interesting inside of an organization, I may be sitting in a team of people who’s going through a transformational change and intellectually I understand why it’s necessary and what we’re going to be doing and I see that that’s the right path and the direction I’m bought into that, but maybe I’m having a difficult time at home and so I’m bringing my challenges of home, just my natural state, which makes it more difficult to go through a change in the workplace as well. So there are psychological components to all of that, but there’s also a way that we can unpack each of those through the lens of Adkar by giving people what they need as they progress through each of those elements. One of the things Jeff Hyatt was really clear on when he developed the Adkar model is these are outcomes, they’re not activities. Awareness is not an communication is an activity, awareness is an outcome. So if we’re able to take into consideration what people need in awareness, why now what if we don’t do this? What is and what isn’t changing? Why is this one important relative to other changes that are going on inside of the organization and in desire? We get into the personal motivators and the what’s in it for me and the organizational motivators and so on and so forth. So if you look at it sitting that, putting that model on top of other models around the psychology of change where it’s scarf model or it’s early adopter models, they all are recognizing that change is a process and that it’s incumbent upon us as people managers, I need to understand where my own people are in the process of change, the executive leaders of the organization understanding that everyone’s going to go through their own transitions. And it’s especially challenging for leaders because they sit in the future state, they live in the future state, they’re imagining this difference that’s going to happen, but not so much what it’s going to take to get there. So there are models that Adkar sits on top of, but it really is articulating the process and the outcomes of all of the that we need to do to help people go through their individual change process.
Jeff Standridge:
So if you don’t mind, kind of break that add card down for us a little bit and tell us when you stand up an engagement with one of Prosci clients, how do you use that model today?
Karen Ball:
Yeah, Adkar at the center, I always try to think of this. If you think of Prosci as a global fruit stand offering lots of different products and services to our clients in the space of change management, Adkar is the golden apple that flavors everything on the fruit stand. So it sits at the center of our change management methodology. It sits at center of our people manager and executive sponsor training. It sits at the center of integration with project delivery into bedding, at car milestones, for example as project milestones along a project delivery lifecycle. So at CAR is really the core of everything because again, we go back to the fact that change is individual and the activities that we enact to help people go through individual change collectively is what delivers organizational results. So everything goes back and understands and recognizes the individual change process first so that we can deliver the change outcomes that we’re trying to deliver as organizations.
I’ve been trying to use two words here that maybe I want to test them with you. Adkar gives us sense making, so it allows us to make sense of why some people move quickly through the change cycle, some don’t, where do they get stuck? What are the barriers so that we can make sense of and give a framework to change. And that it also gives us way finding so that we can scan and act so sense-making of the change process and way finding to help find our way through quickly, especially in times when things are happening collectively and on top of each other. So the velocity of changes is so great right now we need to be really good at both sensemaking and way finding for people in our organizations
Jeff Standridge:
About an anecdote or two, maybe an example that you have where you used Adkar with a client to do some of this sensemaking and way finding or to help them do some of the sensemaking and way finding.
Karen Ball:
Yeah, great. Great question. And one thing is Adkar is both individual and organizational and it’s personal and professional. So we can apply the same model to any personal change that we want to undertake. So in the book I’ve incorporated over 50 Adkar storytellers with 20 countries, six continents, and one of them is Graham learns to swim, right? So it’s a personal at car story, but then we’ve got an organization that’s a multinational pharmaceuticals organization with 50,000 people who are going through 5,000 migrations data migrations in a digital transformation portfolio. And they architected the journey for all 50,000 people through the lens of Adkar and how they were going to engage with them to communicate and to engage sponsorship and to do training and to test for proficiency and to ensure the readiness of every person impacted through the lens of Adkar. So it gave them a way to build out a rather complex change management strategy and all of the plans looking at it through the lens of Adkar and then they can check and make sure they’re checking progress. So they would actually do Adkar assessments at major milestones in the project to ensure that we had awareness and we had people choosing and desire, they felt knowledgeable about what they were going to be asked to do and able in proficiency to be able to do it. So I’ve seen it employed from individuals going through a personal change to many thousands of people in organizations where you are architecting the full change journey as an ad car journey.
Jeff Standridge:
What about some of the challenges that you see when you’re working with clients having been involved in a number of change initiatives? Somebody gets an idea. We see this on the innovation side as well. Someone gets an idea and they run down the path of implementing the idea, but maybe they didn’t really think through it and this recent large corporate initiative gets scrapped after a few months because we really didn’t think through it very well beyond something like that. Tell me about some of the red flags and challenges you see when you’re working with an organization as it relates to being ready for change.
Karen Ball:
Yes. Most of it is that they just don’t take the time to imagine what this journey is going to be like for everyone who’s impacted by the changes. So it’s just really important for people to come back and say, yes, this is the ideation that we have of the future state. Now let’s go back and compare that to where we are today. Who’s going to be impacted? How are they going to be impacted? To what degree is that impact? And then how are we going to support equipment, enable them through that? And I think a lot of it has to do with getting really good clarity around having an idea of a future state doesn’t mean that we fully articulated what it’s going to mean to bring that to life. And that’s designing and developing and delivering the solution as well. So if it’s a new implementation of a technology or an advancement in the way that organization is running or a merger and acquisition to go from an idea that’s aspirational to one that’s executable, so we can actually go in at an execution level and make it come to life. And that means that we’ve got to continually be in the future state, step back to the future state, I’m sorry, to the current state and then drive the necessary progressions to get there. So it’s kind of a backward, forward, backward way of saying, we are here, we need to be here now let’s go back and collect everybody and help them get there. So saying it and doing it are two different challenges.
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, for sure. When you look at how to implement today versus when Adkar was originally created, is there a growing pallet of tools and automated technologies that are available that are additive or supportive of trying to get this process implemented during a change management exercise? Talk a little bit about how the technology’s growing up around what you’re doing.
Karen Ball:
Yeah, that’s a great question. The model was built in the late 1990s and nothing has changed in almost 20 years. In fact, we’ve got more proof and more evidence and more research and more practice that demonstrates the value of the at car model. But what has changed is I know you’ve had a chance to spend time with Tim Cree on ai, pro AI model. Kaya is fed with all of the research that we’ve been doing for over 25 years. So I can say, for example, I need to do a sponsor briefing on their role in helping individuals through their transitions and change. And I can go to Kaya and say, Kaya, can you throw together for me an agenda? I’ve got a sponsor who is resistant to change management as a methodology or doesn’t understand their role in change management. Help me build an engagement story for that particular leader so we can tap into now all of the over 25 years of research through our AI engine to help make those things happen.
But we can’t skip the steps. It’s a sequential model. So we can have tools and resources that help us build awareness outcomes more quickly and more effectively teach executives and senior leaders how to step into their role more actively and more effectively. But the progression through each of those steps is still a checklist outcome in order to get people successfully through their ag car journey. So we’ve got tools and resources to help speed the process, but the outcomes of Adkar are still as relevant, if not more so today than they have been since the model was first created.
Jeff Standridge:
So Karen, tell our listeners a little bit about the book, the Adkar Advantage and what they can expect where they to pick it up.
Karen Ball:
Yeah, thanks Jeff. Yeah, the Adkar Advantage is basically a refresh of Jeff Hyatt’s book that was written in 2006. So in early 2023, I was asked to take on the project of building a refreshed version of the book, certainly to incorporate the almost 20 years of promise and proof and practice that we have since the model was introduced. And I’ve broken it down into three parts. So part one is the model, how one person goes through change. Part two is how groups of people go through change and how you scale Adkar to an organizational context. And then part three is about how organizations build change capability, how they become better at change through the lens of Adkar. And it’s intended to be an Adkar journey for the reader. So it’s awareness and desire. There’s checklists and downloads, and it’s a very how-to practical guidance for applications of Adkar at individual and organizational context.
Jeff Standridge:
Good. Well, we appreciate you for being with us today. We’re talking to Karen Ball, who’s a senior fellow with Prosci, the change management organization. Karen, tell our listeners where they can connect with you.
Karen Ball:
Yeah, thanks. Of course. You can go to prosci.com. Prosci has so many resources that are available at no charge. They’re just free downloadable webinars, thought leadership articles. You could spend hours there. The other way is to reach out to me directly most of the time in LinkedIn. So Karen, ball 20, LinkedIn, and of course, I’m happy to continue the conversation with anyone whose interests may be peaked to learn more.
Jeff Amerine:
Right. Jeff, anything to add? No, thank you so much for coming on. It’s just such a critical topic. A lot of times we see the really compelling stats about how often major organizational changes fail, how often it fails when there’s merger and acquisitions, because that’s also a major change and it’s not often well thought through. So the work you all do is great, and thank you very much for all the contributions.
Karen Ball:
Yeah, thank you so much for having me. And when I was first introduced to Adkar, I knew how impactful it was and that it would change the trajectory of my career, and I am just thrilled to be able to share it with others.
Jeff Standridge:
Aaron Ball, senior Fellow with Prosci. Karen, it’s been great having you. This has been another episode of the Innovation Junkies podcast. We’ll talk to you soon. See you next time.
Jeff Amerine (Outro):
Thanks for tuning into another episode of the Innovation Junkies Podcast. We hope you gain some valuable insights and inspiration from today’s conversation. Be sure to subscribe for more episodes featuring leaders in the forefront of innovation. And don’t forget to connect with us on social media to continue the conversation. See you next time.