Transcript

SPEAKER:

The first A in ADKAR is awareness, awareness of the need for change. And it's because change begins with understanding why. This is a question we began asking when we turned about two years old as human beings – why, why, why?

We're seeing it show up all over the business literature, as well. You look at Simon Sinek's Golden Circle. You look at all the work around purpose-driven organisations. The notion of why as a central driving force is becoming more and more evident. Awareness has been the beginning building block of ADKAR since ADKAR was created.

What are the factors that influence awareness? They are things like your view of the current state, how you perceive problems and the credibility of the center. Do you think the current state is broken and needs to get fixed, or do you think the current state is doing great? Because you know what, you're the one that built the current state.

Are you hearing a lot of rumours about the current state, or are you not hearing much about the current state? Do you identify problems as soon as they start to creep up, or are you kind of oblivious until a problem is sort of blatantly right in front of you? Who's telling you this is a problem? Who's telling you that there's a need for change? Is that someone that you trust? Is it someone that is credible? Do you buy into the message?

So that's awareness of the need for change. It's what's the nature – why, why now, what if we don't. And I'm going to make one quick observation here. Notice that it is not awareness that the change is coming. It's awareness of the need for change. It is a subtle but incredibly important difference because I've heard even skilled change practitioners say, oh, we built awareness. We told them when it was coming. Awareness that it's coming is not awareness in the ADKAR model. We define awareness as awareness of the need for change. It's when I've internalised and understand why this is happening in the first place.

Grab your smartphone. We're going to do a couple – we're going to build a real quick word cloud here. That question why we begin asking from the very beginning – what I'm asking here is, what are some of the common reactions that a person is asked to change but they don't understand why? A person is asked to change, but they don't understand why.

This is stupid. Resistance – they resist. They panic – frustration. Sometimes we just ignore, you know? Reluctance, consolidation, apathy. Yeah, I will shut down. The why is so important to open up my receptivity to hear anything else that's about to come and to start to open up to the fact that I might need to take a step out of my current state how I do things today because there might be a need to change. If we don't create that compelling why, we see confusion, resistance, people ignore, we get fear and anger and all of those consequences.

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