How You Create Knowledge

It's fine to say you need Knowledge as well as Awareness, Desire, Ability and Reinforcement to carry through organizational change (ADKAR by Prosci) . The question then becomes how do you develop the knowledge?

One challenge is there is so much information today it's difficult to sort through and decide exactly the kind of knowledge you need.  It works better if you first choose a strategy, not only for how to get the knowledge you're seeking, but for succeeding at each step to reach an overall goal you have in mind. 

Only when you start to pursue your goal seriously through action will you begin to pay close enough attention to notice the types of knowledge you need.

An example would be when you decide you're going to take over another organization - a major change for people in the other organization and for your own people as well.  From experience I can say the most important factor (apart from obvious factual items: financial and strategic fit between the organizations) is that both groups of people must feel continuing respect from the other, feel included and believe the end result will provide value to them - and by "them" I mean each individual in each group.

80% of mergers and acquisitions fail for "lack of culture fit."  In other words the people didn't get along, respect each other or find ways to work together.

To follow the ADKAR model, as you go forward you begin to become Aware of more of these new challenges that you may not have anticipated at first.  Each can become a block to progress.  You may have to scramble to develop new knowledge throughout the process.  Now you have a new test of the strength of your Desire and need to Reinforce it.  The overall strategy looked sensible, but do you want to dig into each roadblock you've discovered.  You must do so with good will and confidence, believing you have a positive chance of success, or you will end up with failure.  So Desire has to be renewed and developed further day by day.  In other words the general concepts of Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability and Reinforcement are helpful guides, but not sufficient to handle the details.  Underlying each are habits to develop.  Doing so requires you to be Positive, Honest, think Strategically and so on according to my model.

Each step can be the deal-breaker.  You will have to develop many new Abilities along the way.  Each requires Reinforcement through practice to build habits in the new area.  It really doesn't take much to shift the ADKAR change model toward practical skills you need in order to succeed: Balance, in being Positive, being Honest, choosing the best Strategies and building Habits to achieve them.  My efforts have simply been aimed at finding the easiest words that most directly help guide one's behavior in each situation.  By following them you develop Knowledge as you go.