Top Change Management Models: ADKAR and CRET Explained

Organizations rarely fail at change because they pick the wrong destination. They fail because they underestimate how people and processes actually move from the old way to the new way. Whether a municipal corporation is digitizing property records or a manufacturing firm is overhauling its supply chain, the technical plan is often the easy part. The harder challenge is managing the human transition and redesigning the work itself. This is where structured change management models earn their value. Two frameworks worth understanding in depth are the ADKAR model, which focuses on guiding individuals through change, and the CRET model, which blends process redesign with people-centred change. Together they offer complementary lenses for thinking about transformation.

Why change needs a model at all 🔗

Change initiatives have a stubbornly high failure rate. Studies of business process reengineering efforts have repeatedly found that a majority do not deliver their intended results, often because the people side of change is neglected. A model gives leaders a shared vocabulary and a checklist of what cannot be skipped. It turns a vague ambition (“we need to modernize”) into a sequence of measurable goals. Without this structure, teams tend to jump straight to implementation, install a new system, and then wonder why employees quietly revert to old habits within months.

The ADKAR model: managing change one person at a time 🔗

The ADKAR model was developed by Jeff Hiatt, founder of the change management firm Prosci, after studying the change patterns of hundreds of organizations. Its core insight is simple but powerful: organizational change only happens when individuals change. You can buy new software and redraw the org chart, but if each affected person does not personally make the shift, the change does not stick. ADKAR is therefore both a planning framework and a diagnostic tool. When a change stalls, you can use it to pinpoint exactly where a person or team is stuck.

ADKAR is an acronym for five outcomes that an individual must achieve, in order, for change to succeed. The model treats these as sequential building blocks, where each one must be reasonably secure before the next can hold.

Awareness of the need for change 🔗

Awareness is the starting point. People need to understand why the change is happening, what is driving it, and what the risks of not changing are. This is primarily a communication task. In practice, awareness is built through clear messaging from leaders, briefings, and honest explanations of the business case. A common mistake is rushing this stage. If employees do not believe a change is necessary, every later effort meets quiet resistance.

Desire to support and participate 🔗

Desire is about motivation, and it is the hardest element to manufacture because it is a personal choice. A person can fully understand why a change is needed and still not want it, perhaps because they fear losing status, comfort, or job security. Building desire involves addressing “what’s in it for me,” involving people in the process, and having managers actively champion the change rather than merely announce it.

Knowledge of how to change 🔗

Knowledge covers the information and skills people need to operate in the new environment. This is the training stage, encompassing both knowledge of how to perform new tasks and knowledge of how to use new tools or follow new procedures. Insufficient training here is a frequent failure point, leaving willing employees unable to act on their motivation.

Ability to implement the change 🔗

Ability is the difference between knowing and doing. As change researchers note, awareness, desire and knowledge all fall short of real change if ability is absent. This is the point at which change becomes visible and measurable. Closing the gap between knowledge and ability usually requires hands-on practice, coaching, time to build proficiency, and removing practical barriers that block performance.

Reinforcement to sustain the change 🔗

Reinforcement is what prevents people from sliding back to old habits. It includes recognition, rewards, feedback, performance measurement, and corrective action. This stage is frequently neglected because organizations are often already racing toward the next initiative. Yet without reinforcement, hard-won gains quietly erode.

A key strength highlighted by guides such as Mindtools is that ADKAR gives each stage a clear, finite goal, which makes the change process easier to communicate and to measure at the individual level. Its main limitation is the flip side of its focus: because it centres on individual transitions, it does not, on its own, redesign the underlying processes, structures, or systems that large-scale transformation often demands.

The CRET model: marrying process redesign with people change 🔗

Where ADKAR concentrates on the human journey, the CRET model takes a broader view by integrating Business Process Reengineering (BPR) with structured change management. BPR is the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of core business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in cost, quality, service, and speed. On its own, BPR has a troubled reputation, partly because early efforts focused on workflows and technology while ignoring the people affected. The CRET model responds to this by weaving change management into a reengineering sequence, recognizing that process redesign and human transition must happen together.

The model organizes work into five phases that move from understanding the problem through to confirming results.

Clarification 🔗

Clarification establishes why the change is needed and what it is meant to achieve. This phase defines the scope, objectives, and vision of the initiative, much like building a business case for reengineering. As BPR practitioners emphasize, securing leadership commitment early is essential here, because without clear direction from the top, transformation efforts lose momentum and fail to deliver meaningful change. Clarification ensures everyone agrees on the destination before the journey begins.

Analysis 🔗

Analysis examines the current state in detail. This means mapping existing processes, identifying redundancies and bottlenecks, and understanding where value is created and lost. It also involves assessing the organization’s readiness for change and identifying the critical success factors that will influence the outcome. Analysis is where the radical redesign of BPR takes shape, as teams critically question why work is done the way it is and imagine how it could be done differently.

Transition planning 🔗

Transition planning bridges design and execution. Here the organization decides how it will move from the old process to the new one, including timelines, resources, roles, and responsibilities. A central decision is the type of transition, whether a gradual, phased rollout or a faster switch. Piloting redesigned processes before full implementation is widely recommended because it surfaces application problems early so they can be solved before a full launch. This phase also produces a deliberate change management plan to address resistance and support people through the shift.

Transition management 🔗

Transition management is the active execution of the plan. In BPR practice, teams that steer organizations through major change are often called transition management teams, and their job is to guide the direction in which the organization moves during implementation. This phase is where communication, training, and support intensify. Resistance is natural during reengineering as people worry about disruption and job security, and effective transition management works to reduce that resistance through involvement, consistent communication, and ongoing support rather than force.

Evaluation 🔗

Evaluation closes the loop. The organization measures the results of the change against the objectives set during clarification, examining gains in efficiency, cost, quality, and adoption. As reengineering thinking stresses, BPR is not a one-time project but a continuous journey, so evaluation feeds learning back into further refinement. This phase confirms whether the change has actually taken hold and what should be improved next.

Comparative analysis: choosing the right lens 🔗

ADKAR and CRET are not rivals so much as tools designed for different parts of the same problem. ADKAR is fundamentally a people model. Its strength is precision at the individual level: it tells you whether a specific employee is stuck on motivation, skills, or sustaining new behaviour, and it works well for changes where the main challenge is adoption, such as introducing new software or reorganizing a team. Its weakness is that it does not address how to redesign the work itself.

CRET, by contrast, is a process-and-people model. Its strength is scope. By embedding change management inside a reengineering sequence, it suits situations where the existing processes are fundamentally broken and incremental fixes will not do, the kind of radical change BPR was built for. Because it covers clarification through evaluation, it provides an end-to-end roadmap for large transformations. Its trade-off is that it is heavier and more demanding, requiring strong leadership, significant resources, and tolerance for disruption.

In practice, the two complement each other neatly. An organization might use the CRET model to structure a major reengineering programme while applying ADKAR within the transition management phase to ensure each affected person genuinely moves through awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement. The process model handles the “what” and the “how” of the work, while the individual model handles the “who.”

What do you think? 🔗

What do you think? If you were leading a major change in an organization you know well, would you start with the individual focus of ADKAR or the process-first scope of CRET, and what does that choice reveal about where you believe change really begins? And when a transformation fails, is it more often a failure of process design or a failure to win people over?

References

1. https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/business-process-reengineering
2. https://www.prosci.com/methodology/adkar
3. https://www.irmbrjournal.com/papers/1560753273.pdf
4. https://www.mindtools.com/aou2mjr/the-adkar-change-management-model/
5. https://www.atlassian.com/work-management/strategic-planning/business-process-reengineering
6. https://www.prosci.com/blog/business-process-reengineering
7. https://www.mindtools.com/aeho535/business-process-reengineering/