The AIRAS Method for Accelerating Transformation
Change management sequences a rollout. AIRAS sequences the behavior: align, inspire, reflect, apply, scale. It is the sequence that survives the sponsor who launched it.
We fund more transformation every year — and three in four fail to deliver the results.
The money is not the problem. Spend on transformation is on track to more than double, from $1.8 trillion in 2022 to over $4 trillion by 2027. Boards are funding it at unprecedented levels.
What is collapsing is the willingness to sustain it. Employee support for enterprise change has fallen from 74% in 2016 to 38% today. And roughly three in four transformations still fail to produce lasting value.
What the money keeps buying is a rollout that lands on schedule and a return that falls short of the case that funded it. The constraint was rarely the budget. It is what people do the week after the launch.
ADKAR names the terms of compliance. Not the ones for commitment.
ADKAR is the change‑management model most Fortune 100 companies run on. Created by Prosci founder Jeff Hiatt and formalized in his 2006 book, it names the five sequential conditions an individual meets to adopt and sustain a change. For three decades it has been the default playbook for rolling out change, and for its era a genuine contribution.
It is a logical model, and a necessary one. It was simply not a sufficient one. Moving an organization through a defined change is a different job from building one that keeps adapting after that change ends and the next one starts.
Five gaps sit between managing a change and building a company that adapts.
It drives compliance more than commitment.
A manager who complies uses the framework when observed and eases off when not, and ADKAR does little to address the passive resistance that can follow.
It treats motivation as a communication problem.
Its Desire stage conflates burning‑platform messaging with intrinsic motivation, ignoring the autonomy, competence, and relatedness that Self‑Determination Theory shows are required.
It leaves open whether the learning endures.
Structured training decays fast: up to 90% forgotten within a week. Retention comes from doing and teaching the real work, not from sitting through instruction.
It does little to prepare people for adversity.
ADKAR does little to prepare people for how they respond when transformation gets hard, measured as AQ®, among the strongest predictors of whether change survives.
Its reinforcement leans on outside pressure.
Reinforcement depends on external governance; when the sponsor moves on or Q4 pressure mounts, it can fade, with little intrinsic motivation left to keep the change in place.
AIRAS closes those gaps in five stages, run cohort by cohort.
AIRAS is the delivery rhythm a transformation runs on: how mindset, skill, and tools get installed in a population rather than announced to one. Each stage is built on a specific behavioral mechanism, and each one addresses a gap the rollout playbook leaves open.
The order is deliberate. Align and Inspire build the motivation to engage before any framework arrives. Reflect gives people a way to work through the hard middle. Apply puts the capability into live P&L work, and Scale moves ownership from the program to the people, who then run the next cohort.
AIRAS rests on three sciences — two of them published before ADKAR.
AIRAS did not come out of a change‑management textbook. It was assembled inside Demand Metric, the advisory firm behind the Commercial Excellence Consortium™ and an invite‑only community of senior commercial operators, by people who kept watching well‑run programs finish on plan and revert a quarter later.
Rather than write another communication model, it synthesizes three bodies of performance science that ADKAR leaves out. Two of the three were established well before ADKAR was formalized in 2006, and left on the table.
Adversity Quotient (AQ®) & GRIT™
Dr. Paul Stoltz's paired measures of how people handle hardship: AQ® for how they absorb pressure and setbacks, GRIT™ for how they push through toward goals that matter.1
Self‑Determination Theory
The autonomy, competence, and relatedness that produce intrinsic motivation, which the Desire stage asks for and rarely creates.2
Project‑based learning
Capability is built by doing the real work rather than delivered to a room, and it outlasts the classroom.3
1 Stoltz, P. G. (1997). Adversity Quotient: Turning Obstacles into Opportunities. Wiley. 2 Deci, E. L. & Ryan, R. M. (1985). Intrinsic Motivation and Self‑Determination in Human Behavior. Plenum. 3 Chen, C.-H. & Yang, Y.-C. (2019). Revisiting the effects of project‑based learning on academic achievement: a meta‑analysis. Educational Research Review, 26, 71–81.
Mindset before skillset, skillset before toolset.
Mindset
Built before any framework. Skip it and the skills and tools that follow get rejected. The coaching: AQ® and GRIT™, run by Operator‑Coaches.
Skillset
Real capability, built on the team's own live P&L problems, not a training audience. The real work: 90‑day Growth Projects™ on the team's own priorities.
Toolset
Frameworks embedded in daily workflows, for a population already motivated to use them well. On demand: 1,000+ Demand Metric playbooks, pulled when the work needs them.
All three install cohort by cohort through AIRAS: the mindset layer during Align, Inspire, and Reflect; the skill layer during Apply; the tools last.
AIRAS is how TransformationOS™ gets installed.
A commercial transformation operating model that turns compliance into commitment. It builds the mindset to absorb change before the skillset to execute it and the toolset to sustain it, to accelerate adoption of new ways of working.
A framework is a diagram on a wall.
An operating system runs underneath the work and keeps it running. This is the layer beneath the training, the tools, and the governance, rather than another one of them.
Mindset, then skill, then tools.
Most programs install those three in reverse, then wonder why nothing takes. The operating model enforces the sequence that makes each layer land.
Commitment outlasts the sponsor. Compliance rarely does.
Behavior driven from outside needs a watcher to survive. Behavior people own sustains itself, and the point where ADKAR degrades is exactly what this is built for.
From today's pattern to the one that lasts.
The same organization, run on a mindset‑first operating model. Left is the pattern most transformations are stuck in; right is what the work produces.
- Transformation activity is high, but velocity is slow→Teams adapt and execute faster under pressure
- Programs run, but adoption is uneven across teams and regions→Adoption lasts after the pressure lifts
- Training happens, and behavior lags well behind it→Capability is built in the work, and it stays
- Passive resistance slows the work down→Resistance is surfaced and reduced at the root
- Commercial Excellence struggles to prove its strategic contribution→Commercial Excellence becomes a credible growth engine
AQ® is measurable, improvable, and unlike IQ, it moves.
AQ® measures defense: how a person absorbs and recovers from pressure, setbacks, and ambiguity. GRIT™ measures offense: how they turn that adversity into forward motion on goals that matter.
Over four decades and 3,500+ studies, the same methodology has been used at the most elite levels of sport, academia, and enterprise, and unlike IQ, it can be assessed, strengthened, and linked directly to outcomes.
Higher adversity capacity predicts the outcomes you are funding for.
These are AQ® research findings, the foundation the mindset layer stands on, rather than results from any one program. Across 3,500+ independent studies and 5M+ people tested, higher AQ® predicts and strengthens what a mindset‑first method is built to move.
Higher AQ® predicts and improves at the individual and team level: performance, productivity, innovation, agility, resilience, pace of change, problem‑solving, optimism and energy, and morale. At the enterprise level: retention and hiring, talent, leadership, culture, and engagement.
Source: PEAK Learning / Peak Performance International research base; independent studies including Cornell University and Educational Testing Service (ETS).
What installing AIRAS asks of you — and where it breaks.
This isn't plug‑and‑play. It asks more of the sponsor and the team than a training rollout does. That's the point, and the risk.
What it requires
Where it breaks
Adaptive capacity moves first — and it predicts the rest.
The metrics Commercial Excellence and Transformation own: leading, behavioral, then financial. The financial ones belong to the business.
Adaptive capacity
AQ® for defense, GRIT™ for offense, benchmarked before and after. The research base shows it predicts successful outcomes better than the alternatives. Commercial Excellence owns this.
Execution discipline
Growth Project™ progress, adoption of new ways of working, and the consistency of follow‑through, observed by coaches rather than self‑reported. Commercial Excellence owns this.
Business impact
Pipeline, margin, win/loss, market entry, measured in your own systems, on the Growth Projects the work put in motion. The business units own this.
He scrapped a failed consulting playbook and rebuilt it mindset first.
At LANXESS, Roy van Griensven inherited a classroom capability program from a top consulting firm, a design he had watched fail before. It treated behavior as a downstream result of training rather than the thing to solve for.
He rebuilt it as the Commercial Excellence Academy, designed with Demand Metric. Participants started with an adversity‑response baseline, then ran 90‑day projects on their own live problems, coached weekly by a senior operator rather than a consultant. By the sixth cohort LANXESS coaches were coaching some of the projects themselves, which is how the coaching capability moves in‑house.
“The best development experience of my career.” — a German‑HQ skeptic
ADKAR and AIRAS, across the dimensions that matter.
The job changed. So did the question worth asking.
ADKAR gave the field structure, vocabulary, and a repeatable process for managing the human dimension of change. For three decades, it was the best available tool for the job.
But the job has changed. Commercial leaders are now driving fundamental shifts in how their organizations create and capture value, under pressure, against inertia the playbook leaves in place. Big‑consultancy change practices, Prosci and the LMS manage the same surface ADKAR named. Few of them install the behavioral layer underneath.
So the question for the next initiative shifts. Not ‘how do we manage the change?’ but ‘what makes these people want to run it after we stop watching?’ That is the question AIRAS was designed to answer, and the reason the behavioral science it rests on is worth the extra quarter it asks for.
Ready to run your next transformation on the behavioral science?
For Consortium members and their leadership teams, the next step is straightforward: book a confidential Executive Briefing. No pitch. No proposal. A candid, peer‑level diagnostic.
For senior Commercial Excellence, Strategy, Transformation, and Growth leaders at $1B+ enterprises.
The Fellowship™
A working circle for Heads of Commercial Excellence, Strategy, Transformation, and Growth at $1B+ enterprises: operators building the next commercial operating model, together.