Beyond ADKAR: why the 21st century demands a new operating model for commercial transformation.
Change management is necessary — but on its own it was never sufficient. No rollout, however well-governed, builds an enterprise that keeps adapting on its own.
We fund more transformation every year — and get the same result.
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 carry 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.
The pattern has held for thirty years. The inputs keep rising; the outcome does not move.
ADKAR is built to manage change.
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 describes the five sequential conditions an individual must meet 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 never a sufficient one. Managing an organization through a defined change is not the same as building one that keeps adapting after the change ends.
Five gaps between what ADKAR manages and what transformation now requires.
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 does not account for whether 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.
TransformationOS™, defined.
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 — not 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 can't.
Behavior driven from outside needs a watcher to survive. Behavior people own carries itself — the point where ADKAR degrades is exactly what this is built for.
Built by operators, on science older than ADKAR.
TransformationOS did not come out of a change-management textbook. It was assembled inside Demand Metric — the advisory firm behind the Commercial Excellence Consortium™, an invite-only community of senior commercial operators — who kept watching well-run programs pass every adoption metric on the dashboard and then revert in the field.
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 — what ADKAR's Desire stage asks for but cannot create.2
Project-based learning
Capability is built by doing the real work, not delivered to a room — and it outlasts anything the classroom can teach.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.
How the pieces fit — and why the order matters.
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 five-stage rhythm — detailed next.
The five-stage rhythm, run cohort by cohort.
AIRAS is the delivery rhythm beneath the model — how the mindset, skill, and tool layers actually get installed. Each stage builds intrinsic commitment, not just awareness.
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 actually 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, but behavior doesn't change→Capability is built in the work, and it stays
- Passive resistance slows everything 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® — Adversity Quotient — is measurable, and can be permanently improved.
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.
What high adversity capacity predicts — and improves.
These are AQ® research findings — the foundation the mindset layer is built on, not results from any one program. Across 3,500+ independent studies and 5M+ people tested, higher AQ® predicts and strengthens the outcomes a mindset-first model 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 it takes to install — 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
Three signals — and the one to own.
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 science shows it predicts successful outcomes better than any other metric. Commercial Excellence owns this.
Execution discipline
Growth Project™ progress, adoption of new ways of working, and the consistency of follow-through — observed by coaches, not 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, not 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 — not a consultant.
“The best development experience of my career.” — a German-HQ skeptic
ADKAR vs. TransformationOS, across every structural dimension.
The job has changed. The sharper question for your next initiative.
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 ADKAR does not dissolve. The usual alternatives — big-consultancy change practices, Prosci, the LMS — manage the same surface ADKAR named. None install the mindset layer underneath.
Ready to equip your people to harness the adversity transformation generates?
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.