change management is the product.
ai software is a commodity. getting a team to use it is not. this page is the research we build on.
why most ai rollouts fail
the pattern is always the same. leadership buys a license. a vendor runs a demo. ops sends a rollout email. six months later three people use it, nobody's sure what it cost, and the board is asking for an "ai strategy." the tool wasn't wrong. the adoption never happened.
dr. gerald bell's laws of change
dr. bell has been at unc kenan-flagler for over fifty years. his bell leadership institute has trained more than 500,000 leaders across 5,000 organizations. his change leadership program is built on a set of laws that apply equally to people, teams, and companies. the short version:
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create the desire first. information doesn't change behavior. desire does.
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communicate the change at the level of the person. not the org chart.
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feedback creates motion. silence kills it.
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behavior follows belief, not the other way around. you can't memo your way to adoption.
adkar — the individual change model
prosci's adkar model says an individual has to move through five stages for a change to stick: awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, reinforcement. we use it as a diagnostic during the first week onsite. if a person is stuck at desire, training them is a waste of money. if they're stuck at reinforcement, more training is also a waste. adkar tells you where the real work is.
Prosci — The ADKAR Model →kotter's 8 steps
john kotter's model is org-level, not individual. it pairs well with adkar. the eight steps: create urgency, build a guiding coalition, form a vision, enlist a volunteer army, remove barriers, generate short-term wins, sustain momentum, anchor the change in culture. for ai adoption in an smb, steps five and six — remove barriers and generate short-term wins — are where most programs die.
how we use this in a real engagement
week one, we run adkar on every person who'll touch the workflow. we find the ones stuck at desire and we don't train them yet — we have a conversation. we use bell's communication principle to make that conversation land at their level. by end of week we've removed the one barrier that's blocking the short-term win, kotter-style. then we ship the workflow. we don't leave until the reinforcement stage of adkar is owned by an internal champion.
reading list
Change Leadership
Bell Leadership Institute
Dr. Bell's program built on the Laws of Change.
The ADKAR Model
Prosci / Jeff Hiatt
The individual-change framework we use as a diagnostic.
Leading Change
John P. Kotter
The eight-step org-level change model. Foundational.
Reconfiguring work: Change management in the age of gen AI
McKinsey QuantumBlack
Why AI adoption is a work-design problem, not a tooling problem.
Change Management for AI Adoption
Booz Allen
Practitioner guide to the people side of AI rollouts.
AI Change Management
Prosci
Prosci's specific AI adaptation of ADKAR.
Transforming change management with responsible AI
IBM
On AI-assisted change management (the other direction of the same problem).
The Carolina Way
Dean Smith and Dr. Gerald Bell
Applied leadership, co-authored. NYT bestseller. Background on Dr. Bell's method.