How can you ever hit a business target when the target keeps changing?
That’s the question that is top of mind for HR, learning, and IT leaders alike. Technology is shifting faster than teams can operationalize it. The result is that company goals and workforce strategies often are no longer fixed destinations. In fact, employees are experiencing approximately ten “planned change programs” per year, according to McKinsey, which is five times more than a decade ago.
Traditional development methods can’t keep up with that. It’s time for a perspective shift.
How to Strengthen Adaptive Change Management and Employee Development
We should be asking, how can we keep pace with a moving target?
Before AI started driving technology innovation at a furious pace, it made sense to determine a goal to support your strategy, adjust work to meet that goal, and continue on that path until it had been achieved. That’s not what work looks like anymore; the world is evolving too quickly to see the process through from beginning to end.
Employees are noticing the lack of effectiveness in how these shifts are handled. In 2025, only one fourth of employees surveyed felt their organizations effectively managed change rollouts across the business, and nearly half said it increased their workload.
At that rate, change isn’t sustainable. In a modern workplace, the only way to manage the current pace of change is to enable your workforce to continually adapt. Then, instead of missing targets, you’ll be looking for the next ones and feeling confident you can keep up.
That’s the shift. But knowing you need adaptability isn’t the same as operationalizing it.
To make change stick, you need a way to move individuals through it. It isn’t enough just to launch initiatives and hope adoption follows.
Apply the ADKAR Model to Drive Individual Change
Adaptive change fails because people aren’t ready to act on it.
That’s where the ADKAR model comes in. Built on the idea that organizational change only happens when individuals change, ADKAR gives leaders a simple way to identify where progress is breaking down, and what to do about it. It focuses on five outcomes every individual needs to move through:
- Awareness: Do people understand why this change matters right now?
- Desire: Do they actually want to engage with it?
- Knowledge: Do they know what to do differently?
- Ability: Can they apply those changes in real work?
- Reinforcement: Are those behaviors being sustained over time?
Most organizations stall somewhere in the middle. They communicate the change (awareness), maybe even provide training (knowledge), but never confirm whether employees can apply it under real work conditions. Or they skip reinforcement entirely, assuming once a behavior is introduced, it will stick.
In a world where priorities constantly shift, those gaps show up faster at scale.
The ADKAR model works because it gives you a diagnostic lens. Instead of asking, “Why isn’t this working?” you can pinpoint the exact barrier. Is it a lack of clarity? Resistance? Missing skills? Or simply no reinforcement?
Once you know where individuals are getting stuck, you can respond with precision, whether that includes targeted communication, hands-on practice, or ongoing feedback loops.
This approach helps turn change from a one-time rollout into a repeatable, scalable system. It’s not enough to introduce new ways of working. You have to ensure people can adopt, apply, and sustain them as conditions evolve.
How to Address Change Business-Wide
Understanding how individuals move through change is only part of the equation. The next challenge is scaling that across the business, so strategy translates into consistent behavior. Your workforce doesn’t need better planning to make this happen. Not only do they need the organization and leadership to help provide stronger change management. They also need more in-the-flow opportunities to help them develop the required emerging skills.
To keep pace, you need a system that connects what people know, how they feel, and what they actually have the capability to do right now. That means moving beyond static training programs. It means building a repeatable way to activate and accelerate always-on readiness.
Here are the steps to addressing big workplace shifts:
- Set the baseline. Don’t make assumptions about skill proficiencies. Knowing what employees know (and don’t know) is an essential part of effectively enabling them throughout a transition. Without this knowledge, you’re operating blind.
- Find out what’s blocking adoption. When adoption of a new method, process, or technology stalls, you can’t fix the problem until you know what’s causing it. Too often, organizations rely on surface-level learning data like completions or logins. But that doesn’t tell you whether employees feel confident, understand the shifts they need to make, or believe the changes apply to their role. Once you have a better grasp of these factors, you can help employees develop in the right areas.
- Provide experiential learning opportunities. According to McKinsey, nearly 90% of leaders are seeking a significant change in how to develop employees. And this is now possible, because AI capabilities have illuminated an entirely new learning landscape. Employees can access one-on-one coaching and participate in skill rating sessions in real-time to meet personalized development needs as they arise.
- Pick up the speed of transformation. The longer it takes to build, update, and deploy learning experiences, the more likely your approach will fall out of sync with current reality. To keep up, organizations need to reduce the operational drag around development by automating content creation, simplifying pathway design, and delivering the right learning to the right people without manual effort.
Successfully managing these four steps is what most organizations are aiming for in this AI-driven era.
Prepare for Constant Workforce Transformation with AI-Powered Learning
Even the best laid business plans and strategies fail if the workforce doesn’t have the capabilities needed to execute them. And in a world where priorities shift constantly, stalled progress is a huge risk. The organizations that keep up are the ones that can continuously:
- Understand workforce readiness in real time
- Identify and remove friction early
- Build capability through practice, not just exposure
- Adapt faster than the pace of change
That’s the shift. Change isn’t something you manage once. It’s something you execute continuously.
Degreed Maestro, our AI tool that’s purpose-built for human learning, is designed to help you do exactly that.
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