PROSCI Change Management: What the Certification Doesn't Teach You

The team had done everything right—sponsor identified, stakeholder analysis complete, change network activated, communications calendar populated. Textbook execution. And yet adoption cratered six weeks after go-live.

The post-mortem was illuminating. The sponsor had signed the charter but never once walked the floor. The change network existed on paper but hadn’t met since training. The communications were grammatically perfect and strategically useless. The methodology was followed. The craft was absent.

I’ve been PROSCI certified since 2012. I believe in the framework. But after dozens of enterprise transformations, I’ve learned that the distance between “certified” and “effective” is vast. Here’s what experience teaches that certification doesn’t.

Most sponsors don’t know how to sponsor

PROSCI’s research is clear: active executive sponsorship is the top predictor of success. Projects with strong sponsors succeed nearly 80% of the time. Projects with weak sponsors fail at the same rate. This finding is cited in every certification class, every keynote, every proposal.

And yet—in my experience, maybe one in five sponsors actually sponsors effectively. They show up at kickoff. They record the launch video. They appear at the town hall. Then they vanish into their real jobs while the project team fights the organization alone.

The uncomfortable truth is that most executives have never been taught to sponsor. They’ve rarely seen it modeled. And the change team is usually too intimidated—or too politically savvy—to name the gap.

What does real sponsorship look like? Decisions made weekly, not monthly. Peer relationships actively managed behind closed doors—convincing skeptical SVPs, neutralizing blockers, building coalitions that the project team never sees. Consistent messaging when things get hard. And most importantly: actually talking to impacted people. Not staged town halls. Break rooms. Slack threads. The hallway after a difficult meeting.

If your sponsor isn’t doing these things, you don’t have a sponsorship problem. You have a project viability problem. No methodology compensates for absent leadership.

ADKAR is a diagnostic, not a recipe

The ADKAR model—Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, Reinforcement—is genuinely useful. When adoption lags, it helps you locate the sticking point. People don’t understand why we’re changing? That’s an Awareness gap. They understand but don’t want to participate? Desire. They’re willing but can’t execute? Ability.

The problem is when practitioners treat ADKAR like a sequential recipe: first create awareness, then build desire, then deliver training, then reinforce. That’s not how humans work.

In practice, these elements shift constantly. Someone starts with strong desire that evaporates when training reveals how hard the change will be. Another person builds ability through practice but loses it without reinforcement. The model is a lens for diagnosis, not a checklist for delivery.

I’ve seen teams pour months into awareness campaigns when the real barrier was ability—people knew about the change, wanted to participate, had been trained, but couldn’t execute in their actual work environment. The training bore no resemblance to the messy reality of their daily jobs. Diagnosis before treatment. Always.

Resistance is usually intelligence

The standard framing: 20% embrace change, 60% wait and see, 20% resist. Change management should convert the middle and manage the resisters.

Different take: resistance is often the most valuable signal in the system.

When a tenured employee pushes back on a new process, they’re usually not being difficult. They’re surfacing information the design team missed. “This won’t work because customer X always needs exception Y” isn’t resistance. It’s requirements. “We tried something similar in 2019 and here’s what happened” isn’t cynicism. It’s institutional memory. The people closest to the work understand its complexity better than anyone designing from a conference room.

Instead of resistance management, think intelligence gathering. Create channels for concerns to surface and be genuinely evaluated. When people see their input changing outcomes, commitment follows.

Training is necessary but wildly insufficient

Knowledge and Ability are the ADKAR phases that get the most budget and the least impact. Organizations love training because it’s visible, measurable, and feels productive. But most learning happens on the job, not in classrooms.

The pattern I see: elaborate training programs, thousands of hours invested, completion rates tracked obsessively. Then go-live happens and people can’t do the work. The training taught the system. It didn’t teach the job.

Effective capability building looks different. It starts with impact analysis by role—not generic overviews but specific “here’s what changes for you on Tuesday.” It includes manager enablement so supervisors can coach their teams. It builds practice environments that mirror real work. And it continues past go-live with just-in-time support when people get stuck.

The methodology isn’t the point

PROSCI is a good framework. So is Kotter. So is ADKAR. The methodology you choose matters less than the craft you bring to it.

What matters: understanding human psychology. Building genuine relationships. Navigating organizational politics. Communicating clearly under pressure. Adapting when the plan meets reality.

The practitioners I respect most use frameworks lightly—as thinking tools, not religious texts. They adapt to context, challenge orthodoxy when it doesn’t fit, and ultimately measure success by outcomes rather than process compliance.

PROSCI certification teaches you the model. Experience teaches you when to deviate from it.

---

If you’re planning a transformation and want experienced guidance—not just methodology, but judgment—let’s talk.