ADKAR + Kirkpatrick: Closing the Gap Between Change Programs and Real Results
Most companies can tell you how much they’ve spent on training, leadership programs and change initiatives.
Far fewer can comfortably answer two simple questions:
Are people actually behaving differently in the real world?
Is that behaviour change showing up in business results?
That gap between “we ran the program” and “we can see the impact” is where a lot of transformation energy quietly evaporates.
It’s also the space Navetra™ is built to work in – with people, not instead of them.
The frameworks we respect… and what they leave up to you
If you sit anywhere near HR, L&D, OD or transformation, you’ve probably used two familiar frameworks:
The ADKAR® model (developed by Prosci) for change management.
The Kirkpatrick Model (Donald Kirkpatrick / Kirkpatrick Partners) for evaluating learning.
They’re both incredibly useful as thinking tools:
ADKAR helps you design how people move from awareness to reinforcement.
Kirkpatrick gives you four levels to think about impact.
Most organizations do reasonably well on the early levels:
ADKAR – building Awareness, some Desire, some Knowledge.
Kirkpatrick Level 1 & 2:
We have attendance lists, LMS completions, feedback scores. All of this lives close to the learning experience.
Where it gets difficult – and where leaders are hungry for clarity – is Kirkpatrick Level 3 and 4:
Level 3 – Behaviour: Are people actually behaving differently on the job?
Level 4 – Results: Is that behaviour change having impact on business outcomes?
Those levels were never meant to be easy. They require you to look at real work and real numbers, not just classrooms and surveys.
What “Level 3” really looks like in an operating business
In a mid-market or industrial company, Level 3 isn’t mainly about attitudes. It’s about how work actually flows:
When sales commits to a date, does operations genuinely agree, or does it find out later?
When something goes wrong, how quickly does it escalate across functions?
Do supervisors consistently run the rhythms they learned (huddles, check-ins, after-action reviews), or only when there’s a crisis?
Do hand-offs between engineering, production, quality and logistics flow cleanly, or do they loop back three times?
Under pressure, do teams use the new process, or quietly revert to the old one?
These are behaviour questions, but they’re not about blaming individuals. They’re about understanding system behaviour so leaders can support people better.
If you can’t see those patterns, it’s very hard to reinforce good behaviour or unblock the teams who are trying to do the right thing.
What “Level 4” really looks like in the P&L
At Level 4, the lens shifts to business consequences:
How many days of delay have we removed from key workflows?
How much rework, scrap or re-inspection have we avoided?
How many vacancy days in business-critical roles have we reduced?
How many projects are moving from “stuck” to “shipped” faster and more reliably?
How is all of that starting to show up in margin, risk, reliability, growth?
Level 4 isn’t about making people “more measurable”. It’s about making the effects of better behaviour more visible, so leaders can protect and scale what’s working.
Why this has been hard to do in practice
It’s not because people are lazy or don’t care. Most HR, operations and finance teams are working flat out.
The challenge is that our usual tools were designed for different questions:
Engagement surveys tell you how people feel about work, not how work moves across the organization.
Learning systems tell you who completed a module, not who changed a hand-off or a decision pattern.
Financial systems tell you how the numbers ended up, not the behavioural patterns that produced those numbers.
We’ve had:
tools that measure sentiment, and
tools that measure results,
but very few instruments that help leadership teams calmly see:
“Here is how our system is actually behaving now, and here is how those behaviours are likely affecting our P&L.”
Navetra was built to support that work.
How Navetra supports Level 3: behaviour in the system
Navetra is not a personality test and it’s not trying to psychoanalyse people. It’s a way to see how the organization is behaving around execution.
At a high level, it:
Focuses on a small, sharp set of execution domains Rather than 80 abstract questions, Navetra looks at a concise set of domains that drive performance in asset-heavy and industrial settings – things like cross-functional alignment, decision latency, hand-offs, leadership rhythms, talent flow, safety and quality habits.
Collects signals across levels and functions, in plain language Questions are deliberately simple and business-grounded so:
Blends human input with an agentic layer Human voices are central: leaders and teams describe how things work today. The agentic layer (24×7 AI agents) quietly looks at the supporting evidence – selected documents, rhythms, patterns in how work gets done – and helps highlight where “what we think is happening” and “what’s actually happening” might differ.
The goal is not to judge individuals; it’s to give leadership teams a behavioural map of the system so they can better support the people inside it.
How Navetra supports Level 4: an executive decision co-pilot
At Level 4, Navetra’s role is to act as an executive decision co-pilot – not a replacement for judgment, but a structured way to link execution patterns to business consequences.
It does that by:
Anchoring to the company’s own targets Early on, a sponsor (often the CEO or CFO) enters a small set of financial anchors once: revenue, margin, key growth or reliability goals. Navetra doesn’t invent the strategy; it aligns to the one leadership has already set.
Using pattern libraries to estimate exposure and opportunity Certain patterns repeat across organizations:
Offering scenario views, not just static reports In the leadership console, Navetra becomes a scenario co-pilot:
In Kirkpatrick terms, Navetra is helping you operate more confidently at Level 3 and Level 4:
At Level 3, by making system behaviour visible and trackable over time.
At Level 4, by helping executives see how changes in behaviour could translate into margin, risk and growth outcomes.
What changes when you have this kind of co-pilot?
The biggest shift isn’t more data; it’s better conversations.
Instead of:
“People liked the program.”
“Engagement is up a bit.”
Executive teams can start asking:
“Which behaviours and hand-offs actually changed?”
“Where did decision latency come down, and what did that unlock?”
“Which teams are quietly removing rework and risk?”
“Which specific execution levers are most worth our attention this quarter?”
Navetra doesn’t replace human judgment, relationships or leadership. It gives those humans better visibility and better questions so they can use their time, attention and resources where it genuinely moves the needle.
Bringing it back to the two questions
In the end, Kirkpatrick Level 3 and 4 boil down to:
Are people actually behaving differently in the real world?
Is that behaviour change showing up in business results?
ADKAR helps you design and manage the change journey. The Kirkpatrick Model helps you think about impact across four levels.
Navetra is designed to support leaders directly at Level 3 and Level 4 – where behaviour in the real system meets margin, risk and growth – as an executive decision co-pilot, not as a replacement for the humans doing the work.
If your current dashboards can’t credibly answer those two questions, it may be time to evolve how you measure change – not to control people more, but to support them better and steer the business with clearer eyes.
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