Playbook 2 — Awareness & Desire
Building the case before you build the training
People rarely resist the tool. They resist the reason for it that nobody said out loud.
The ADKAR model — awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, reinforcement — comes out of the change-management field, and its useful insight for AI rollouts is the order. Awareness and desire come before knowledge, which means training before the team wants the change is mostly wasted effort. You can spend a week on prompt training and get compliance theatre: people attend, nod, and change nothing.
The two questions to answer before day one are why this, and why now.
Why this: what specifically gets worse if we do nothing. Not “AI is transforming industries” — that is a claim about the world, not about your department. It has to be a task your team already feels the cost of: the report nobody wants to compile, the follow-up nobody has time to chase. If the honest answer is that nothing much gets worse, the tool is a solution with no problem, and it will fail on its own logic regardless of how good it is.
Why now: the reason the change cannot wait a year. Sometimes it is real — a competitor is faster, a client expects it, a margin is shrinking. Sometimes it is not, and saying so is better than inventing urgency. A manufactured deadline is the fastest way to teach a team that management announcements are noise.
Desire is the stage that breaks, and it breaks differently by person. For some it is the risk of looking slow. For others it is being handed another tool to learn on top of the work they already cannot finish. Those need different answers, which means you have to know which one you are talking to. The generic all-hands covers neither.
A short test before you book any training:
- You can state the cost of doing nothing in one sentence a team member would recognize.
- The “why now” is real, or you have dropped the pretence of one.
- You know what each affected group stands to gain or lose.
- Someone from the team, not just leadership, has been asked what would make this worth their time.
- No training is scheduled until awareness and desire are actually in place.
Get this wrong and the training still happens. It just does not take.
Next: Playbook 3 turns the case into training built around the job, not the tool.