AGOALS An open framework for change readinessTry the pulse

Manager

“Are you ready for the new system?”

Team member

“Yep, I’m ready.”

But they’re not really ready.

They haven’t had time to look at it. They’ve been too busy to get to the training. And now they’re a bit anxious, because more than one thing is getting in the way.

That’s not a lie. It’s what busy people say.

AGOALS is a behavioural framework for change readiness, built to notice that gap early enough to help.

Most change frameworks measure what people say. AGOALS measures the gap between what they say and what they actually do. It reads readiness in short repeating cycles, not once near go-live, so you can see it building in time to act.

Open and free to use.

Try the three-question pulse

Acceptance Goals Obstacles Actions Levels Support then round again, every cycle

Built with people's interests at heart.

AGOALS didn't start in a transformation program. It started in years of youth work, helping people navigate hard personal change, long before it was ever applied to organisations. The lesson from that work carries straight across: people can only move forward from where they genuinely are, not from where fear tells them to pretend to be.

That's the whole intent behind measuring behaviour. The aim is not to catch people out. It is to see clearly enough to help. AGOALS is deliberately blame-neutral: it reads where a person is and what's holding them, never whose fault it is. A gap is an ask for support, not an exposure. The honest, fault-free read is what makes it safe for people to show where they actually stand, and people can only be supported from there.

AGOALS measures what people do because it takes their readiness seriously enough to act on it.

Transformations fail on the people, not the technology.

Large transformations rarely fail on the technology. They fail on the people, and most readiness measurement can't see the failure coming, because it asks people how they feel, once, and reports an average. A survey score of 68 can hide the individuals at 30 who will struggle most at go-live.

AGOALS was built to close three gaps: self-report that runs ahead of reality, averages that hide the people most at risk, and a single late reading that shows no trajectory.

Six signals of readiness.

AGOALS reads six dimensions of individual readiness. Each is a question, re-asked every cycle.

The handwriting is how the person might put it. The print is the definition.

Acceptance

Have I decided to give this a go?

Has the person chosen to engage with this change? Acceptance is a choice the individual owns, not a change imposed on them. It can move backwards when load rises, and that reversal is valid data, not an error.

Goals

Do I know what I actually need to be able to do?

Do they understand what they specifically need to be able to do?

Obstacles

What's in my way, and does anyone know?

What is getting in the way, who owns it, and is the same block showing up across many people? Obstacles pull a reading down, and a shared obstacle is an organisational signal, not a personal failing.

Actions

Have I done what I was asked to do this round?

Are they completing the actions allocated to them this cycle?

Levels

How far along am I, really?

Where is the person on a cumulative readiness path? Levels builds across cycles and can fall when change load outpaces capacity. That makes visible, as a number, what experienced change managers have only been able to describe as a feeling.

Support

I had a go and got stuck. Who do I ask?

Are they reaching for support, and doing so after attempting rather than instead of attempting?

Want to ask your own people? Try the three-question pulse.

The say/do gap.

The heart of AGOALS.

Say

“Yep, I’m ready.”

What a person reports: their stated readiness.

Do

No training yet. Guide unopened.

What the record shows: logins, materials opened, sessions attended, actions completed.

The distance between them is the signal. Someone who reports they are ready but whose behaviour shows no engagement is the highest-risk profile in any program, and they are invisible to a survey. The gap isn't closed by averaging the two sides. The distance is the risk.

The gap is not an accusation. It is where to offer help first.

Traditional change management is a waterfall. AGOALS is agile.

Traditional change management runs like a waterfall: linear stages, one readiness check near the end. By the time it shows a cohort isn't ready, the window to act has closed.

AGOALS runs like agile: short repeating cycles, each producing a real measured reading, so readiness is a trajectory you watch climb toward go-live, and you intervene wherever it doesn't. In plain terms, every cycle turns through Aware, Action and Support.

Waterfall, traditional

One late judgment

Linear stages, a single readiness check near go-live. By the time it shows a cohort is not ready, the window to act has closed.

Agile, AGOALS

A trajectory you can watch

Short repeating cycles, each a measured reading. Readiness climbs toward go-live in view, so you intervene early wherever it does not.

Try AGOALS with one group this week.

You don’t need software or a budget. Start with three questions, sent to one group of people facing the same change. It takes each person about thirty seconds.

  1. Pick one group. Ten to thirty people affected by the same change. One team or one site is enough.
  2. Send the pulse. Put the three questions below into the survey tool you already have, such as Microsoft Forms. Record names, and tell people why: so you can help the right person, and so you only ever report as a group.
  3. Read it and act. Find the most common thing in the way and remove it first. Run it again next month and see who has moved.
  4. Tell me what happened. A few lines is plenty.

The three-question pulse

This is the whole thing. Tap through it as one of your people would. Nothing here is recorded.

1. Where are you at with the new payroll system?
2. How do you feel about it?

Question 3 only appears for people who feel uneasy. Everyone else is finished after two taps. Question 1 reads Acceptance. Questions 2 and 3 read Obstacles.

Three more, once people have something to do

When your people have been given specific things to learn or try, add these. That makes six questions, and most people will see five.

  • Goals4. For your role, you’ll need to be able to do these two or three things. How clear are you on them?Clear. Partly. Not yet.
  • Actions5. Which of these have you done so far?A short tick list of what you asked them to do, plus “None yet”.
  • Support6. If you got stuck, what happened?Haven’t been stuck. Asked and got help. Asked and still waiting. Didn’t know who to ask.

The questions stay the same for everyone. Only the lists inside questions 4 and 5 change by role. Levels needs no question: it is counted from question 5, as in “1 of 3 done”, and it builds each cycle.

What a completed pulse looks like

Sam is a payroll officer. Sam is an example, not a real person.

Where are you at?
I’ve decided to get ready
How do you feel about it?
Uneasy
What’s the biggest thing in your way?
I’ve got too much on to get ready
How clear are you on what you’ll need to do?
Partly
Which of these have you done so far?
Went to the briefing (1 of 3)
If you got stuck, what happened?
Didn’t know who to ask

What this tells you. Sam is willing, so attitude is not the problem. Sam needs an hour freed up and the name of someone to ask.

If you also hold a record of what people have done, such as a training attendance list, put it beside their answers. Where the two disagree is the say/do gap, and the place to offer help first.

Tell me what happened

Tried it? Think it’s wrong somewhere? Either way I’d like to hear. I read every reply and answer personally.

AGOALS and ADKAR.

AGOALS doesn't replace ADKAR or compete with it. ADKAR is a coaching structure assessed through conversation, producing a stage-gate judgement. AGOALS is an instrumented measurement framework assessed through structured data and behavioural signals, producing a continuous, cyclic profile. The two are complementary. ADKAR offers the coaching conversation, and AGOALS the population-level measurement it was never built to provide. You don't abandon ADKAR to use AGOALS.

Two things set AGOALS apart from any stage model: the say/do gap, and the cyclic reading. They are the whole point, not a repackaging.

What AGOALS is built on.

AGOALS does not claim to have discovered how people change. It puts established behavioural science to work, and credits it. These are the ideas it leans on, and what it takes from each.

What people believe they can do shapes whether they try.

Albert Bandura called this self-efficacy. It is why AGOALS reads what a person says about their readiness alongside what they have done, and treats the distance between the two as the thing to act on.

Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191-215.

Readiness is a stage, not a switch.

Prochaska and DiClemente proposed that people sit at different points on the way to a change, and that help works best when it fits the point they are at. Acceptance in AGOALS draws on this. The fixed order of stages in their model has been challenged, and AGOALS does not depend on it: a person can move forwards or backwards, and both are valid readings.

Prochaska, J. O., & DiClemente, C. C. (1983). Stages and processes of self-change of smoking: Toward an integrative model of change. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 51(3), 390-395.
For the challenge: West, R. (2005). Time for a change: Putting the Transtheoretical (Stages of Change) Model to rest. Addiction, 100(8), 1036-1039.

Saying one thing and doing another is normal.

Motivational interviewing treats that ambivalence as an ordinary part of change, not as resistance, and finds that pressure tends to harden it. This is why AGOALS is blame-neutral, and why Support is matched to where the person is.

Miller, W. R., & Rollnick, S. (2023). Motivational Interviewing: Helping People Change and Grow (4th ed.). Guilford Press.

People sustain the change they have chosen.

Self-determination theory holds that lasting change needs both a person’s own motivation and conditions that support it. AGOALS reads both: Acceptance as the person’s choice, and Obstacles and Support as what the organisation provides or fails to provide.

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68-78.

Poorly managed change is a recognised workplace hazard.

Australia’s model Code of Practice names poor organisational change management as a psychosocial hazard, one of the hazards employers have a duty to manage. The Obstacles signal is designed to surface it across a group, not to single out a person.

Safe Work Australia. (2022). Model Code of Practice: Managing psychosocial hazards at work.

What is established, and what is not yet.

The research above is peer reviewed and long established. AGOALS is new. It is in its first large-scale use and has not yet been independently validated. The science is borrowed and credited; the synthesis is the author’s, and it will be revised as the evidence comes in.

How AGOALS came about.

1992

I started in youth work at 18, in a local drop-in centre, and stayed in it for nine years. What I learned there sits under everything on this page. You can’t move a young person from where you wish they were. You can only start from where they are.

2012

After some years in corporate marketing I moved into organisational change management. On program after program I saw the same pattern. Years went into planning the system. A few weeks went into preparing the people.

2024

I wrote AGOALS down. It is the youth work lesson set out as six questions an organisation can ask about every person, every cycle, early enough to help.

Why AGOALS is free.

People ask why something useful would be free. The framework gets better every time someone uses it with real people and says what worked. Keeping it open is how that happens.

What isn’t free is running it at scale. Reading thousands of people across dozens of groups, cycle after cycle, and setting their answers beside what they have done, can’t be done by hand. That is what ReadyIQ does.

Start with the three-question pulse