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.
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?
The say/do gap.
The heart of AGOALS.
“Yep, I’m ready.”
What a person reports: their stated readiness.
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.
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.
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.
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.
AGOALS is free to use.
The AGOALS framework is published openly and free to use. It draws on established behavioural science (Bandura on self-efficacy, Prochaska and DiClemente on stages of change, Miller and Rollnick on motivational interviewing) and aligns with the Australian duty to manage poorly handled change as a workplace psychosocial hazard. The science is borrowed and credited; the synthesis is the author's.