A process changed. An email was sent. A Slack message was posted. A doc was updated.

And then… nothing. No confirmation that anyone read it. No way to know if the support team switched to the new workflow. No evidence that the sales team stopped quoting the old pricing.

This is the adoption gap — and it’s where most change management efforts silently fail.

The announcement is not the adoption

Most teams treat communication as the finish line: “We announced it, therefore it’s done.” But announcement and adoption are fundamentally different:

Announcement means the information was made available. Adoption means people understood it, internalized it, and changed their behavior.

The gap between the two is where errors, inconsistency, and rework live. And without measurement, you can’t even see the gap.

What adoption evidence looks like

Real adoption evidence answers three questions:

Who has been exposed to the change? Not “who was in the Slack channel” — who actually consumed the updated training material?

Did they understand it? A completion checkbox isn’t enough. A scored quiz on the specific changes provides actual signal.

When? If a critical policy changed on January 15 and a team member didn’t complete the updated training until February 20, that’s 36 days of potential non-compliance.

The version problem

Here’s what makes this harder: when you track completions, you need to track them per version.

Imagine a refund policy course. Version 1 was created in October. All 15 agents completed it. In January, the policy changed. Version 2 is published.

You need to know:

Who completed v2 (not just v1)
Who still hasn’t
What the average comprehension score is for v2 specifically

Tracking “who completed the refund policy training” without version awareness is meaningless after the first update.

Building a practical system

You don’t need enterprise change management software to close the adoption gap. You need four things:

Versioned content. Every update creates a new, trackable version — not an edit to the same document.

Clear diffs. People shouldn’t have to re-read entire documents. Show them what changed.

Completion tracking per version. Know who’s current and who isn’t, at any point in time.

A trigger mechanism. When the source changes, training should be flagged — not silently become outdated.

The audit question

Ask yourself: if someone asked you today “can you prove your entire support team is trained on the current refund policy?”, could you answer with data?

If the answer is no, you don’t have a training problem. You have an evidence problem. And that’s solvable.