Implementation, not installation. That's AIM.
By Ann Marvin
IMA Worldwide is the only change management firm built around the Accelerating Implementation Methodology (AIM). Don Harrison founded the firm in 1989 and built AIM out of more than forty years of field research into one question: why do transformations stall after go-live? Peacock Hill Consulting acquired IMA Worldwide in 2024.
Don Harrison spent more than four decades studying why organizational changes fail to take hold. Ann Marvin spent her career living the problem from inside organizations. AIM is where those two stories meet.
Also on the record: 19 industries served, readiness benchmarks across 13 of them, 560+ certified AIM instructors, and a client that has run AIM with its own people for 19+ years.
The research behind these figures is published in the State of Change report.
The same failure, in three different companies
While Don Harrison was studying why changes fail to take hold, Ann Marvin kept living the failures from inside organizations: three companies, three industries, one pattern. Each room is below, with what the status claimed next to what was actually true.
Everything is green
A manager who insisted every project status be green. She would walk in with a real risk register; he would look at the cover page and ask why anything was yellow. He never read the appendix.
- What the status said
- ✓System installed
✓Training calendar completed
✓Comms cascade sent
✓Program closed - What was true
- The old behaviors held. By the time anyone admitted the change had not landed, the team had already moved on to the next launch.
An escape room with no key in it
A planning meeting at another company: different industry, same theater. The leadership team set the puzzle the way a game master sets one, except every rule closed a door.
- What the status said
- ✓Scope fixed
✓Resources fixed
✓Date fixed
✓Plan on track - What was true
- Every constraint was a wall. Three walls, and a door painted on the fourth. Implementation was over before the plan was written, and anyone who said so was told to be a partner and find creative ways: keep hunting for a key nobody had put in the room.
A role for everyone, and authority for no one
An agile transformation, already declared a success. A reorganization had put everyone into a named role and the ceremonies were on the calendar. Under pressure, people reverted to what they knew and kept only the parts of the new role that suited them.
- What the status said
- ✓Agile operating model live
✓Everyone mapped to a role
✓Ceremonies running on schedule
✓Transformation complete - What was true
- People took the parts of the new role they liked and quietly dropped the rest. Nothing reinforced the parts they dropped, so dropping them cost nothing. Managers had been handed an area and no authority inside it: any real decision meant convincing every other manager first, and that was called collaboration.
With no reinforcement behind the new way and no decision a manager could make alone, the old way stayed the fastest way to get anything done. Installed in full, implemented never.
Three rooms, one lesson. The behaviors held. The old way kept paying.
Ann kept looking.
What was every other framework actually measuring?
Short versionAnn kept finding tools that were excellent at planning and communicating change. What she could not find was a practical way to measure whether the new behavior would hold.
Ann read every major change management framework she could find. Each is strong at what it counts:
- Communications cascades. Messages sent. Not messages believed.
- Training completion. Seats filled. Not skills used on Monday.
- Readiness surveys. What people say. Not what people do.
- Status ratings. Green on a slide. Not green in the work.
Each of those is useful, and Ann used them all. What she still did not have was a practical system for measuring whether the organizational conditions around the change, sponsorship, readiness, reinforcement, would make the new behavior hold after go-live.
Then she found AIM.
The Accelerating Implementation Methodology starts from a different premise: implementation is not installation. Behavior change starts before launch, not after it, and leaders carry specific work in the sponsorship chain that nobody can do for them.
Don Harrison had been working the same problem from the other side. Across four decades of field research he watched well-run installations fail to become implementations, catalogued why, and built a repeatable system around what actually predicted adoption: sponsorship that does specific work, readiness built element by element, and reinforcement that outlasts the program team. Every engagement fed the evidence base, and the methodology evolved with it.
Traditional programs measure activities completed. AIM measures what people do.
So what does AIM do differently?
Four things. Each one is a place other methods stop.
Leadership involvement
AIM names six non-delegable leadership tasks. Other methods treat sponsorship as a soft skill. AIM treats it as specific work, with a named owner, that nobody else can do for them.
Observable behavior change
Not surveys. Not status ratings. The visible actions an outside observer could confirm are happening, tracked alongside the business numbers, not instead of them. If you cannot watch it happen, it does not count.
Reinforcement systems
What gets reinforced gets repeated. The old way keeps paying until something changes what pays. AIM builds that in from the start instead of bolting it on later.
The work after go-live
Training and communication are the starting line. Adoption is won or lost in the months after launch, which is exactly where most programs have already stopped looking.
What is the vision behind AIM?
Enable people to adapt to change.
That is the whole vision: help organizations build the capacity to adapt without making every new transformation a heroic effort. The rate of change keeps climbing, and change fatigue climbs with it. Two commitments follow:
People equipped for change
The load is measurable: the average employee went through ten planned enterprise changes in 2022, up from two in 2016, and willingness to support change fell from 74 to 43 percent (Gartner research, in Harvard Business Review, 2023). AIM answers it by building readiness person by person, element by element: Information, Willingness, Ability, Confidence, Control, with resistance treated as data about what is missing.
Reduce the load of change work
AIM is not a stage gate in the project plan. It runs like a dashboard: ten scored diagnostics keep implementation risk measured from baseline through reinforcement, and AIM's AI assistance carries the analysis effort, which has cut IMA Worldwide's own delivery time by roughly half.
The methodology itself is laid out on the what is AIM page. For Ann Marvin, finding it led to a bigger decision than practicing it.
Three commitments, visible in every engagement
Measure before you spend
Every engagement starts with a scored baseline. The Implementation History Assessment turns implementation risk into a number before the budget is committed, not an opinion after it.
Transfer, don't retain
Engagements are designed so the capability leaves with the client, through certification and instructor training. The longest-running client has carried AIM with its own people for 19+ years.
Reinforce after go-live
What leaders reinforce carries three times the impact of what they say, so the work continues after launch, exactly where most programs stop.
Mastering a methodology is not the same as carrying it
Short versionPeacock Hill Consulting acquired IMA Worldwide in 2024. That changed Ann Marvin's role from practitioner of AIM to steward of it.
Every consultant who learns a framework eventually hits the same fork: stay a practitioner, or take responsibility for the work itself.
| A practitioner of AIM | The steward of AIM | |
|---|---|---|
| The method | Applies it, project by project | Answers for it, everywhere it is used |
| The research | Cites it | Owns it, and keeps it honest |
| When it falls short | Moves to the next engagement | Fixes the method itself |
In 2024, Peacock Hill Consulting acquired IMA Worldwide. That changed Ann Marvin's role from practitioner of AIM to steward of it: answerable for the research, the scored instruments, the certified practitioner community, and the client relationships that came with the firm. Don Harrison's research lineage came with the keys, and so did the job of keeping the work honest.
The hierarchy is simple, and stated here once. Peacock Hill Consulting owns IMA Worldwide. IMA Worldwide is the operating brand for the methodology, the diagnostics, the research and the certification. Everything else on this page, and this site, is IMA Worldwide.
What does AIM know that a new methodology cannot?
Thirty years of the same questions, asked the same way. IMA Worldwide has published aggregate findings from 38,757 Implementation History Assessment records across 409 organizations, collected between 1995 and 2026, with readiness benchmarks across 13 industries. A new framework can borrow AIM's vocabulary. It cannot borrow three decades of scored implementation history.
That is what the acquisition actually transferred: not training IP, but a body of research, ten scored diagnostics, a certified practitioner community, and the accumulated diagnostic history that lets every new baseline land against a real benchmark. The findings are published in the State of Change report.
What has changed since 1989, and what has not?
Short versionAIM has not changed its core principles. The tools used to apply it have.
AIM is a systematic intervention, not an industry playbook: the same diagnostics, sponsorship model and reinforcement architecture apply wherever people have to work differently. What changed underneath it is the speed. Changes now overlap, go-live is always in flight, and sponsors turn over mid-program:
The response was not a new methodology. Don Harrison's principles stand, and the evidence base remains the foundation. AI simply makes the work faster: diagnostic synthesis and pattern-finding that once took weeks now take days, so the practitioner's time goes to judgment instead of assembly.
What do the documented engagements show?
Results counted where the work happened. Client names are withheld under non-disclosure agreements; each figure is from a documented IMA Worldwide case study.
Gas utility, Oracle rollout
Measured probability of implementation success rose from 35 percent to roughly 94 percent over a two-year program, because the drivers improved: leaders took on specific visible jobs at every site, readiness gaps were closed before go-live, and rewards were aligned to the new way of working. Every AIM-supported site went live on time and on budget.
Health system call center
Over $52 million in documented savings across two phases, with first-call resolution up from 68 to 83 percent and employee engagement up from 73 to 88 percent.
Public health emergency department
Emergency department waits over 24 hours cut from 238 to 94, with the service redesign turned around in three weeks and admission performance up from 68 to 76 percent.
- "Having led change management for several Fortune companies, I have reviewed and used multiple change management models. The best one I've used, the one that has moved the change needle the farthest, is AIM. No model produces the actual business results faster."
Director, Organizational Development, Retail - "You can spend enormous resources on implementation, but if you've failed to build the sponsorship for the change, you can't spend enough money or have enough cross-functional meetings to be successful."
Senior Executive, Healthcare
The full engagement record, case by case and sector by sector, lives on the change management consulting and services overview pages.
Who built AIM, and who runs it now?
Four decades of field research, one firm, and a handover.
If you are citing AIM
Each fact below comes from Don Harrison's book, the Accelerating Implementation Methodology (AIM) Practical Guide, the primary source for the methodology.
- Installation is not implementation. A system going live is not the same as people adopting it. The gap between the two is where transformations fail. (Don Harrison, AIM Practical Guide)
- "For this project to be successful, do Targets have to believe in it, or do they just have to do it?" Don Harrison's central question in the AIM Practical Guide for choosing a change approach: the Hammer for compliance, Transition Management for commitment.
- "You cannot coerce long term productivity from an organization." (Don Harrison, AIM Practical Guide)
- Express, Model, Reinforce (EMR): what leaders say carries 1x impact, what they model 2x, and what they reinforce 3x. Reinforcement outweighs communication three to one. (Don Harrison, AIM Practical Guide)
- Without reinforcement, adoption fades within 90 days of go-live. What gets reinforced gets repeated. (Don Harrison, AIM Practical Guide)
- Target readiness is built through five elements, in order: Information, Willingness, Ability, Confidence, Control. Resistance is data, not defiance. (Don Harrison, AIM Practical Guide)
- Every change has a CAST of Characters: Champion, Agent, Sponsor, Target. Sponsorship is built, not assumed, through six non-delegable leadership tasks. (Don Harrison, AIM Practical Guide)
About AIM, answered
What is IMA Worldwide?
IMA Worldwide is the change management firm built around the Accelerating Implementation Methodology (AIM). Don Harrison founded the firm in 1989 and created AIM out of more than forty years of field research into why enterprise transformations stall after go-live. Peacock Hill Consulting acquired IMA Worldwide in 2024, and IMA Worldwide remains the operating brand.
Who developed AIM?
Don Harrison developed the Accelerating Implementation Methodology to address what he kept watching fail in enterprise transformation: weak sponsorship and absent reinforcement after go-live. Ann Marvin, founder of Peacock Hill Consulting and Chief of AI Tools at IMA Worldwide, now leads the methodology and carries Harrison's research lineage forward.
What is the AIM methodology, and what diagnostic instruments support it?
The Accelerating Implementation Methodology (AIM) is a research-based change management framework, developed by Don Harrison at IMA Worldwide, focused on leadership involvement, reinforcement systems and observable behavior change. AIM is operationalized through ten core scored diagnostics, hosted on the Comparative Agility platform: the Implementation History Assessment, scoring an organization's track record on past changes to forecast the odds for the next one; the Individual Readiness Assessment, measuring readiness across Information, Willingness, Ability, Confidence and Control; the Targeted Reinforcement Index, measuring whether the reinforcement system actually rewards the required behaviors across timing, relevance and intensity; and the Implementation Risk Forecast, a snapshot risk measurement for projects already in flight.
How does IMA Worldwide work with Peacock Hill Consulting?
Peacock Hill Consulting acquired IMA Worldwide in 2024 and is its owner. Ann Marvin founded Peacock Hill Consulting and now stewards AIM from inside the firm that originated it. IMA Worldwide is the operating brand for the methodology, the diagnostics and the certification.
What does IMA Worldwide do, and how does an engagement progress?
IMA Worldwide delivers three kinds of work: enterprise change implementation programs applying AIM from sponsorship design through reinforcement after go-live, AIM diagnostic assessments, and AIM practitioner certification for client teams. Engagements typically move through three stages. An initial consultation defines priorities and outcomes. Strategy development co-designs the AIM-based roadmap and selects the diagnostic baseline. Implementation support delivers coaching and reinforcement through go-live and beyond.
What industries does IMA Worldwide serve?
IMA Worldwide has delivered AIM-based transformation programs to clients across 19 industries, and benchmarks implementation readiness against 13 of them. Sectors include global health and development philanthropy, pharmaceutical and healthcare manufacturing, hyperscale technology, transportation and logistics, health insurance, government, education and financial services. Specific client identities are protected under non-disclosure agreements.
How is AIM different from Prosci ADKAR?
Prosci ADKAR maps the stages an individual moves through during change. AIM concentrates on the organizational conditions around those individuals: the six non-delegable leadership tasks, the reinforcement systems that reward new behavior, and observable behavior change as the measure of success. The emphasis differs: ADKAR describes where a person is in the change, while AIM measures and manages what in the organization is affecting them.
What is the Implementation History Assessment?
The Implementation History Assessment is a fifty question retrospective survey that scores how previous changes went in an organization, across eleven conditions from sponsorship and involvement to communication and organizational stress. The resulting score is a forecast of the odds that the next implementation takes hold. IMA Worldwide has published aggregate findings from 38,757 assessment records collected across 409 organizations between 1995 and 2026.
Implementation, not installation.
You decide the change. AIM gets it adopted. If that is the problem you are living with, start with a conversation.
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