Change Frameworks: Kotter & ADKAR

If you spend any time around a change project, three names will float past you: Kotter, ADKAR, and Lewin. People drop them like everyone already agrees what they mean. The good news is that under the labels, these are just three sensible ways of thinking about the same problem — how do you get a group of busy humans to do something differently? Each one zooms in at a different level, and once you know which is which, you can pick the right tool instead of nodding along.

Lewin: the simplest picture

Start with the oldest and simplest. Lewin’s model has three steps: unfreeze, change, refreeze. Imagine the way you work today is a block of ice — solid, settled, comfortable. Before anything new can happen, you have to unfreeze it: shake up the certainty, make the case that the current state isn’t good enough. Then you change: introduce the new way, support people through the wobble. Finally you refreeze: let the new way settle into the next solid block so it becomes the normal, default thing.

Lewin is less a recipe than a reminder. Its whole value is that last step. Most efforts do the unfreezing and the changing and then forget to refreeze, which is exactly the “no reinforcement” trap from Module 1.

Kotter: the organisation-level playbook

Kotter’s 8 steps is the famous big-picture model, aimed at leading change across a whole organisation. You do not need to memorise all eight word-for-word, but the shape is worth knowing: create urgency, build a guiding coalition of influential people, form a clear vision, communicate that vision relentlessly, empower people to act by removing obstacles, generate some short-term wins to prove it’s working, consolidate those gains to push further, and finally anchor the change in the culture so it sticks.

Read that list and you can hear the failure modes from Module 1 being deliberately prevented. Urgency answers “why now.” Communication answers the comms gap. Anchoring is reinforcement by another name. Kotter is essentially a checklist for not losing momentum, written from the leader’s chair.

ADKAR: the person-level model

ADKAR flips the camera around. Instead of asking “how does the organisation change,” it asks “how does one person change?” Because, the thinking goes, an organisation has only changed when enough individuals have. It is five steps, in order: Awareness (I know why this change is happening), Desire (I want to take part), Knowledge (I know how to do the new thing), Ability (I can actually do it in practice), and Reinforcement (I keep doing it because it sticks).

The power of ADKAR is diagnostic. When someone isn’t adopting a change, you can ask which letter they are stuck on. Someone who is trained but still not doing it may have Knowledge without Ability. Someone resisting outright may lack Desire — and no amount of training fixes a Desire problem. It tells you where to push.

Which one when

They are not rivals; they overlap happily. Reach for Lewin when you just need a clear, plain way to explain the journey to people — it fits on a napkin. Reach for Kotter when you are planning a large, top-down change and want a sequence that keeps leaders honest about urgency, wins, and anchoring. Reach for ADKAR when the change is really about getting many individuals to adopt something — a new system, a new behaviour — and you want to diagnose exactly where someone is stuck.

Rule of thumb: use Kotter to steer the organisation and ADKAR to coach the individual. If you only remember one word from any of them, make it Lewin’s “refreeze.”

Spot it: Lewin, Kotter, or ADKAR?

Read each situation and decide for yourself, then tap a card to flip it and check your answer.

Sort the scenarios

Drag each item into the bucket it belongs to — or tap an item, then tap a bucket. Hit Check placement when you’re done.

How to use it

You rarely need to run a framework yourself, but naming the right one makes meetings sharper. If a rollout is flailing person-by-person, say: “Let’s use ADKAR — are people stuck on Desire or on Ability? Because those need different fixes.” If leadership is planning something sweeping, ask: “What are our short-term wins, and how will we anchor this so it doesn’t snap back?” — that is pure Kotter. And whenever someone treats launch day as the finish line, gently remind them: “We still need to refreeze.” Speaking the model out loud, then translating it into plain words, marks you as someone who actually understands change rather than someone who collects acronyms.