You have probably sat in a room where someone drew a change model on a whiteboard, eight boxes, or five letters, or a block of ice melting, and everyone nodded, and nothing changed. The models are not the problem. Using them as decoration, instead of as a diagnosis, is.

The quick version

  • Lewin is the simplest frame: unfreeze (loosen the old way), change (move to the new), refreeze (make it stick). It is a way of thinking, not a checklist.
  • Kotter is the organisation-level playbook: eight steps from "create urgency" to "anchor it in the culture." Strong on leading a large transformation; light on the individual.
  • ADKAR is the people-level lens: each person needs Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability and Reinforcement, in order. It tells you which person is stuck and why.
  • They are not rivals. Lewin sets the shape, Kotter mobilises the organisation, ADKAR diagnoses the individual. The skill is matching the model to your actual bottleneck.

The idea in depth: three models, three altitudes

The reason there are competing change models is that "change" happens at different altitudes at once. An organisation changes; the people inside it change; and underneath both is a question about how any human group lets go of one way of working and adopts another. The three best-known models each operate at a different one of those altitudes, which is exactly why pitting them against each other is a category error.

Start at the bottom, with the oldest. The unfreeze–change–refreeze frame is attributed to the social psychologist Kurt Lewin, traced to his 1947 paper "Frontiers in Group Dynamics", the first article in the first issue of the journal Human Relations. His insight was that behaviour in a group sits in a "quasi-stationary equilibrium," held in place by opposing forces; to move it, you do not just push harder toward the new state, you first reduce the forces holding the old one in place. That flips the usual instinct. Before you sell the new way, spend real effort surfacing what makes the current way feel safe, and lower that first. Push change onto a group that hasn't "unfrozen" and you are pushing against a spring.

An honest limitation. The tidy three-step "model" is partly a posthumous tidy-up. Stephen Cummings, Todd Bridgman and Kenneth Brown, in "Unfreezing change as three steps" (Human Relations, 2016), show that Lewin never presented unfreeze–change–refreeze as the capstone framework it later became; the clean diagram was assembled by others after his death in 1947. Treat it as a useful metaphor with a serious mind behind it, not as Lewin's considered final word, and certainly not as evidence that organisations behave like ice.

Move up an altitude to the organisation, and you reach the model most leaders have met: John Kotter's eight steps. First sketched in his 1995 Harvard Business Review article "Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail" and expanded in the 1996 book Leading Change, it runs: create a sense of urgency, build a guiding coalition, form a strategic vision, enlist a volunteer army, enable action by removing barriers, generate short-term wins, sustain acceleration, and institute change in the culture. The sequence matters, Kotter's central argument is that skipping the early steps (especially urgency) is why transformations collapse later. In practice that means resisting the urge to start with the reorg or the new tool. Start instead with the two steps everyone wants to skip: making the case for why now, and assembling a coalition with enough credibility and power to carry it.

flowchart TD
  L(["LEWIN, the shape of change"]) --> U(["Unfreeze
loosen the old way"])
  U --> C(["Change
move to the new"])
  C --> R(["Refreeze
make it stick"])
  U -.maps to.-> K1(["KOTTER 1–4
urgency, coalition,
vision, enlist"])
  C -.maps to.-> K2(["KOTTER 5–6
remove barriers,
short-term wins"])
  R -.maps to.-> K3(["KOTTER 7–8
sustain, anchor
in the culture"])
Lewin gives the three-act shape; Kotter fills each act with organisation-level moves. Leaders Loop

An honest limitation. Kotter is a practitioner framework, not a peer-reviewed finding, distilled from his observation of roughly a hundred companies, not a controlled study. The famous claim that "70% of change efforts fail" is widely attached to his name but has no rigorous source; the figure appears to be an estimate that hardened into "fact" through repetition (see this account of the statistic's origins). Use the eight steps as a checklist of things transformations tend to neglect, not as proof of a failure rate.

ADKAR: the model that tells you who is stuck

Kotter and Lewin describe what the organisation does. Neither tells you why Priya in finance went to the training and still works the old way. That is the gap ADKAR fills. Created by Jeff Hiatt, founder of the change-management firm Prosci, the model holds that any one person makes a change by passing through five building blocks in order: Awareness of the need to change, Desire to support and participate, Knowledge of how to change, Ability to perform new behaviours, and Reinforcement to make it stick (Prosci's own ADKAR overview).

The practical power is that the letters are a diagnostic. When an individual or team isn't changing, ADKAR's claim is that they are blocked at exactly one of those five points, and the fix is specific to which one. Someone stuck at Awareness needs communication, not training. Someone stuck at Desire needs their personal "what's in it for me" addressed, and no amount of explaining the strategy will move them. Someone stuck at Ability has the knowledge but needs practice, coaching and time, sending them on the course again is wasted. The shift is to stop asking "is the change going well?" and start asking, person by person, "which letter are they stuck on?", because the intervention for each is different.

flowchart LR
  A(["Awareness
why change?"]) --> D(["Desire
what's in it for me?"])
  D --> K(["Knowledge
how to change"])
  K --> B(["Ability
do it for real"])
  B --> R(["Reinforcement
make it stick"])
  A -.gap = communicate.-> A
  D -.gap = motivate / sponsor.-> D
  K -.gap = train.-> K
  B -.gap = coach + practice.-> B
  R -.gap = recognise + measure.-> R
ADKAR as a diagnosis: the block tells you the remedy. A training fix won't solve a Desire problem. Leaders Loop

An honest limitation. ADKAR comes from a commercial methodology (Prosci sells certification in it), and the linear, one-block-at-a-time picture is a simplification, real people loop back, lose Desire after gaining Knowledge, or need Reinforcement before Ability is solid. It is a strong conversational and diagnostic tool, weaker as a literal claim that humans change in five clean stages. As with the others, hold it as a lens, not a law.

A worked example: same change, three lenses

Picture a 200-person services firm rolling out a new CRM that everyone is quietly ignoring six weeks in. (Illustrative scenario; not a real company.) Adoption is stuck at roughly 30% of the sales team logging deals, the rest still keep their own spreadsheets. Each model asks a different, useful question.

Lewin asks: did anyone unfreeze the old way? Here, no, the spreadsheets still work, nobody removed them, and the comfort of the familiar is fully intact. The move: make the old way visibly costlier (stop accepting forecasts built off spreadsheets) before expecting the new way to take.

Kotter asks: where in the eight steps did this skip? Urgency was assumed, not built; there were no short-term wins to show the tool paying off, and no guiding coalition of respected reps championing it. The move: recruit three credible salespeople to model it publicly, and engineer a visible early win, a deal the CRM demonstrably helped close.

ADKAR asks: which letter is the team stuck on? A quick poll reveals it isn't Knowledge, they sat through the training. It's Desire: reps believe the CRM helps managers watch them, not helps them sell. The move: a manager addresses that fear directly and ties logged activity to something the rep wants (better leads, less reporting), rather than running the training again.

The models don't compete, they ask different questions. Lewin: did we unfreeze? Kotter: did we skip a step? ADKAR: who is stuck, and where?

Notice that none of the three is "the answer." Together they triangulate: Lewin reframes the comfort of the status quo, Kotter exposes the missing organisational moves, ADKAR pinpoints that the real blocker is motivation, not skill. A leader who only owned one model would have misdiagnosed it, most likely by ordering more training for a problem training cannot fix.

Frequently asked questions

Which change model should I actually use?

Match it to your problem, not your preference. If you are leading a large, organisation-wide transformation and need a sequence of leadership moves, reach for Kotter. If you are trying to work out why specific people or teams aren't adopting a change, use ADKAR to find the stuck point. If you just need a simple way to frame any change to a group, Lewin's three acts are the cleanest mental model. Many practitioners run Kotter or Lewin at the programme level and ADKAR at the individual level, they layer rather than clash.

Are these models backed by research?

Partly, and it's worth being precise. Lewin was a serious empirical social psychologist, but the neat three-step "model" was largely assembled after his death (Cummings, Bridgman & Brown, 2016). Kotter's eight steps come from practitioner observation of around a hundred firms, not a controlled study. ADKAR comes from a commercial change-management practice (Prosci). They are credible, widely used frameworks, but treat them as structured experience, not as laws with the weight of peer-reviewed evidence behind them.

Is it true that 70% of change efforts fail?

There is no solid evidence for that specific number. It is frequently attached to Kotter, but it traces back to an estimate rather than a study, and what counts as "failure" is defined so loosely (late, over budget, or never launched all qualify) that almost any complex initiative would count. Use it as a reminder that change is hard, not as a statistic you can defend.

Can I combine Kotter and ADKAR?

Yes, and many change teams do exactly this. Kotter gives you the organisation-level choreography, build urgency, form a coalition, generate wins. ADKAR gives you the per-person diagnosis underneath it, so when a step stalls you can see whether people lack Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability or Reinforcement. They operate at different altitudes, so they complement rather than contradict each other.

Why does "unfreeze" matter so much?

Because most failed changes try to install the new way without dismantling the safety of the old one. Lewin's point, that behaviour is held in place by opposing forces, means a change can be perfectly designed and still fail simply because the forces anchoring the status quo were never reduced. Practically, that's why removing the old process, system or incentive often matters more than promoting the new one.

Related in the Toolkit

Models are scaffolding; the harder work is the human reality around them. When the same change has to land across many teams at once, that's the territory of leading transformation at scale, and ADKAR's "stuck on Desire" diagnosis is really the opening move of managing resistance and driving adoption.

Where to go next