Change Models Compared: Lewin, Kotter and ADKAR in Practice

Ask a room of managers how organizational change works and someone will sketch three boxes: unfreeze, change, refreeze. Someone else will bring up Kotter's eight steps, and a third person will mention ADKAR. All three ideas are useful. They also answer different questions, and mixing them up is how a team ends up with a tidy plan that nobody follows.

This guide compares the three models leaders reach for most often: where each one comes from, what it actually says, what it is good for and where it runs out. The short version: the three-step idea credited to Lewin is a way of thinking, Kotter's steps are a leader's agenda for an organization-wide push, and ADKAR is a check on whether each person is actually making the change.

Lewin's three steps, and what Lewin actually wrote

Kurt Lewin, the social psychologist, is widely described as a founding father of change management, and "unfreeze, change, refreeze" is the idea most often attached to his name. The history is messier than the textbook version.

In a 2016 paper in the journal Human Relations, Stephen Cummings, Todd Bridgman and Kenneth Brown traced the idea to a short passage in Lewin's 1947 article "Frontiers in Group Dynamics," the first article in that journal's first issue, published a few months after his death. They note that the passage sits in the 24th of 25 subsections of a 37-page article and comes with no empirical evidence or diagram. They argue that Lewin never developed it as a model for change agents, and they point out that "Lewin never wrote 'refreezing' anywhere." The authors also note that a frozen metaphor fits awkwardly with Lewin's more detailed view that groups are never truly still, only in "quasi-stationary equilibria."

None of that makes the idea useless. The core insight holds up well as a lens: the current way of working is held in place by habits, incentives and relationships, so those forces have to loosen before something new can take hold, and the new way needs support before it becomes normal. Use it to explain to a team why change feels sticky, or to ask "what is keeping the old way in place?" Don't use it as a project plan, and don't read "refreeze" as "lock it down forever."

Kotter's eight steps: a leader's agenda

John Kotter, a professor emeritus at Harvard Business School, set out his ideas in the March–April 1995 Harvard Business Review article "Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail," drawing on what he saw as he watched more than 100 companies try to remake themselves. The eight steps became the backbone of his book Leading Change. His firm, Kotter, now presents them as eight "accelerators," which it says evolved from the original linear steps, using these names:

1. Create a sense of urgency.
2. Build a guiding coalition.
3. Form a strategic vision.
4. Enlist a volunteer army.
5. Enable action by removing barriers.
6. Generate short-term wins.
7. Sustain acceleration.
8. Institute change.

The strength of this model is that it tells senior leaders what their own job is during a large change: make the case, recruit allies, keep the vision clear, clear obstacles, celebrate progress and keep pushing after the first wins. It is a strong fit for organization-wide efforts such as a new strategy, a restructuring or a culture shift.

Its limit is the flip side of that strength. It is written from the top looking down. It tells you what leaders should do across the organization, but it says little about why a particular team is stuck or what one employee needs in order to work differently on Monday.

ADKAR: what each person needs

ADKAR comes from Prosci, a change management firm founded in 1994 by Jeff Hiatt. The acronym names five elements: Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability and Reinforcement. Prosci describes them as "sequential, though not linear," and it is explicit that ADKAR "is a model for individual change, not a complete change management methodology."

The most practical idea in ADKAR is to find the earliest element where someone is stuck, which Prosci calls the barrier point. If people don't understand why a change is happening, more training won't help, because the gap is Awareness, not Knowledge. If they understand and want the change but can't yet do it under real conditions, the gap is Ability, and they need practice, time and coaching rather than another explanation of the strategy.

Its limit is scope. ADKAR won't tell you whether the change itself is the right one, how to set strategy or how to sequence a large program. It is a diagnostic for adoption.

Side by side

• The question it answers. Lewin: why is change hard to start and hard to keep? Kotter: what should leaders do to move a whole organization? ADKAR: where is this person or team stuck?
• Level. Lewin: the group and the forces around it. Kotter: the organization. ADKAR: the individual, added up across people.
• Best moment to use it. Lewin: early, when you're diagnosing and explaining. Kotter: when planning the leadership agenda for a large change. ADKAR: during rollout, when you're tracking adoption and deciding where to put support.
• Main risk. Lewin: treating a metaphor as a method. Kotter: running it as a top-down checklist. ADKAR: assuming that once individuals check all five boxes, the system around them will support the change.

Combining them in practice

The models work better together than alone. For example, imagine a hypothetical 40-person accounting firm moving client document exchange from email attachments to a secure portal.

The Lewin lens asks what holds the old way in place. Email is easy, clients are used to it, and nobody has been told to stop. The Kotter agenda gives the partners their work: explain plainly why the change matters, ask a few respected staff to help guide it, show early wins (say, the first clients who find the portal easier) and later retire the old habit for good. ADKAR shapes the check-ins. Staff who keep emailing files may know how to use the portal but not see why it matters (Awareness), or may know why but find it clumsy with a hard-to-reach client (Ability). Each needs a different response.

It also helps to add a people-side lens that none of the three covers fully. William Bridges distinguished change, the external event, from transition, the inner process people go through to come to terms with it. His model has three stages: Endings, the Neutral Zone and New Beginnings. It is a reminder that people often need to let go of something before they can take up the new way.

Mistakes to avoid

• Picking a model because it's popular rather than because it answers the question you have.
• Running the steps once, in order, and declaring the change done.
• Using any model as a substitute for talking with the people who have to change.
• Treating a framework's vocabulary as proof of progress. Having a "guiding coalition" on paper is not the same as having people who will actually lead.

Key takeaways

• The unfreeze-change-refreeze idea is a useful lens, but researchers have shown that Lewin never developed it as a step-by-step model, and he never wrote "refreezing."
• Kotter's eight steps, now framed by his firm as accelerators, are an agenda for leaders driving organization-wide change.
• ADKAR is a model for individual adoption; its most useful move is finding the earliest element where someone is stuck.
• Choose a model by the question you need answered, and combine them when a change has both organizational and personal sides.
• Pair any model with attention to transition: what people are giving up, not just what they are taking on.

Sources

• Stephen Cummings, Todd Bridgman and Kenneth G. Brown, Unfreezing change as three steps: Rethinking Kurt Lewin's legacy for change management, Human Relations (2016)
• John P. Kotter, Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail, Harvard Business Review (March–April 1995)
• Kotter, The 8 Steps for Leading Change
• Prosci, The Prosci ADKAR Model
• Prosci, ADKAR Is a Change Management Model, Not a Methodology
• Prosci, About Prosci
• William Bridges Associates, Bridges Transition Model