What does this article cover?
- What did the mapping actually show?
- Which six are the same one?
- What are the other six?
- Why does the confusion cost anything?
- If six are the same, does it matter which you pick?
- If the sequences are the same, why do outcomes differ?
- Who should this article send away?
- Where does this break down?
- People also ask
- What I sell, and what I don’t
- About the Stagnation Assassin
The criteria before the verdict. I took twelve named change and transformation frameworks and asked one question of each: does it prescribe a sequence of things to do, and if so, what are its phases. Then I mapped those phases against each other. That is a mechanical exercise rather than a judgment, which matters, because an article arguing that this field asserts things without demonstrating them has to demonstrate its own claim. The number in the headline is whatever the mapping produced, and it is not the number I expected.
What did the mapping actually show?
Six of twelve are one framework at different resolutions, and the other six are not frameworks for the same job. That second half is the more useful finding, because it means half the comparison tables in this field are comparing objects of different kinds.
The twelve I mapped: Lewin’s three stages, Kotter’s eight steps, Kotter’s later Accelerate model, Prosci’s ADKAR, the Bridges Transition Model, the Satir Change Model, McKinsey 7-S, the Beckhard-Harris change equation, Maurer’s three levels of resistance, nudge theory, the Kübler-Ross change curve, and the Deming plan-do-check-act cycle.
Those are the models that recur across the comparison literature, and the list is mine rather than canonical. Someone else’s twelve would produce a different count and, I suspect, the same split.
Which six are the same one?
Lewin, Kotter’s eight steps, his later Accelerate revision, ADKAR, Bridges and Satir. Every one of them divides change into a loosening phase, a moving phase and a settling phase. They differ in resolution, in vocabulary, and in whether they address an organization or a person.
Kurt Lewin published the substrate in the 1940s: unfreeze, change, refreeze. Everything below is that shape at a different magnification.
| Framework | Loosening | Moving | Settling |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lewin | Unfreeze | Change | Refreeze |
| Kotter, 8 steps | Urgency, coalition, vision, communication | Empower action, short-term wins | Consolidate, anchor in culture |
| Kotter, Accelerate | Same four, run continuously | Same, as accelerators | Institute change |
| ADKAR | Awareness, Desire | Knowledge, Ability | Reinforcement |
| Bridges | Ending, losing, letting go | The neutral zone | The new beginning |
| Satir | Late status quo, resistance | Chaos | Integration, new status quo |
The convergence is not a secret and it is rarely stated plainly. A comparative review of ADKAR, Lewin, Kotter and McKinsey 7-S published in the academic literature concludes that despite their differences they share common factors: dividing the process into consecutive stages, and treating the human side as central.
Two of the six add something the others do not, and it is worth crediting. ADKAR operates on an individual, which makes it a diagnostic of where one person has stalled rather than a plan for an organisation. Bridges separates the external change from the internal transition, which is a genuine distinction and the reason his language survives.
Kotter’s steps one to four are unfreeze. Five and six are change. Seven and eight are refreeze. ADKAR is the same shape applied to one person. Bridges is Lewin with better language for how it feels.
What are the other six?
Different kinds of object entirely. A diagnostic of organizational alignment, a formula for whether change will start, a taxonomy of resistance, a behavioral mechanism, an improvement loop, and a description of how individuals experience loss. None of them is a process.
McKinsey 7-S examines seven interdependent elements and asks whether they are aligned. It has no phases and no order. It tells you what is inconsistent, not what to do first.
The Beckhard-Harris change equation states a precondition: dissatisfaction, vision and first steps together must exceed resistance. That is a test for whether change can begin, which is genuinely useful and is not a plan.
Maurer’s three levels of resistance sorts objections into not understanding, not liking it, and not trusting you. A taxonomy, and a good one, aimed at a specific problem inside a change rather than at the change.
Nudge theory is a mechanism for altering behaviour through choice architecture. It belongs inside a step of one of the sequences rather than alongside them.
Plan-do-check-act is a continuous improvement loop with no end state, which makes it the structural opposite of a model containing a refreeze phase.
The Kübler-Ross change curve deserves a specific note. It was developed observing terminally ill patients and describes stages of grief. Its application to organisational change is an import from a different field, made by other people rather than by Kübler-Ross, and it has never been validated for that use. It is frequently the most emotionally resonant item on any list of these models and the least evidenced for the job it is being asked to do.
Why does the confusion cost anything?
Because buyers choose between them as if they were alternatives. Picking McKinsey 7-S over Kotter is not choosing a different route to the same place, it is choosing a diagnostic instead of a sequence, and the diagnostic will never tell you what to do on Monday.
The error runs in both directions and both are common.
A team that adopts a sequence when it needed a diagnostic starts executing before it knows what is misaligned, which produces a well-run programme addressing the wrong thing. A team that adopts a diagnostic when it needed a sequence produces an excellent analysis of its own incoherence and no plan, which is the more comfortable failure and the more frequent one.
The practical correction is a sentence. Before picking anything, decide whether you need to know what is wrong or to know what to do next, because almost nothing on the standard list does both. If you need both, take one from each column and say so, rather than searching for a single model that will turn out to be one or the other with the gap hidden.
If six are the same, does it matter which you pick?
Only for three reasons, and none of them is about correctness. How much detail your organisation needs, whether the unit of analysis is the company or the individual person, and whether the vocabulary will survive being said out loud in your own building.
Take them in order, because they resolve the choice quickly once the convergence is established.
Detail. Lewin gives you three words, which is enough for a team that already knows how to run a change and wants a shared shape. Kotter gives you eight steps with content inside each, which suits an organisation that has not done this before and needs the intermediate instructions. Choosing Lewin over Kotter for a first-time change is choosing less scaffolding, not a different method.
Unit of analysis. ADKAR works on one person and is the right instrument when adoption has stalled and you need to know why, for whom. The organisational models cannot answer that, because their smallest unit is a group. This is the one genuine functional difference among the six and it is the reason ADKAR and Kotter are frequently run together rather than chosen between.
Vocabulary. This sounds trivial and decides more implementations than the other two. Bridges talks about endings and letting go, which lands in an organisation where people are losing something and would be laughed out of a plant that is simply changing a process. Kotter’s language of urgency and coalitions suits a company in difficulty and sounds melodramatic in one that is fine. Pick the words your people will repeat without embarrassment, because the words are what they will remember in month six.
What none of the three reasons is: accuracy. All six describe the same thing, so the choice is about fit to your organisation rather than about which model is right.
There is a fourth consideration that is not about the model at all. If your board, your sponsor or your consultant already uses one of these, use that one. The cost of translating between two descriptions of the same process is real and the benefit is zero, and arguing for a different model on the grounds that it is better is arguing about something this mapping suggests is not true.
If the sequences are the same, why do outcomes differ?
Because the framework is not the active ingredient. All six describe what has to happen and none supplies what makes it happen: somebody with authority to decide, capacity to absorb the work, and a consequence when a commitment is missed.
This is the part of the article I am most confident about and it is not a fashionable conclusion, because it implies the model you choose matters far less than anybody selling one would like.
Consider what a sequence actually contains. An instruction to create urgency, which does not tell you how to create it in an organisation that is profitable. An instruction to build a guiding coalition, which does not help if the people you need report to someone who disagrees. An instruction to remove obstacles, which is the whole job restated as a step.
Every phase in every one of the six is a description of a state the organisation must reach. None is a mechanism for reaching it. That is not a flaw in the models; a framework is a checklist of conditions, and checklists are useful. It does mean that two companies applying the identical model will diverge entirely on the basis of things the model never mentions.
Three things predict the divergence, in my experience and consistent with what I have written elsewhere about why transformations fail. Whether one named person can make the decisions the plan requires without seeking permission. Whether the organisation has capacity for the work on top of running itself. And whether missing a commitment has any consequence at all, which is the one most often absent and the cheapest to fix.
Who should this article send away?
Anyone expecting the framework to supply the missing thing. If you have no owner with authority, no spare capacity and no consequence for a missed commitment, every model on this list will describe your failure accurately and none of them will prevent it.
That is a real disqualification and it removes a large group, because the framework search is frequently a substitute for the authority conversation. Choosing a model is a decision a leadership team can make together; granting one person the authority to override a colleague is not, and the first is regularly used to postpone the second.
The test before you choose anything: name the person who can, without further approval, change a price, move a manager, or stop a project. If that person does not exist, no model on the list will function, and the work to do is the appointment rather than the selection.
Where to go instead, and some of it beats any framework including mine. Read Lewin directly if you want the substrate, because it is three pages of thinking that the rest of this field elaborates. Read Bridges if your problem is that people are struggling rather than that the plan is unclear, because he is better on that than anyone. And if the problem is authority, that is a governance question and the honest answer is that no change model addresses it, including the ones I write.
Where does this break down?
My own frameworks sit in this taxonomy and I have never labelled which is which. One of them is a diagnostic, another is a sequence, and I publish both without telling readers they answer different questions, which is exactly the confusion this article criticizes.
Being concrete: my concentration analysis is a diagnostic, it tells you where value sits and it contains no instruction about what to do on Monday. My improvement cadence is a sequence, it tells you how to run the work and it contains no method for choosing what the work should be. A reader encountering both on this site would have no way of knowing that from how I present them, and I should fix that rather than only noting it.
Three further limits. The twelve are my selection from a field with no canonical list, and a different twelve would produce a different headline number, though I would expect a similar split. The mapping compresses genuine differences: Kotter’s eight steps contain real content about coalitions and communication that Lewin’s three words do not, and saying they share a shape is not saying they are interchangeable. And the three predictors in the previous section are my observation rather than a finding, offered as a hypothesis worth testing rather than as evidence.
One thing I am not claiming. That these models are useless. A checklist of conditions is worth having, the six sequences are a reasonable checklist, and an organisation that genuinely completes all three phases will do better than one that improvises. The claim is narrower: the choice between them is not where the outcome is decided.
Every phase in every one of the six is a description of a state the organization must reach. None is a mechanism for reaching it. Two companies applying the identical model will diverge on things the model never mentions.
People also ask
Are change management models all the same? Six of the twelve I mapped share one three-phase structure at different resolutions. The other six are different kinds of object: diagnostics, taxonomies, mechanisms and descriptions, none of which prescribes a sequence.
How do Kotter and ADKAR relate to Lewin? Both elaborate the same substrate. Kotter’s first four steps are Lewin’s unfreeze, five and six are change, seven and eight are refreeze. ADKAR applies the same shape to one individual rather than an organization.
Is McKinsey 7-S a change model? Not in the same sense. It is a diagnostic of alignment across seven interdependent elements, with no phases and no order. It tells you what is inconsistent rather than what to do first.
Why is the Kübler-Ross curve questionable here? It was developed observing terminally ill patients and describes grief. Its transfer to organizational change was made by others, not by its author, and has never been validated for that purpose.
If the models are similar, why do results differ so much? Because the model is not the active ingredient. Every phase describes a state to reach and none supplies the authority, capacity or consequence that determine whether you reach it.
What I sell, and what I don’t
I don’t sell consulting. My employment contract doesn’t allow it, so there is no engagement waiting at the end of this article and no proposal coming. Two things here are commercial: I speak for a fee, and I sell books. Everything else, including the audit, is free, and it stays free because it has to be. If you want a second read on whether you need a diagnostic or a sequence before you commit to either, ask at my contact page.
About the Stagnation Assassin
Todd Hagopian is a Fortune 500 transformation executive who has generated $3B in shareholder value across Berkshire Hathaway, Illinois Tool Works, Whirlpool, and JBT Marel, where he serves as Global VP of Product Strategy and Marketing. Known as The Stagnation Assassin, he is the author of two published books, The Unfair Advantage: Weaponizing the Hypomanic Toolbox and Stagnation Assassin: The Anti-Consultant Manifesto. His blog is published in 15+ languages and read by operators worldwide. Bring him to your stage via his speaking page or connect with him on LinkedIn.
The talk version puts the twelve on one slide and asks the room to sort them into sequences and everything else, which takes about four minutes and changes what people think they have been choosing between. Formats and fee are on my speaking page.