Change management is the discipline of preparing, equipping and supporting individuals and organizations to adopt a change successfully. It covers both the structural side of a change, what is different afterward, and the human side, whether people actually adopt it.
Lewin’s model treats behaviour as a quasi-stable equilibrium between driving and restraining forces. Unfreezing destabilises the current state, change moves the organization to a new one, and refreezing locks it in. The common criticism is that it implies a stable end state, when most organizations now run into the next change before the last one has settled.
Kotter’s eight steps are: establish urgency, build a guiding coalition, develop a vision and strategy, communicate the vision, empower broad-based action, generate short-term wins, consolidate gains and produce more change, and anchor the new approach in culture. It is prescriptive and sequential, derived from Kotter observing common failure patterns across more than a hundred change efforts.
ADKAR is the odd one out because it operates at the individual level rather than the organizational one. A change succeeds only when each affected person moves through all five stages, which makes it useful for diagnosing exactly where a stalled change is stuck in a specific team or population.
Planned change vs continuous change
Lewin, Kotter and ADKAR are all planned-change models. They assume change is an episodic project with a beginning and an end, driven top-down by identified change agents.
A different school, associated with scholars including Karl Weick, treats change as emergent and continuous: an ongoing, self-organizing process arising from everyday adaptation rather than a discrete initiative. This view has gained ground as the pace of change has made the idea of a stable “refrozen” state increasingly unrealistic. McKinsey’s November 2025 research frames the current environment explicitly this way, noting organizations now run roughly ten planned change programmes a year, a fivefold increase from a decade earlier.
Why change management is failing at the rate it is
Gartner’s July 2025 research found only 32% of business leaders say their most recent change initiative achieved healthy employee adoption, and 79% of employees report low trust in organizational change generally, based on a survey of over 2,850 employees.
Volume is part of the problem. Deloitte’s 2025 Global Human Capital Trends found the average worker now experiences ten planned enterprise changes a year, up from two in 2016, and 85% of leaders say their organizations need more agile structures even though only 39% report meaningfully managing the tension between agility and stability.
Coordination, not the number of changes, appears to be the deciding factor. Gartner’s same research found organizations with what it calls ungovernable change, meaning uncoordinated and excessive, are 1.6 times less likely to achieve high employee trust.
There is a genuine reversal available with better execution. McKinsey’s November 2025 research argues the traditional benchmark of 70% of change programmes failing can flip to 70 to 80% success with disciplined change leadership, though it does not attribute a fixed formula to the reversal.
What actually improves change adoption
Coordinate the change calendar centrally. Uncoordinated change is what drives the trust penalty Gartner found, more than the volume of change itself.
Diagnose at the individual level when a change stalls. ADKAR’s value is precisely here: it tells you whether the blocker is awareness, desire, knowledge, ability or reinforcement, which each require a different fix.
Do not assume refreezing. Build reinforcement into the plan from the start rather than treating adoption as a one-time event.
Generate visible short-term wins. Kotter’s step is the one most frequently skipped under time pressure, and skipping it is what causes momentum to stall mid-programme.
Treat trust as the scarce resource. Every change spends some. Sequencing and coordination decide whether it recovers.
Expect continuous change rather than discrete episodes. Planning as though the organization will reach a stable state after this one change sets up disappointment when the next one arrives before it does.
How Engagedly helps
Change adoption depends on knowing where people actually stand, not assuming the plan is landing. Engagedly’s Engage & Listen suite runs pulse surveys during a change programme, so awareness, desire and readiness gaps by team surface early rather than at the post-mortem.
Continuous feedback in the Performance Suite gives managers a channel to catch individual blockers before they compound across a team.
The three most commonly cited are Lewin’s three-stage model (unfreeze, change, refreeze), Kotter’s eight-step model (from establishing urgency to anchoring the change in culture), and ADKAR, which diagnoses change readiness at the individual level through awareness, desire, knowledge, ability and reinforcement.
Why do most change management efforts fail?
Research points to low trust in the change process, poor coordination between overlapping change initiatives, and insufficient reinforcement after the initial rollout. Gartner research found only about a third of leaders achieve healthy employee adoption of their most recent change effort.
What is the difference between planned and continuous change?
Planned change models treat change as a discrete project with a start and end, managed top-down. Continuous or emergent change treats change as an ongoing, self-organizing process without a stable end state, a view that has gained relevance as organizations run more overlapping changes than in the past.
What is the ADKAR model used for?
ADKAR diagnoses change readiness at the individual level across five stages: awareness of the need for change, desire to participate, knowledge of how to change, ability to implement it, and reinforcement to sustain it. It is most useful for identifying exactly where a stalled change effort is stuck.
Performance
