Choosing the Right Change Management Model

Claire Monroe

Welcome back to Science of Leading, I'm Claire Monroe with Edwin Carrington. Edwin, we've covered all five elements now, sponsorship, measurable outcomes, structure, engagement, governance. Today I want to close the loop with the part everyone asks about first and probably shouldn't, which change management model to actually use.

Edwin Carrington

And that's exactly why it comes last, Claire. A model is a decision aid, not a replacement for the other four elements. Pick the wrong one for the shape of your change and you'll execute a framework beautifully while solving the wrong problem.

Claire Monroe

So walk me through them, starting with the one most people have heard of, ADKAR.

Edwin Carrington

ADKAR is built for individual adoption, awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, reinforcement. Use it when success genuinely hinges on individual behavior change, new software, new systems, new skills. Its strength is that it makes gaps obvious, someone can have full awareness and zero ability, and ADKAR forces you to see that gap instead of assuming training solved it. The watch-out is it can feel too person by person if you actually need organization-wide coordination, and it needs strong manager routines behind it or the reinforcement step just doesn't happen.

Claire Monroe

And Kotter is the one for the big, organization-wide transformation.

Edwin Carrington

Kotter-style sequencing, yes, when you need cross-functional alignment and sustained executive visibility across the whole company. It creates urgency and governance structure so the change doesn't drift, and it emphasizes communication and reinforcement at scale. But it can become a checklist if teams treat the steps as theater, and it fails fast without real sponsorship, which, as we covered, is consistently the top predictor in Prosci's research regardless of which model you're running.

Claire Monroe

Lewin's the one I always think of as the freeze metaphor, unfreeze, change, refreeze.

Edwin Carrington

Right, and it's genuinely useful when you need to intentionally break existing processes, reset norms, then stabilize the new way. It's a clean mental model for culture and behavior resets specifically. The honest watch-out is that real organizations rarely refreeze permanently, most operate in continuous change, so treat the refreeze as a checkpoint, not a permanent state.

Claire Monroe

And Lean or PDCA is the one for smaller, iterative fixes.

Edwin Carrington

Test, learn, standardize. Best when you're improving a business process or optimizing a workflow, where learning by doing beats a top-down design document. It reduces risk because you validate changes in real scenarios instead of on paper. But it can under-communicate the why if you treat it like pure operations, and it can stall without decision rights and clear metrics behind it, same governance and measurement pieces we've already covered.

Claire Monroe

So none of these four fix a mismatch, they just help you organize the emphasis once you already know the scale.

Edwin Carrington

Which is why the real decision starts with scale, people impact, and capacity, not the model name. Team or function-level change, start with pilot waves and manager enablement. Multi-function change, emphasize governance and stakeholder mapping. Entire-organization transformation, prioritize sponsorship and a communications spine that stays consistent, because that's the one that has to survive the longest without wavering.

Claire Monroe

And people impact, is that basically asking how many roles are actually changing versus just the tools they use?

Edwin Carrington

Exactly that. Are job responsibilities changing, or just tools. Are performance metrics changing. Are managers expected to coach genuinely new behaviors. If the answer is yes across multiple areas, allocate more time to manager coaching and champions, not less, because optimism doesn't substitute for reinforcement.

Claire Monroe

And capacity is the one everyone treats as infinite until it very obviously isn't.

Edwin Carrington

Right, so ask plainly. How many major change efforts are active right now. Which teams are already saturated. What work actually stops to make room. If you can't create space, your structured approach becomes a structured failure, no matter how good the model was on paper.

Claire Monroe

Okay, last thing, because I think this is the most practical takeaway of the whole series. If a mid-sized HR team only has bandwidth to fix one of the five elements first, how do they decide which one?

Edwin Carrington

Simple decision rule. If executive sponsorship is weak, fix that first, before you build anything else, since it's the top predictor across nearly three decades of Prosci research. If adoption risk is high, employee willingness to support change has dropped, invest in engagement and champions early. If multiple initiatives are competing for the same people, start with governance and sequencing, you can't inspire your way out of overload. And if leaders are genuinely aligned but execution is sloppy, go straight to measurable outcomes, pick five to ten metrics, assign owners, and drift dies fast once measurement is real.

Claire Monroe

That's a much better starting question than "which framework should we use."

Edwin Carrington

Every time. The framework matters far less than diagnosing correctly which of the five elements is actually broken.

Claire Monroe

If you want a clearer read on who on your team is built to lead through exactly this kind of ambiguity, OAD's free Top Performer Profile gives you that in about seven minutes, results in twenty-four hours, no credit card. That's O-A-D dot A-I.

Edwin Carrington

Diagnose first. Then pick the tool. Never the other way around.

Claire Monroe

Perfect place to close out the series. Thanks, Edwin.

Edwin Carrington

Always, Claire.