Anyone planning a strategy or OKR rollout eventually runs into the same fork: follow Kotter's 8-Step Change Model, or build the rollout around Prosci's ADKAR? The question assumes a competition that isn't really there. Kotter tells you when an organization should act. ADKAR tells you whether a given person is actually ready to. A rollout that only answers one of those questions is guessing at the other.
What Kotter's 8-Step Change Model is
Harvard Business School professor John Kotter developed the model after observing how leaders and organizations tried, and often failed, to transform. He first laid it out in a 1995 article and then in full in his 1996 book Leading Change. The steps, in order:
- Establish a sense of urgency: name the risk or opportunity clearly enough that the status quo stops looking safe.
- Build a guiding coalition: assemble a group with enough authority and credibility across the organization to actually lead the change.
- Develop a vision and strategy: give the coalition a clear picture of the destination and a plan for reaching it.
- Communicate the change vision: repeat that vision constantly, through every channel available, until it is the thing people expect to hear.
- Remove obstacles to action: clear the structural and cultural barriers, outdated processes, unclear roles, that stop people from acting on the vision.
- Generate short-term wins: create and publicize visible, near-term proof that the change is working.
- Consolidate gains and produce more change: use the credibility from early wins to tackle the harder changes still ahead, rather than declaring victory too soon.
- Anchor the new approaches in the culture: connect the new behaviors to the organization's success stories until they become how things are simply done.
Kotter's firm has since evolved the linear steps into what it now calls the 8 Accelerators, built for organizations facing constant change rather than a single, bounded transformation. The underlying logic is the same. What changed is the assumption that change happens once and then stops.
What ADKAR is, briefly
ADKAR is Prosci's model of individual change: five sequential outcomes, Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, and Reinforcement, that a person needs to reach before a change actually sticks for them. Where Kotter describes what an organization's leaders should do, ADKAR describes what has to be true inside one person's head for that leadership to land. Workpath's own change management content covers this ground in more depth; the short version here is enough to make the comparison useful.
The core difference in one idea
Kotter is a model of organizational sequence. ADKAR is a model of individual sequence. Kotter answers what leadership should be doing right now, at the level of the whole change effort. ADKAR answers whether this specific team, or this specific person, has actually reached the point where they can act, regardless of what leadership announced last week. Neither model does the other's job, which is exactly why comparing them as competitors misses the point.
How they compare, dimension by dimension
- Unit of change: Kotter treats the organization as the thing being moved. ADKAR treats one person at a time as the unit, on the premise that an organization only changes because enough individuals within it change first.
- Structure: Kotter is eight sequential actions for leadership to take. ADKAR is five sequential outcomes an individual has to reach, each a precondition for the next.
- Evidence base: Kotter's model comes from his own research and consulting practice, first published in 1995 to 1996. ADKAR comes from Prosci founder Jeff Hiatt's study of roughly 700 organizations going through change.
- What it's built for: Kotter suits large, leadership-driven transformations where a guiding coalition can realistically drive the whole effort. ADKAR suits diagnosing a specific stall, a team that isn't adopting a change even though leadership has done everything Kotter's steps ask for.
- Documented limitation: Kotter's own steps say little about how to actually execute each one, and the model assumes people move together once leadership acts, which is not always true. ADKAR, by its own description, is a model rather than a methodology: it names the outcomes a person needs but not the program, cadence, or roles that get them there.
Where they work better together than alone
Prosci, the organization behind ADKAR, makes the combination case directly rather than treating this as a rivalry to win. Jean-Claude Monney, former Chief Knowledge Officer at Microsoft Services, put it this way after running both: "I started with Kotter, and I think the fundamentals are still valid. But when the rubber hits the road, it's the last part, the last mile. We didn't have a proven method for it. The Prosci ADKAR Model gives that last mile." Read plainly, that's an argument for using both: Kotter's steps give a change effort its shape and its leadership backing, and ADKAR checks whether the people inside each step have actually arrived, rather than assuming they have because a memo went out.
Applying both to an OKR or strategy-execution rollout
A typical OKR or strategy-execution rollout already moves through phases that map onto Kotter's organizational steps without anyone naming them that way. Leadership alignment and the case for change cover urgency, coalition, and vision. Communicating the shift and training teams on the methodology covers the vision and action steps. The first few cycles of drafting and check-ins are where short-term wins either show up or don't. A steering rhythm built on Business Reviews is where gains get consolidated and the new way of working gets anchored, quarter after quarter, instead of fading after the launch event.
Kotter's sequence explains what leadership should be doing at each of those stages. It does not tell a program lead whether a specific department has actually reached the readiness to act, which is the question that decides whether check-ins produce real prioritization or just a status update read aloud. That's the ADKAR layer: checking, stage by stage, whether awareness and desire were actually built before asking for ability, rather than assuming a well-run kickoff means the work is done. Workpath's own writing on frameworks that pair with OKRs, including EOS and 4DX, follows the same pattern: the framework sets the structure, and the steering rhythm is what keeps it from becoming a one-time event.
FAQ
What are the 8 steps in Kotter's change model?
Establish a sense of urgency, build a guiding coalition, develop a vision and strategy, communicate the change vision, remove obstacles to action, generate short-term wins, consolidate gains and produce more change, and anchor the new approaches in the culture.
Who created Kotter's 8-step model, and when?
Harvard Business School professor John Kotter, first in a 1995 article and then in full in his 1996 book Leading Change.
Is Kotter's model still used today?
Yes, though Kotter's own firm has updated it into the 8 Accelerators, reframing the original linear steps for organizations where change is continuous rather than a single project with an end date.
Should I use Kotter or ADKAR for a rollout?
Most practitioners who have used both end up combining them rather than picking one. Kotter gives the change effort its organizational shape and leadership backing; ADKAR checks whether individuals have actually reached readiness at each stage, which Kotter's steps do not measure on their own.
Does Kotter's model apply to OKR rollouts specifically?
Yes. An OKR or strategy-execution rollout already moves through urgency, coalition-building, vision-setting, and reinforcement, whether or not anyone calls it Kotter's model. Naming the stages makes it easier to see which one a stalled rollout is actually stuck in.
Choosing a change model is only part of the work. Our guide to change management in agile organizations covers the operational side of running a rollout day to day.
