If you are interested in Change Management, you might have heard a few questions regarding the methods you are using. We developed the Root Map Method. But how is this different from ADKAR, or Kotter’s eight steps?
It’s a fair question. Those are two of the most taught change management models, and they are both built the same way. You complete one stage, then move to the next, in order, and you are done with it once you have moved on. I still use pieces of both, and the research behind people transformation that comes with them is real and useful.
But working with actual people taught me something those models do not account for. Nothing about a real transformation is that linear.
Linear models assume you are moving an organisation from a known starting point to a known destination, almost like relocating an object from one place to another. I do not think that is what is actually happening. An organisation, like any living system, does not get replaced. It reroots. It carries its own culture and its own people forward into new ground, instead of being asked to become someone else entirely.
Kurt Lewin and the Linear methods
Kurt Lewin, whose Unfreeze, Change, Refreeze model I wrote about last week, assumed something similar to ADKAR and Kotter without saying so: a system frozen, then deliberately moved, then frozen again into its next stable state. What none of them account for is a system that does not want to be relocated. It wants to keep enough of itself intact to still recognise its own reflection on the other side.
I keep coming back to a tree metaphor for this, and not because it sounds nice. Trees do not migrate north because it is inspiring. They move because the old ground stops sustaining them and staying put stops being an option. For a tree, that move takes generations. For an organisation, it takes months, sometimes years, but the mechanism is the same: something old has to travel into something new, or it does not survive the transition at all.
Which means the work of managing that transition is not sequential either. You do not finish listening to resistance and check the box. You keep listening throughout, because resistance evolves as the project does, and what people are protecting in week two is rarely what they were protecting in week one. Naming the break is not a kickoff meeting you hold once. Keeping people involved is not a phase you close before moving to the next slide.
It is slower to explain than a clean eight step model. I have watched it be the only version that actually survives contact with a real organisation.
I am not against ADKAR or Kotter. I use pieces of both, deliberately, inside a structure that does not pretend transformation moves in a straight line. What I have stopped doing is pretending the straight line was ever the honest description of what happens in a mission. It was just the easiest one to put in a slide.
If you wish to be supported during your transformation projects, we invite you to schedule a meeting with The Change Society Office.
