Kotter: the organisational perspective
John Kotter's 8-step model is top-down and organisational: create a sense of urgency, build a guiding coalition, develop a vision, communicate that vision, remove obstacles, generate short-term wins, use that momentum to drive further change, and anchor the new practice in the culture. Kotter answers the question: how does an entire organisation move from A to B?
ADKAR: the individual perspective
Prosci's ADKAR model picks up exactly where Kotter leaves off: at the individual person. ADKAR stands for five sequential stages that each person must go through individually for a change to actually take hold: Awareness (of the need for change), Desire (the personal wish to participate), Knowledge (of how the change works), Ability (the actual capability to implement it), and Reinforcement (so the change sticks instead of reverting).
Why skipping a stage causes failure
ADKAR's practical value lies in its sequence: whoever delivers Knowledge before Desire is even present wastes the training – the information evaporates because the motivation to apply it is missing. This exact mistake happens especially often in AI rollouts: a company trains a tool extensively without first clarifying why employees should even want to use it.
Practice section: think both levels together
For an AI rollout that means concretely: Kotter supplies the organisational frame (create urgency, guiding coalition, vision), ADKAR supplies the check at the individual level of whether that frame actually lands with each person. A team check after every Kotter stage that asks "Are we at Awareness? At Desire?" surfaces gaps before they turn into quiet failure – the pattern from the first module of this course.