Which Model Fits Eleven Branches and One Telephone? Comparing Lewin, Kotter and ADKAR Against a Title Firm's Diagnosis Rather Than Against Each Other
Student Name
American College of Education
ORG5003: Organizational Dynamics & Change Management
Module 3 Assignment
Instructor Name
August 3, 2025
The Change and the Criteria
Harborline Title and Escrow, the composite firm analyzed in the first two modules, intends to separate two kinds of work that its branch structure has always bundled together. Title searches, examination and settlement document preparation will move to a shared production center, staffed partly at the founding branch and partly by examiners working remotely from other branches, on a single production system. The 11 branches will keep their closers, their managers and the client relationships that bring orders in. About 90 of the firm's 248 employees will change what they do each day or where their work comes from.
Four criteria for choosing a change model follow from the diagnosis. The model must work where formal authority is thin and informal power is concentrated in a senior examiner and three branch managers. It must overcome the memory of a 2019 standardization effort that was announced and dropped. It must create urgency in busy branches that do not feel the firm's decline. And it must help individuals whose jobs change substantially, since most of the risk lies in examiners and processors learning a new system and a new way of receiving work. A change model is chosen for the organization in front of you, not for the one in the textbook.
Lewin Against the Criteria
Lewin's work is usually taught as a three-step model of unfreezing, changing and refreezing. Cummings et al. (2016) showed that Lewin never presented such a model in the form now attributed to him, and that the three steps were largely assembled by later writers from a few lines of his work. The work Lewin (1947) actually published offered a way of seeing a stable situation as a balance of forces pushing for and against change, and evidence from group experiments that people who decide on a change together in a group are more likely to carry it out than people who are told about it.
Against the criteria, Lewin's ideas are strongest on the first and second. A force field of Harborline's situation shows the driving forces, the revenue decline and the cost of idle examiners, against the restraining ones, branch identity, the 2019 memory and fear for referral relationships, and it directs attention to reducing restraints rather than pushing harder. The group decision principle fits a firm whose informal leaders must own the new design. But Lewin offers little on sequence or on the individual transitions the fourth criterion requires.
Kotter Against the Criteria
Kotter (1995) described eight steps for leading change, beginning with urgency and a guiding coalition strong enough to lead, moving through a vision that is communicated widely, the removal of obstacles and early visible wins, and ending with building on those wins until the new approaches become part of the culture. He found that many transformations fail when leaders skip steps, especially by declaring victory too early. Against the criteria, Kotter's sequence is strongest on the second and third. Short-term wins are the most direct answer to the memory of 2019, and urgency is the step busy branches most need.
Kotter's weakness here is its implicit assumption of top-down leadership. At Harborline, a coalition of the executive team would be the coalition that announced the 2019 checklist. The coalition must therefore include the senior examiner and at least two of the three branch managers whom Module 2 found hold the power the change depends on. With that adaptation, Kotter supplies the organizational sequence that Lewin lacks.
ADKAR Against the Criteria
Hiatt (2006) described change at the level of the individual as a sequence of five outcomes: awareness of the need for change, desire to take part, knowledge of how to change, ability to carry it out and reinforcement to sustain it. The model's strength at Harborline is on the fourth criterion. An examiner moving to the production center needs to know why, want to go, learn the new system, perform on it under real deadlines and see the change rewarded. Each role group, examiners, processors, closers and branch managers, will be at different points in that sequence at different times, and ADKAR offers a way to see where each group is stuck.
ADKAR says little about power or organizational sequence. Used alone, it would treat the change as a training and communication problem at a firm whose main obstacles are identity and influence.
The Alternative Not Taken
A fourth option deserves a fair hearing because some members of the executive team prefer it: a directed change, in which headquarters designs the production center, sets a conversion date for each branch and requires compliance. Its advantages are real. It is faster, perhaps six months from decision to the last branch converted, against nine for the combined approach. It is cheaper in management time, and it avoids months of workshops in which the design could be pulled back toward each branch's current habits. In a firm losing money on idle examiners, speed has a price of its own, roughly $28,000 for each month the old structure continues.
It fails the criteria for reasons the diagnosis makes plain. A directed change relies on formal authority, which Module 2 found to be thin below the chief operating officer. It repeats the pattern of 2019 in form as well as substance. And it gives the senior examiner and the three high-volume managers no stake in the result, which leaves the people with the most influence free to wait for the change to fail. Three months saved at the start would probably be lost several times over in a conversion that staff quietly work around.
The Choice
No single model meets all four criteria, so the approach combines them with a clear division of labor. Kotter's sequence is the spine of the plan, adapted so that the guiding coalition includes the senior examiner and two of the high-volume branch managers alongside the chief operating officer. Lewin's group decision principle governs the design stage: the new production process will be designed in workshops led by the senior examiner with examiners and processors from every branch, including the shore offices, so that the people who will run it decide how it runs. ADKAR is used to plan and track each role group's transition, with a short check of where each group stands at each stage.
The combined approach has a cost. It is slower than a directive rollout, adding perhaps three months, and it hands influence over the design to people who may prefer to keep parts of the old way. That cost is worth paying because the alternative, a faster change designed at headquarters, is the one this firm has already watched fail.
What the Choice Leaves Open
Two questions remain for later modules. The first is how to answer the strongest objection, which Module 2 suggests will come from the branch managers whose referral relationships depend on fast, local service. The second is how to communicate with groups that will read the same announcement very differently, the founding branches, the acquired branches and the shore offices. Module 4 takes up the first, and the communication and implementation plans that follow take up the second.
References
Cummings, S., Bridgman, T., & Brown, K. G. (2016). Unfreezing change as three steps: Rethinking Kurt Lewin's legacy for change management. Human Relations, 69(1), 33-60. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726715577707
Hiatt, J. M. (2006). ADKAR: A model for change in business, government and our community. Prosci Learning Center Publications.
Kotter, J. P. (1995). Leading change: Why transformation efforts fail. Harvard Business Review, 73(2), 59-67.
Lewin, K. (1947). Frontiers in group dynamics: Concept, method and reality in social science; social equilibria and social change. Human Relations, 1(1), 5-41. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872674700100103
How this ORG 5003 Module 3 example is structured
ORG 5003 Module 3 commonly compares change models, and samples argue fit rather than summarizing each one; your classroom's instructions decide which models to compare. This example derives the criteria from the diagnosis in the earlier modules, then applies all three models to the same criteria. The choice is argued from fit, adapted where a model's assumptions do not match the firm, and each rejected element is named with its reason.
ORG5003 Module 3 questions, answered
What does ORG5003 Module 3 usually ask for?
ORG5003 Module 3 often asks students to compare change models such as Lewin, Kotter and ADKAR and to choose the one that best fits a specific organization. Your classroom's instructions decide which models and which case.
How do I argue that a change model fits an organization?
Set criteria from your diagnosis of the organization's structure, culture and power, then test each model against the same criteria. Name what each model would miss and adapt the chosen one where its assumptions do not match the case.
Can I combine change models in one plan?
Yes, if each has a defined role. Using one model for the organizational sequence and another for individual transitions is common, as long as the paper explains why each is used where it is.
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