Executive Summary
Before deciding how to approach a change, leaders need a working understanding of the field around them. This section introduces the major types of change-management providers and the major frameworks that have shaped the discipline over time. Its purpose is not to push one model or one provider type. It is to give leaders enough vocabulary and context to understand what exists, recognize the differences among approaches, and make more deliberate choices about how to structure change work.
What This Page Answers
- Who are the main types of organizations working in change management?
- What does each player type tend to bring to the work?
- What are the major frameworks that have shaped change-management practice?
- How has thinking in the field changed over time?
- Where do the Purpose Triangle and TRANSFORM fit within that larger landscape?
- Why does understanding the field help leaders make better change decisions?
The Change Management Landscape
Before deciding how to approach a change, leaders benefit from knowing what exists. The market for change management support is broad and the frameworks that guide the work are varied. This section introduces both: the types of organizations that work in this space and the models that have shaped how change gets managed. The goal is vocabulary. Knowing who the players are and what the major frameworks do allows leaders to have more informed conversations, ask better questions, and make more deliberate choices.
The Players
Major Consulting Firms
The large global firms bring enterprise scale, deep resources, and cross-industry pattern recognition to change work. They have managed transformations across dozens of industries and geographies, and they bring that accumulated experience to every engagement. Organizations working with major consulting firms gain access to proprietary research, established methodologies, and practitioners who have seen a wide range of organizational challenges. These firms work best in large-scale, complex transformations where the breadth of their resources and the credibility of their name are genuine assets.
Boutique and Specialist Consultants
Boutique and specialist firms focus on specific types of change: technology implementations, cultural transformations, mergers and acquisitions, leadership transitions, and others. Their depth in a particular domain often reflects years of concentrated experience in that space. Organizations facing a specific and well-defined type of change frequently find that a firm with direct experience in that area brings a quality of insight that generalist firms cannot match. The relationship tends to be closer and more flexible than engagements with larger firms, and the work is often more tailored to the specific situation.
Training and Development Companies
Training and development companies focus on building the knowledge and skills that change requires. Their work operates at the human level: developing leaders who can communicate and drive change, building the capability of managers to support their teams through transition, and giving individual contributors the tools to operate effectively in a new environment. Organizations that engage training and development companies are investing in capability that extends beyond the current initiative. The people who go through the work carry what they learn into every change that follows.
Independent Coaches and Facilitators
Independent coaches and facilitators bring personalized, focused attention to the individuals and teams navigating change. A skilled coach working with a senior leader provides a level of individualized support that larger engagements rarely include. A skilled facilitator creates the conditions for groups to reach genuine alignment, surface difficult conversations, and move from divergent thinking to shared direction. Independent practitioners often bring deep expertise in a specific discipline, whether executive coaching, group facilitation, organizational development, or another area, and their engagements tend to be nimble and responsive to the specific needs of the client.
Internal Capability
Many organizations build and maintain internal change management capability. Internal practitioners bring organizational knowledge, cultural fluency, and continuity that outside partners cannot replicate. They understand the history, the relationships, and the informal dynamics that shape how the organization works. Internal capability allows organizations to respond to change with speed and with context, and it builds an institutional knowledge base that grows stronger with each initiative. Organizations that invest in developing internal change management expertise over time develop a genuine competitive advantage in their ability to adapt.
The Major Frameworks
The frameworks that have shaped change management practice emerged across eight decades of organizational research and experience. Reading them in the order they appeared tells a story about how thinking in this field has evolved over time.
Lewin’s Change Model (1947)
Kurt Lewin developed his three-stage model in 1947, and it remains one of the most enduring conceptual frameworks in the field. The model describes change as moving through three stages: Unfreeze, Change, and Refreeze. Before an organization can adopt new behaviors, it first needs to loosen its attachment to existing ones. That is the unfreezing stage. The change itself occupies the middle. Refreezing describes the process of stabilizing new behaviors so they become the new normal.
Lewin’s contribution to the field was the insight that the psychological and cultural preparation for change is as important as the change itself. Organizations that invest in creating the conditions for people to release the old way before introducing the new one experience smoother transitions. The model gives practitioners a language for talking about that preparation and a framework for thinking about change as a staged process rather than a single event.
McKinsey 7-S Framework (Early 1980s)
Tom Peters, Robert Waterman, and colleagues at McKinsey developed the 7-S Framework in the early 1980s as a way of understanding organizational effectiveness. The framework identifies seven interdependent elements: Strategy, Structure, Systems, Shared Values, Style, Staff, and Skills. The central insight is that these elements are connected, and a change in any one of them creates pressure across the others.
The 7-S Framework gives practitioners a systems-level view of the organization. It is particularly useful in the planning phase of a change initiative, where understanding the interdependencies between organizational elements helps leaders anticipate where friction will emerge and design their approach accordingly. Organizations using the 7-S Framework develop a more complete picture of what a proposed change will touch before the work begins.
Kotter’s 8-Step Model (1996)
John Kotter published his 8-step model in Leading Change in 1996, drawing on research into major organizational transformations. The model places leadership at the center of successful change and organizes the work into eight sequential steps, beginning with establishing a sense of urgency and concluding with anchoring the change in organizational culture.
Kotter’s model gave the field a structured approach to large-scale, leadership-driven transformation. Its emphasis on urgency, coalition building, and vision as the primary drivers of successful change reflects the patterns Kotter observed across organizations that navigated major transitions effectively. The model is widely used and widely taught, and its vocabulary, including concepts like the guiding coalition and short-term wins, has become part of the standard language of organizational change.
Prosci and ADKAR (Developed Late 1990s, Formally Published 2006)
Jeff Hiatt and the team at Prosci developed the ADKAR model in the late 1990s as a framework for understanding change at the individual level. ADKAR is an acronym for the five building blocks of individual change adoption: Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, and Reinforcement. The model’s central insight is that organizational change happens one person at a time, and that supporting individuals through each of these five stages is what determines whether a change takes hold.
ADKAR gives practitioners a diagnostic tool for understanding where individuals are in their adoption of a change and what support they need to move forward. Prosci has built an extensive certification and practitioner ecosystem around the model, making it one of the most widely adopted individual-level frameworks in the field. Organizations using ADKAR develop a more precise language for talking about resistance, adoption, and the human side of change.
Business Training Works: The Purpose Triangle (2016) and TRANSFORM (2025)
Business Training Works developed the Purpose Triangle in 2016 and refined it through a decade of client work. The framework establishes the WHY at the center of any change initiative and maps the current and future states across three dimensions: the work product, the processes, and the people. It is designed to be accessible at every level of the organization without requiring specialized training to apply.
TRANSFORM, developed in 2025, is a nine-element execution architecture that organizes the full scope of change implementation. The nine elements, Trigger, Result, Audience, Now and Next, Story, Friction, Ownership, Reinforcement, and Measure, address the questions that change leaders need to answer before and during implementation. A single organization can run multiple TRANSFORM plans simultaneously, each addressing a different workstream or audience, all connected to the same Purpose Triangle above them.
Sections 3 and 4 go deeper into both models.
Section Takeaway
Change management is shaped by a range of established frameworks and support models. Understanding that landscape gives leaders the vocabulary to evaluate different approaches and provides useful context for the models presented in the sections that follow.