The framework doesn’t know your people yet.

Kotter helps organize collective movement.

Kotter’s approach emphasizes urgency, a guiding coalition, direction, participation, removing barriers, visible progress, and reinforcement. Its original eight steps have evolved into accelerators intended for ongoing change. Source ↗

How I work with that thinking: We examine where influence actually lives, whose participation matters, and what makes action possible. Urgency needs a purpose people can understand and a pace the organization can support.

What you get with me: A map of stakeholders and informal influence; explicit sponsor decisions; and a practical engagement rhythm connected to the initiative. We test whether messages and actions are reaching the people whose work needs to change.

ADKAR helps locate what a person needs.

Prosci’s ADKAR model identifies five individual change outcomes: Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, and Reinforcement. It sits within Prosci’s broader methodology. Source ↗

How I work with that thinking: We explore what is behind an adoption barrier. Does the person need practice? Is the task unclear? Has the new process removed their authority while leaving their accountability intact? “They need more training” is a hypothesis we should check.

What you get with me: Role-specific impact and learning plans, opportunities to practice, and changes to the surrounding workflow where needed. We connect individual experience with the conditions leaders and teams can change.

Bridges gives loss and uncertainty a place.

Bridges distinguishes an external change from the internal transition people experience. Its three stages address endings, the neutral zone, and new beginnings. It explicitly recognizes loss, identity, and the unsettled period between familiar and emerging ways of working. Source ↗

How I work with that thinking: We make room to name what people are leaving behind, without assuming everyone feels the same thing or follows the same timetable. This is particularly relevant when AI changes the value people attach to expertise, relationships, and professional identity.

What you get with me: Facilitated conversations, manager preparation, shared learning, and explicit decisions about roles and support. We revisit those needs as the technology and the work change.

Here is what the partnership looks like.

A close reading of your organization. We examine the formal process and the actual experience, including workarounds, power, and the things people have stopped saying out loud.

Experiments with a purpose. We decide what a pilot should teach us, involve the people affected, and use the findings to change the plan. A revised assumption can be valuable progress.

Emotional reality connected to action. Fear, grief, or anger can tell us something worth investigating. We listen carefully, then decide what needs to change in the work, the support, or the leadership response.

Materials your team can use. Depending on the scope, that could include an ownership map, a decision brief, a pilot plan, a manager conversation guide, or a role-based learning resource.

Direct access to the practitioner. You work with me across the agreed scope, with the strategic and everyday questions held together.

Playformer connects that work through Prime, Layer, Form, and Release. It is my practice framework, informed by art and change-management training. I do not claim it has been independently validated to outperform established models. I can work alongside an approach your organization already uses.

Say you’re introducing AI into a familiar workflow.

Kotter can help you mobilize people around the purpose. ADKAR can help identify what individuals need to adopt the change. Bridges can help you attend to the transition in identity and experience.

In a Playformer engagement, we put those concerns to work together: identify affected roles and decisions in Prime; try a bounded workflow with employee feedback in Layer; clarify responsibilities, review points, and learning support in Form; then examine use, quality, and unresolved concerns in Release.

We could ask: Who checks the output? Where does human judgment remain essential? What happens when the tool is wrong? What is the new work displacing? And can someone say “this isn’t helping” without being written off as behind the times?

The answer may be to expand the pilot, redesign it, or stop using AI for that task. Those are decisions the work should help us make.