This guide is written for DNP and leadership-track students whose committee expects a named change theory or model behind the project, such as Lewin's Change Theory or Kotter's 8-Step Model. You will get accurate summaries of both, a way to choose between them, and the single fix that turns a decorative citation into a model that actually does analytical work.
Quick answer. A change theory should map explicitly onto the specific actions of your project, stage by stage. Naming the model without connecting each of its steps to something concrete you actually did is the most common weakness committees flag.
Implementing a practice change on a unit or across a department is fundamentally a change-management problem, not only a clinical one. The evidence behind the clinical intervention itself might be settled, but getting staff to adopt it, sustaining the adoption past the initial excitement, and dealing with resistance along the way is a separate and well-studied problem. This is why DNP and nursing leadership committees typically expect the project to be grounded in a recognized change theory or model.
The expectation is not decorative. Committees want to see that the student has thought through how the change will be managed, planned, and sustained, not only what the change is clinically. A project that describes an excellent evidence-based intervention but has no plan for engaging stakeholders, building momentum, or reinforcing the change after go-live is missing half of what a DNP project is meant to demonstrate. A change model gives the project a structured, citable way to organize that half of the work.
Many models exist, and your program or committee chair may have a preference. The two summarized here are the most commonly used in nursing DNP and leadership projects, and both are genuine, well-established, citable frameworks worth understanding accurately before you choose one.
Lewin's model describes change in three broad stages. Unfreezing is the stage where the need for change is established and the current state is destabilized enough that staff become open to something different. Changing (sometimes called "moving") is the stage where the new practice, process, or behavior is actually introduced and adopted. Refreezing is the stage where the new state is stabilized and reinforced so that the organization does not drift back to the old way of doing things.
Lewin's model is simple and foundational, which is its strength and its limit. It is genuinely useful for briefly framing a change process early in a paper, or for a smaller-scope change where three broad stages are enough structure. It is less useful as the sole framework for a full DNP implementation plan, because it does not offer enough granularity to map a detailed, multi-week project timeline.
Kotter's model breaks change into eight sequential steps: creating a sense of urgency, building a guiding coalition, forming a strategic vision, enlisting a volunteer army, enabling action by removing barriers, generating short-term wins, sustaining acceleration, and instituting change into the culture. Each step is more specific than Lewin's three broad stages, which makes the model more practically applicable to a full-scale implementation plan.
Because Kotter's steps are more granular, the model suits mapping a full DNP project implementation plan stage by stage, where each step corresponds to an identifiable phase of the project timeline, from building buy-in among unit leadership through sustaining the change well past the initial rollout.
| Model | Structure | Best suited to |
|---|---|---|
| Lewin's Change Theory | Three broad stages: unfreeze, change, refreeze | Briefly framing a smaller-scope change, or an early-paper overview |
| Kotter's 8-Step Process | Eight sequential, more granular steps | Mapping a full DNP project implementation plan stage by stage |
The choice between Lewin, Kotter, or another established model such as the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle or Rogers' Diffusion of Innovations should follow from the scope and detail of your project, not from which model happens to be most familiar. Lewin's simplicity suits a brief framing early in a paper, or a smaller, shorter-timeline change with fewer moving parts. Kotter's greater step-by-step detail suits mapping the full implementation plan of a DNP project that unfolds over multiple phases and requires sustained organizational buy-in.
Whichever model you choose, state the reasoning briefly in the paper rather than leaving the choice unexplained. A sentence or two connecting the model's structure to your project's actual scope is enough: for example, noting that Kotter's staged approach was selected because the project required building buy-in across three shifts over several months, which a three-stage model would not map in enough detail.
This is the single most common weakness in this kind of paper. A student names Kotter's model in the introduction, lists the eight steps in a bullet list as if summarizing a textbook, and then never refers to the model again for the rest of the paper. The model is present on the page but does no work in the actual project.
Applying a model means mapping each of its stages or steps explicitly to a concrete action in your specific project. Instead of writing that step one is "creating a sense of urgency," state specifically what creating urgency looked like at your site for your problem: perhaps sharing unit-level data on missed handoff items at a staff meeting, or presenting a short case example that made the gap visible to charge nurses. The model should read as a lens applied to your actual work, not a summary of change-management theory in general.
The mapping below is invented to illustrate the pattern for a sample unit-level practice change, and does not describe a real project.
| Kotter step | Generic description (decorative) | Applied to a specific project (real work) |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Create urgency | Establish why change is needed. | Presented three months of unit incident-report data showing a pattern of missed handoff items at the monthly staff meeting. |
| 2. Build a guiding coalition | Assemble people to lead the change. | Recruited the charge nurse and two senior staff nurses on each shift as unit champions for the new handoff tool. |
| 3. Form a strategic vision | Create a vision for the change. | Drafted a one-page vision statement describing a completed structured handoff tool used consistently across all three shifts within eight weeks. |
| 4. Enlist a volunteer army | Get broader staff involvement. | Held two brief in-service sessions per shift to introduce the tool and answer staff questions before go-live. |
| 5. Enable action by removing barriers | Remove obstacles to adoption. | Added the structured handoff template directly into the existing electronic documentation workflow so staff did not need a separate paper form. |
| 6. Generate short-term wins | Show early progress. | Shared a two-week completeness audit at the next staff meeting showing improved handoff completeness on the day shift. |
| 7. Sustain acceleration | Keep momentum going. | Extended the champion role to the night shift, which had lagged in the two-week audit. |
| 8. Institute change into the culture | Make the change permanent. | Added the structured handoff completeness metric to the unit's existing monthly quality dashboard so it continues to be tracked after the project ends. |
Notice that the right-hand column never restates the step in general terms. It says what happened, where, and to whom, in language specific enough that a reader could picture it happening at an actual unit.
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This site uses the same test elsewhere for theoretical frameworks, and it applies just as well here. Delete the model's name from your paper and read the implementation plan again. If the plan reads exactly the same with the name removed, the model was decorative rather than applied. If removing the name leaves a visible gap, because specific actions were justified by reference to a specific stage of the model, the model was doing real analytical work.
If the test reveals a decorative use, the fix is usually not to abandon the model but to go back through your implementation plan and explicitly label which stage or step each action belongs to, then check that each stage has at least one concrete, site-specific action attached to it.
A common weakness in student implementation plans is writing as though every staff member will welcome the change once it is explained clearly enough. Real change processes almost always encounter some resistance, whether from workload concerns, skepticism about whether the change will actually help, or simple habit. A committee generally reads more favorably on a plan that names this directly and builds a response into the timeline than one that assumes universal buy-in.
Rather than a general statement that "some staff may resist the change," identify the plausible, specific sources of resistance at your site. Consider whether the resistance is likely to come from added workload during a transition period, from staff who were not involved in planning and feel change was imposed on them, from skepticism grounded in a previous change effort that failed, or from a genuine disagreement about whether the new practice is actually better. Each of these calls for a different response, and naming the likely source lets your plan address it directly rather than generically.
| Likely source of resistance | Response built into the plan |
|---|---|
| Added workload during transition | Phase the rollout by shift rather than all at once, and provide extra staffing support during the first two weeks on each shift. |
| Staff feel change was imposed on them | Recruit unit champions from the staff who will use the change daily, and route their feedback into a revision before full rollout. |
| Skepticism from a previous failed change effort | Share the short-term win data transparently and often, rather than only at the end of the project. |
Building a named response to resistance into the plan is itself a place where the chosen change model can do real work: Kotter's step of building a guiding coalition, for example, is partly a resistance-management strategy, not only a momentum-building one, and stating that connection explicitly strengthens the application.
Beyond the framework or theoretical basis section where the model is introduced, most programs expect the model to reappear in the methodology or implementation section, where it should structure how the implementation timeline itself is presented. A methodology section that describes project activities in a plain narrative, with the change model's stages mentioned only in passing, misses an opportunity to show the model doing organizing work.
A stronger approach is to structure the implementation timeline explicitly around the model's stages or steps, using them as subheadings or as the organizing column of a timeline table, so a reader can see exactly which project activities correspond to which stage of the change process. This also makes it easier for you to check, stage by stage, that every step of the model has at least one concrete action attached to it, rather than discovering a gap only after the plan is written.
Yes. Other established models, such as the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle or Rogers' Diffusion of Innovations, may fit certain projects better. The same rule applies to any model you choose: map its stages to specific, concrete actions rather than naming it and moving on.
Check your program's handbook first, since many DNP and leadership programs require one regardless of project size. For a smaller-scope change, Lewin's simpler three-stage model is often the more proportionate choice.
Typically the model is introduced in the framework or theoretical basis section, then referred to again explicitly in the methodology or implementation section as each stage is applied, and often briefly again in the discussion when reflecting on what worked.
Some projects do this deliberately, using Lewin's three broad stages as an overarching frame and Kotter's steps to detail the "changing" stage specifically. If you do this, state the reasoning clearly so it reads as an intentional choice rather than confusion about which model you are using.
Ask your chair directly before you build a full implementation plan around it. Some committees have a preferred model based on prior projects in the program, and confirming early avoids a costly rewrite later.
A change theory belongs in a DNP or leadership project because managing the change is as much the work as the clinical intervention itself. Choose a model that fits your project's scope, map each of its stages to something specific you actually did or plan to do, and check with the deletion test that the model is shaping the plan rather than decorating it.
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