Draw the change curve with PowerPoint's Curve tool (Insert > Shapes > Lines > Curve), not the native line chart. Click five rough anchor points — Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance — then switch to Edit Points and drag each anchor's Bezier handles until the dip reads as one continuous arc instead of a zigzag. Add stage labels as separate text boxes below the curve, and place any "you are here" marker at the curve's actual y-height at that stage's x-position, not at whatever height looks roughly right. A line chart plots straight segments between five data points and looks like a stock chart; a change curve needs to look like a mood, which only a smoothed, continuous curve delivers.
The curve traces back to psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who described five stages people move through when processing grief — Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance — in her 1969 book On Death and Dying. Change management practitioners adapted the same five stages in the 1990s and 2000s as a way to describe how employees emotionally process organizational change, mapping performance or confidence on the vertical axis against time on the horizontal one. Some consulting decks extend the model to seven stages — Shock, Denial, Frustration, Depression, Experiment, Decision, Integration — to give the early "shock" reaction and the later "trying the new way" phase their own space, but the five-stage version is still what most people mean when they ask for "the change curve."
The axes matter for how you should build the slide. There's no real unit on either axis — it's not a survey score plotted over weeks, it's a qualitative shape meant to signal "this is roughly where confidence and output dip, and roughly where they recover." That's the opposite of a normal PowerPoint chart, where the whole point is precise data at precise coordinates. Treat the change curve like a chart and you'll spend time adding gridlines and axis numbers that make a rough, qualitative shape look falsely precise. Treat it like a smooth line with five labeled landmarks, and the slide does its actual job: giving a room a shared mental model for why a team feels the way it does mid-transition.
Picture an HR business partner building a change curve slide for a reorg kickoff. They open PowerPoint, and the fastest thing on the ribbon that looks chart-shaped is Insert > Chart > Line, or they drag five data points into a native line chart because that's the tool built for "point plus point plus point." Five values, straight segments between them — it takes ninety seconds. The curve dips through Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and rises back up through Acceptance, and from six feet away it reads fine.
Then someone in the reorg planning meeting asks the obvious follow-up: "Where's the sales team right now?" The HR partner clicks back into the slide to add a marker — a circle, an arrow, a text callout saying "You are here." With a line chart, that marker either sits on the nearest of the five hard-coded data points (forcing the answer into one of five buckets even when the real answer is "somewhere between Bargaining and Depression") or gets placed by eye near the line, which almost never lands exactly on it. Zoom in during the actual meeting and the marker is visibly floating a few points above or below the line it's supposed to be marking. It's a small gap, but it's the kind of small gap a sharp-eyed VP catches in about four seconds, and once they've caught it, the credibility of the whole diagram — not just the marker — takes the hit.
The underlying issue is that a native PowerPoint line chart and a Bezier curve are solving different problems. A line chart's whole design is "connect known data points with the minimum possible interpretation" — straight segments, because adding any curve to a line chart implies a trend between points that the data doesn't actually support. That's correct behavior for a revenue chart. It's wrong behavior for a change curve, where the straight-segment "interpretation" you're avoiding is exactly the thing you want: a continuous, smooth transition in mood and performance that doesn't actually snap between five discrete states on Tuesday at 9am.
The marker problem follows directly from that. A curve you can query at any x-position — which is what Edit Points gives you once you've built the shape as an actual curve object — lets you read off the real y-height wherever "now" happens to fall. A line chart only has meaningful y-values at its five original data points; anywhere else, you're either snapping to the nearest one or eyeballing a value the chart was never built to represent. The fix isn't a better marker. It's building the curve as a shape with a continuous path in the first place, so a marker has an actual height to sit on regardless of where along the timeline it needs to go.
Here's the sequence that still holds up once someone asks where a specific team sits on it:
The same discipline — build the shape as one clean object, then keep content elements grouped separately from structural ones — is what keeps a MECE issue tree editable after a round of partner comments instead of needing a full rebuild. If ungrouping to make one small change tends to disturb everything else in your deck's box-and-line diagrams, that guide covers the same separation habit in more detail.
Field note: the first change curve I built at a global consulting firm was a five-point line chart, because that's what the client's template gallery suggested and it was genuinely the fastest thing to drag onto the slide. It looked fine in the draft review. In the actual workshop, a plant manager pointed at the jagged kink between "Anger" and "Bargaining" and said, flatly, "that's not how people feel, that's a stock chart." The rebuild — Curve tool, Edit Points, smooth anchors — took about fifteen minutes, and the shape that came out of it was the same five stages in the same order. The only thing that changed was that it stopped looking like data and started looking like what it actually was: a mood.
The marker-on-curve logic from step 7 stops being optional the moment a slide needs to show more than one group's position at once — which is the normal case once a reorg or system rollout spans more than one function. Say Sales is further along than Operations: Sales sits just past Bargaining, heading into Depression, while Operations is still deep in Anger. Two markers, each read off the curve's actual height at its own x-position, make that gap visible at a glance without adding a second curve or a legend explaining what's going on. Try the same thing with a line-chart version and both markers inherit the same problem — neither one has a real height to sit on except at the five original data points, so "Sales is 70% of the way from Bargaining to Depression" has no coordinate on the chart to express it at.
The same build sequence carries over cleanly to the seven-stage extended curve (Shock, Denial, Frustration, Depression, Experiment, Decision, Integration) that shows up in some change-management decks: more anchors, same rule — sketch positions first, build as one continuous Curve-tool path, smooth every anchor before placing any markers. Adding "Shock" as a sixth stage ahead of Denial, or splitting Acceptance into "Experiment," "Decision," and "Integration," doesn't require rebuilding the curve from scratch if the underlying shape was already a smooth, editable path rather than five chart data points someone tried to reverse-engineer into a line.
The derived question worth answering before you build anything: is a change curve even the right diagram, or does this slide actually need to be an ADKAR breakdown? They're not competing for the same job. The change curve describes how people feel — Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance is an emotional and performance trajectory, and its job is to build empathy for why a team looks checked-out in week three of a rollout. ADKAR (Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, Reinforcement) describes what the organization needs to do to move someone through change, and its job is to assign specific interventions — a town hall for Awareness, targeted training for Ability, manager check-ins for Reinforcement — to specific points in the process.
In practice the two pair well on a single slide rather than competing for one: plot the change curve as the primary shape, and annotate the relevant ADKAR intervention as a short label pinned above each trough — "Awareness-building comms" above Denial, "Manager 1:1s" above Bargaining, "Reinforcement plan" above Acceptance. That turns a slide that only explains a feeling into one that also tells the room what to do about it, without forcing two separate frameworks onto two separate slides that a steering committee has to mentally stitch together themselves.
Because getting a curve to read as smooth — and getting a marker to sit exactly on it rather than near it — is the part of this slide that eats the most time relative to how simple it looks once finished, it's one of the places an AI layout tool inside PowerPoint earns its keep. Give Advisio the stage list and the current position (or positions, for more than one team), and it builds the curve as a continuous, smoothed Bezier path with every marker seated at the curve's real height at its x-position, instead of a five-point zigzag with a marker placed by eye. It's listed on Microsoft AppSource, and because it builds the curve as native, editable PowerPoint shapes, moving a marker next month when a team's position changes is still a normal click-and-drag edit, not a rebuild.
The original Kübler-Ross model, adapted from grief research into change management, has five: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance. Some consulting and change-management decks use an extended seven-stage version — Shock, Denial, Frustration, Depression, Experiment, Decision, Integration — that separates the initial shock reaction and the later "trying the new way" phase into their own stages. Either version builds the same way in PowerPoint: more anchors on the same smoothed curve.
The underlying five-stage model comes from Kübler-Ross's observations of terminally ill patients processing their own mortality, not from controlled research on organizational change, and grief researchers have long debated how rigidly people actually move through fixed stages in a fixed order, even in the original context. In a change-management setting, treat it as a useful communication device for building empathy and structuring interventions, not as a measured, predictive model — which is also the reason the vertical axis shouldn't carry numbers or units it can't actually justify.
They answer different questions, so the honest answer is usually both, on the same slide: the change curve explains how people feel at each stage, ADKAR specifies what the organization should do about it. If you only have room for one, pick ADKAR when the audience is asking "what's our plan," and the change curve when the audience is a group of managers who need to understand why their teams look disengaged.
Yes — plot one shared curve and add a separate marker for each group, each one seated at the curve's real height at that group's current stage. Past three or four groups, a shared curve with that many markers starts competing for attention with the curve itself; at that point, a small table listing each group's stage next to the single curve usually reads more clearly than stacking five markers onto one line.