Kotter's eight-step change model

In one paragraph

John Kotter's sequence for organisational change, drawn from watching a lot of change programmes fail.

1. Create urgency — make the case for why the status quo is more dangerous than the change. 2. Build a guiding coalition — a group with enough authority and credibility to lead it. 3. Form a vision — a clear picture of the destination. 4. Communicate it — relentlessly, and far more than feels necessary.

5. Remove obstacles — the systems, structures and occasionally people blocking it. 6. Create short-term wins — visible, early, so belief accumulates. 7. Build on the change — do not declare victory too soon. 8. Anchor it in the culture — make it how things are done, not an initiative.

Where it fails

Almost always step one. Leaders who have thought about a change for six months forget that everyone else heard about it on Tuesday and thinks things are fine. Without genuine urgency, the change is competing against everyone's actual workload and loses.

Step six is the other common casualty. Change programmes with no visible result for a year run out of belief long before they run out of plan.

How to actually use it

• Before announcing anything, write down what happens if you change nothing, in concrete terms. If it is not alarming, you do not have urgency and the change will drift.
• Engineer a win inside the first eight weeks. Small and real beats large and eventual.

Where it breaks down

• Top-down and linear. It assumes leadership has the answer and the organisation needs bringing along, which suits some changes and misrepresents many.
• The steps overlap and loop in practice; treating it as a checklist to tick through is a misuse.

If you are being examined on it

Contrast it with Lewin. Kotter is a sequence for leaders; Lewin is a model of why change is hard at all.

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