John P. Kotter’s 8-step model for leading change

While the ideas presented in Lessons 1 and 2 were of relevance to all actors in organizations involved in working of change projects, Kotter’s 8-step model specifically targets managers confronted with providing leadership for change processes. Before starting to go through this lesson, watch the video clip first.

After a decade of empirical research on a diverse sample of companies in the US and around the world, John P. Kotter published his goundbreaking article “Leading Change. Why Transformation Efforts Fail.” in the March/April 1995 issue of Harvard Business Review. From the eight most common errors identified in that publication he deducted an 8-step methodology for successfully leading change, summarized in the display below.

The strength of Kotter’s approach – apart from being grounded in large scale empirical research – is the integration of some of the most important other models on managing change:

• it clearly reflects Lewin’s three phases – step 1-4 are part of the unefreeze phase, step 5-7 belong to the transform phase and step 8 is Kotter’s rendering of Lewin’s refreeze phase;
• it strongly underlines the importance of a credible and attractive vision (and its active communication to the members of the organization), reflecting Dannemiller’s change formula that considers this as a sine qua non for change processes to take off in the first place,
• it integrates findings of Greiner and others about the crucial role of micro-political work (the establishing of power bases etc.) in change processes.

In addition, from a pragmatic point of view, in many parts of the world Kotter’s model has found its way into the business administration curricula even on undergraduate level, so a substantial portion of management staff will be familiar with it.

Note: if you want to dig deeper, you find Kotter’s article in the 1995 Harvard Business Review here.