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Kotter's Eight Steps: Designing and Executing Successful Change
Principles of Management · Chapter 6: Leading Organizational ChangeSection 6.6 · lesson 30 of 11713 min · free with a free account
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In this lesson
Designing and executing successful change.
- Describe Kotter's 8 steps and what each accomplishes
- Explain the errors the model was written to prevent
- Relate the 8 steps to Lewin's 3 stages
- Apply the model to a described change effort
Transcript
Everything said in the video, section by section (1,768 words). Read along, or search it.
Leading Organizational Change
Kotter's Eight Steps
Most change efforts don't fail at the start. They fail somewhere in the middle, often after looking like a success. This section covers John Kotter's eight-step model, which was built around exactly that observation. We'll walk through the eight steps, and what each one accomplishes. We'll look at the specific errors the model was written to prevent. We'll connect it back to Lewin's three stages from the previous section. And we'll apply it to a change effort that went wrong at a very predictable point.
A List of Errors to Avoid
8 Steps, Each Built From a Failure
Kotter's model has a distinctive character, and it's worth naming before the content. He developed it from direct observation of change efforts that failed. So it's structured as a list of specific errors to avoid, not as an abstract theory built from first principles. Each step corresponds to a failure Kotter saw recurring, across organizations that were otherwise very different. That origin is where its practical usefulness comes from. It names concrete, recognizable mistakes. The eight steps run in sequence. First, establish a sense of urgency. Second, form a guiding coalition with enough power to lead the effort. Third, create a vision and strategy. Fourth, communicate the vision. Fifth, empower broad-based action, by removing obstacles. Sixth, generate short-term wins. Seventh, consolidate gains, and produce more change. And eighth, anchor the new approaches in the culture, so the change becomes how things are simply done.
Step 1: Urgency
The Most Underestimated Step
Urgency is the first step. In Kotter's account, it's also the step most underestimated, in how much genuine work it requires. A crucial distinction sits here, between real urgency and anxious activity. Real urgency is a genuine, widely shared sense that action is needed now. It's grounded in an accurate read of the organization's actual situation. Anxious activity is visible busyness and stress. From the outside, it can look like urgency. But it reflects no shared understanding of why the change matters, or what it's meant to accomplish. An organization can be extremely busy, even visibly stressed, and still have no real urgency at all. Busyness is not the same thing as a shared conviction that the current path is unsustainable. When announcements are met with polite indifference, that's the sign this step was skipped.
Steps 2 and 3
Enough Power, and a Vision That Travels
The second step is forming a guiding coalition. That's a group with sufficient power to actually lead the change effort. Power here comes from formal authority, expertise, credibility, and leadership standing, in some effective combination. A change driven by one person alone tends to stall, however senior that person is. So does a change driven by a staff function with no genuine line authority behind it. Either way, it lacks the combined power needed to overcome resistance and coordination problems across the whole organization. So building the coalition is not a courtesy extended to stakeholders. It's a structural requirement. The third step is creating a vision and strategy, and Kotter proposed a specific test for the vision. Can it be communicated in a few minutes, and produce genuine understanding and interest in the listener? A vision that needs a lengthy presentation hasn't met that bar. Neither has one that leaves people unclear about what would actually be different once it's achieved. That holds however sound the strategic thinking behind it might be.
Steps 4 and 5
Say It Often, Act on It, Clear the Way
The fourth step is communicating the vision. Kotter observed that change visions are typically under-communicated, by a large margin. Leaders have lived with the vision for months, because they developed it themselves. So they badly underestimate how many times it must be repeated before it registers with everyone else. Communication in this model also goes beyond formal messages. Leaders must behave consistently with the vision, because behavior communicates more powerfully than any stated message. A leader who states a vision, then behaves in ways that contradict it, undermines it more than silence would have. The fifth step is empowering broad-based action, by removing the obstacles that stop people acting on the vision. Here the model connects to the four targets of Subchapter six point two. An obstacle can live in structure, or in an outdated process. It can be a skill gap among the people expected to act, or a reward system still pointing the old way. Empowering action means finding and clearing whichever one is actually blocking people. Simply exhorting them to act despite it doesn't work.
Step 6: Short-Term Wins
Real Wins, and Manufactured Ones
The sixth step is generating short-term wins. A genuine transformation takes an extended period, and wins are what sustain the effort's credibility through it. They give people visible evidence the effort is working, before its longer-term results have had time to appear. But the distinction between a real win and a manufactured one matters directly. A real win is a genuine, verifiable improvement that can be attributed to the change effort. A manufactured win is presented as evidence of success, without actually being a verified improvement. It might come from selective reporting, or from a change in how something is measured. Or it might be an improvement that would have happened regardless of the effort. A manufactured win can sustain credibility in the short term. But it does so by spending trust the organization will need later. When a win fails to hold up under scrutiny, it costs far more credibility than an honest partial result would have.
Step 7: Consolidate Gains
The Premature Victory Error
The seventh step is consolidating gains, and producing more change. It uses the credibility that short-term wins have built, to tackle bigger, harder problems. Those are problems the initial wins deliberately avoided. The early win is a stepping stone. It is not the finish line. The characteristic error at this step is the premature victory declaration. Early, visible progress appears, and leaders announce success. That relaxes the urgency the model's first step worked so hard to establish. And while attention moves elsewhere, the restraining forces from Subchapter six point five's force field reassert themselves. Here's the counter-intuitive part. A change effort can look complete at exactly the moment it is most vulnerable to reversal. Declaring victory is precisely what releases the pressure that was holding the new state in place.
Figure 6.6.1
A Harborline Effort, Mapped Step by Step
Figure six point six point one takes a described change effort at Harborline Manufacturing. It maps that effort against Kotter's eight steps. Steps one through five were carried out. So was step eight, anchoring the new approach in the culture. But steps six and seven, generating short-term wins and consolidating gains, were skipped. That's exactly the premature victory pattern we just described. An effort can complete the launch-oriented steps convincingly. Urgency, coalition, vision, communication, and empowerment can all be done well. And it can still skip the middle steps that sustain momentum long enough to reach genuine anchoring. The pattern is worth remembering, because from the outside, a strong launch looks like a successful change.
Table 6.6.1
What Each Step Prevents, and the Sign It Was Skipped
Table six point six point one gives, for each step, the error it prevents, and the observable sign that it was skipped. Skip urgency, and complacency stalls the effort before it starts. Announcements meet polite indifference. Skip the coalition, and one person leads without enough weight. The effort stalls whenever that champion is unavailable or overruled. Skip the vision, and initiatives conflict with no unifying direction. Different units describe the change's purpose differently. Skip communication, and most people stay unaware or unclear. Employees several levels down can't state the vision in their own words. Skip empowerment, and people who want to act are blocked by structure, process, or skill gaps. Enthusiasm runs high, but visible action on the ground stays low. Skip short-term wins, and faith is lost before results show. Skeptics gain ground, with no evidence to counter them. Skip consolidation, and victory is declared after only the easiest problems are solved. The effort visibly slows. Skip anchoring, and the change reverts once its champions move on. The sign is that it unwinds within roughly a year of those original champions departing.
Step 8 and Lewin
Anchoring, and How Kotter Maps Onto Lewin
Anchoring new approaches in the culture is the final step. It gets only a brief mention here, because organizational culture receives its full treatment in Subchapter six point eight. The connection worth stating now is to Lewin. Anchoring is Kotter's version of the work Lewin's refreezing stage names. But it's applied to culture, the deepest and slowest-moving part of an organization, not just structure and rewards. In fact the two models cover much the same territory, at different levels of resolution. Kotter's steps one through three, urgency, coalition, and vision, sit within Lewin's unfreezing. Steps four through seven, communicating, empowering, generating wins, and consolidating, sit within changing. And step eight, anchoring in culture, corresponds to refreezing. So Kotter doesn't replace Lewin. He subdivides the middle stage, changing, into far more operational detail. That reflects his focus on exactly where change efforts break down in practice.
Criticisms
4 Concerns About the Model
Kotter's model draws three related criticisms, and one further concern. First, it's prescriptive. It offers a specific recommended sequence, rather than a purely descriptive account of how change occurs. Second, it's top-down. It assumes a coalition with real organizational power drives the effort. That fits some situations better than others. It fits poorly where meaningful change genuinely starts from lower in the organization. Third, it's derived from observation, not controlled evidence. It was built from Kotter's own review of the change efforts he studied. A controlled comparison could isolate the steps as the actual cause of success or failure. This model has no such test behind it. The further concern is that it treats change as a project with an end. It moves cleanly from step one to step eight, and then stops. That sits in tension with organizations facing continuous, overlapping change. It's the same tension Subchapter six point five raised against Lewin's refreezing.
Case Vignette
Devi Declares Victory Too Soon
Here is a composite case, constructed for instruction. Devi led a division-wide initiative to modernize a decades-old inventory process at Harborline Manufacturing. She built real urgency, and assembled a coalition of respected leaders across three departments. She communicated a clear vision that people could repeat back accurately within weeks. The first four steps were executed about as well as this section describes them. Then an early pilot in one warehouse produced a genuine, well-documented reduction in processing time. Shortly afterward, Devi announced the initiative's success at a division-wide meeting. Attention and resources moved on to other priorities almost immediately. Eight months later, only the original pilot warehouse was still using the new process. Every other site had quietly reverted, once the visible momentum faded. Devi had generated a real short-term win. But she declared victory on the strength of that single win, instead of consolidating it into the harder, broader rollout. That's the premature victory error, occurring at exactly the step where Kotter's own observation predicted it would.
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