Kotter’s eight-step change model

John P. Kotter · 1995

Also known as Leading Change

Eight steps for changing how an organisation works, beginning with urgency and ending with making the change stick.

Its place in the frameworkBusiness Core›HR

What it does

Drawn from watching change efforts fail, the sequence runs from establishing urgency and building a guiding coalition, through a clear vision and communicating it relentlessly, to short-term wins and anchoring the change in the culture. Kotter’s finding was that skipping any step feels faster and reliably costs more later; most efforts fail at the first, because everyone is already busy.

Reach for it when: Before a change programme starts, and when one has stalled and nobody can say at which step.
Where it stops: It is top-down and linear, and it was drawn from large corporations in the 1990s. Anything genuinely emergent will not wait for step three.

John P. Kotter, “Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail”, Harvard Business Review, 1995; Leading Change, HBS Press, 1996.

Why it sits at HR

The people the organisation has, the people it needs, and everything between the two. HR is where capability stops being an abstraction and becomes a headcount with names attached.

A model is only useful when you reach for it at the right moment. This one answers a question that arises here — so it is filed here, and nowhere else. These are the working areas it serves:

Workforce planningStrategic workforce planning practice, and the resource-based view’s treatment of human capital as a source of advantage rather than a cost line.
Recruitment and selectionSelection validity research, which consistently finds structured methods outperform unstructured interviews by a wide margin.
DevelopmentHuman capital theory on the build-or-buy choice, and the seventy-twenty-ten distinction between learning on the job, from others, and from formal training.
Retention and engagementWork on turnover cost and on the difference between satisfaction and engagement — the second predicts discretionary effort, the first mostly predicts staying.

All of HR

What it touches elsewhere

Nothing in a business is decided on its own. A conclusion reached with this model at HR lands in these other cores, whether or not anyone follows it there.

Goal CoreAlmost every tactical goal eventually becomes a question of who will do it.
Goal CoreCore values sit with purpose, and they are enacted through hiring and departure decisions rather than through statements.
Brand CoreHow the organisation treats people is part of what it is understood to be.
Data CoreCapability, turnover and time-to-hire are measurable, and mostly are not measured.

Filed at the same place

These answer questions that arise at HR too. Where they disagree with this one, the disagreement is the useful part.

Tuckman’s stages of group developmentTeams pass through forming, storming, norming and performing, and the difficult stage is not a failure of the team.
Belbin Team RolesPeople contribute to a team in recognisable ways, and a team of one kind fails in a predictable direction.
Herzberg’s two-factor theoryWhat makes people dissatisfied at work and what motivates them are two different lists, not two ends of one.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needsPeople attend to basic needs before higher ones, and what motivates someone depends on which are already met.
Situational leadershipThere is no single right way to lead — the right amount of direction depends on how ready the person is for that particular task.

Elsewhere in Business Core

These are other people’s models, named here so you can go to the source and use them properly. The Omnigoal is not affiliated with their authors and is not endorsed by them; nothing of theirs is reproduced here — no canvas, no diagram, no wording. Each is described in our own words, with the originator credited, because the framework is a place to put thinking, not a replacement for the people who did it. Model names and trademarks belong to their respective owners and are used here only to refer to the work itself.

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