The eight steps and what each is for
| Step |
Purpose |
Where programmes fake it |
| 1. Establish a sense of urgency |
Make the cost of not changing concrete and shared |
Urgency is manufactured with a burning-platform speech, then discounted as rhetoric |
| 2. Create a guiding coalition |
Assemble people with the power and credibility to lead the change |
The coalition is the people who already agreed, minus the sceptics who run the core business |
| 3. Develop a vision and strategy |
Define where the change leads and how, in terms people can act on |
The vision is a slogan that cannot guide a single operational decision |
| 4. Communicate the change vision |
Repeat the vision through every channel, and model it in behaviour |
Communication is counted in emails sent while executive behaviour contradicts the message |
| 5. Empower broad-based action |
Remove the structures, systems and managers blocking the change |
Obstacles are catalogued but the blocking incentive scheme (or blocking executive) is untouchable |
| 6. Generate short-term wins |
Produce visible, unambiguous results within months |
Wins are declared, not earned: pilots are labelled successes regardless of the data |
| 7. Consolidate gains and produce more change |
Use credibility from early wins to take on the harder, structural changes |
The programme celebrates at the first milestone and momentum drains away |
| 8. Anchor new approaches in the culture |
Tie the change to promotion, succession and how results are actually achieved |
The programme closes at go-live and the old culture reabsorbs the change within a year |
Where the model belongs in the decision process
Kotter is usually consulted after a transformation is approved, which is one gate too late. Its highest value is as an approval-stage test: does the organisation have the conditions the eight steps require? Genuine urgency beyond the sponsor, a coalition that includes the sceptics who matter, wins that can be demonstrated within two quarters? A transformation business case that cannot answer those questions is requesting budget for a programme the organisation is not yet able to lead.
A recognisable trajectory
A regional bank launches a digitisation programme. Steps three to six go well: clear vision, strong communication, a genuinely successful account-opening pilot. It still stalls in year two, and the post-mortem finds the failure was committed at steps one and two. Urgency was never established beyond the executive floor, because branch leadership privately believed the deadline was negotiable, and the guiding coalition contained no one from the retail network that had to change most. The middle steps were executed professionally on a foundation that was never poured.
Reading the steps critically
- The steps overlap in practice; treating them as a strict sequence produces programmes that "finish communicating" before anyone has changed anything. Kotter himself later reframed the steps as concurrent accelerators.
- Step six is the most gamed: under pressure to show momentum, programmes redefine whatever happened as the planned win. A win that needs explaining is not a win in Kotter's sense.
- Step eight is the least funded, because it matures after the programme team, and often the sponsoring executive, have moved on. Budget that survives go-live is the tell of a serious programme.
- The model says little about the change being wrong. Executing eight steps flawlessly in service of a flawed strategy accelerates the failure: the model governs how, not whether.
The urgency question nobody inside can answer
Step one fails unnoticed because urgency is self-assessed: the executive team that sponsored the change reports that urgency exists, and every layer below tells it what it wants to hear. Independent perspectives from senior operators (people who have watched real and rhetorical urgency from inside comparable organisations) can tell you which one you have, and whether your coalition would survive its first collision with the operational calendar. That is worth knowing before the budget is committed, not in the year-two post-mortem.
