Kotter's eight-step model for leading organizational change — creating a sense of urgency, building a guiding coalition, forming a strategic vision, and so on through to anchoring new approaches in the organization's culture — provides a widely used, genuinely useful structured checklist of activities generally necessary for change to succeed. The model is frequently presented and applied as a strict linear sequence, each step substantially completed before the next begins, an interpretation that imposes a cleaner, more orderly structure on organizational change than the genuinely iterative, overlapping way real change actually tends to unfold in practice.
What the model genuinely gets right
Kotter's research, based on studying a large number of organizational change efforts, identified a set of activities consistently associated with successful change and consistently missing or poorly executed in failed change efforts — creating genuine urgency, building a coalition with real authority and credibility, communicating a clear vision repeatedly — and this checklist provides real, practically useful structure for planning a change initiative, particularly for organizations that might otherwise skip foundational steps like genuinely building urgency or a broad coalition before attempting to implement specific changes.
Why a strict linear reading doesn't match how change actually unfolds
Real organizational change efforts typically don't complete each step fully before starting the next — building a guiding coalition often continues and evolves throughout an entire change effort, not just at an early, discrete stage; new information or resistance discovered during implementation frequently requires revisiting and adjusting the original vision rather than treating it as fixed once step three has notionally concluded; and short-term wins, which the model treats as a later step, often need to be identified and pursued considerably earlier to sustain the coalition's energy and credibility through a long, difficult change process.
Why treating the model as a rigid sequence can actually produce worse change management
A change effort managed as though each step must be substantially completed before the next begins risks proceeding too slowly and too rigidly to respond to the genuine, often unpredictable dynamics that emerge during real implementation — waiting to address emerging resistance or unexpected obstacles because the plan says the organization is still notionally in an earlier step can mean missing the actual, time-sensitive moment when addressing that specific issue would have been most effective.
What a more accurate, iterative reading of the model actually looks like
Treating Kotter's eight activities as a set of genuinely interdependent, often-overlapping concerns to be continuously attended to and revisited throughout a change effort — rather than a strict, one-directional sequence of discrete phases — better matches how change actually tends to unfold, allowing a change leader to strengthen the coalition, reinforce the vision, and generate additional short-term wins concurrently and repeatedly throughout the process, rather than treating each as a box to be checked once and left behind.
What this means for using Kotter's model effectively in practice
- Use the eight activities as an ongoing, iterative checklist to continuously attend to throughout a change effort, rather than a strict linear sequence to complete once in order
- Be prepared to revisit and adjust vision, coalition-building, and communication activities repeatedly as new information and resistance emerge during implementation
- Identify and pursue short-term wins earlier and more continuously than a strict linear reading of the model would suggest
- Recognize the model's genuine, research-based value as a checklist of necessary activities, distinct from its less accurate framing as a strictly ordered, one-time sequence
Kotter's model earns its continued influence through genuinely identifying activities real, successful change efforts consistently include — the practical limitation isn't in the activities themselves, but in a rigid, linear reading that misses how genuinely iterative and overlapping real organizational change actually turns out to be.