By Jason Hreha

Glossary

Kotter’s 8-Step Change Model

Reviewed by Jason Hreha

Published 6 min read

A chief executive opens a company-wide meeting with a chart of shrinking margins and a warning: if nothing changes, the business will not survive five years. Leaders often call this “creating a burning platform.” It is the move most associated with John Kotter’s change model. It is also the step at which, by Kotter’s own account, more than half the companies he watched failed.

What did Kotter actually propose, where did the urgency idea come from, and how well has the model been tested?

What is Kotter’s 8-step change model?

Kotter’s 8-step change model is a sequence of leadership actions for transforming an organization, developed by Harvard Business School professor John Kotter. It began in his 1995 Harvard Business Review article, “Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail,” drawn from watching more than 100 companies try to remake themselves over a decade. The article described eight common errors and listed the matching eight steps in an exhibit. His 1996 book Leading Change set out the steps in more detail, under the names most textbooks teach. The step names below follow Steven Appelbaum and colleagues’ review of the 1996 model; the descriptions summarize the 1995 article.

1996 step What it asks leaders to do Kotter Inc. wording today
1. Establish a sense of urgency Convince enough people, especially managers, that the status quo is more dangerous than change Create a sense of urgency
2. Create a guiding coalition Assemble a group with enough power, information and credibility to lead the effort Build a guiding coalition
3. Develop a vision and strategy Set a direction that can be explained in five minutes, with a strategy to reach it Form a strategic vision
4. Communicate the change vision Use every channel, and leaders’ own behavior, to repeat the vision far more than seems necessary Enlist a volunteer army
5. Empower broad-based action Remove obstacles such as structures, pay systems or managers that block the vision Enable action by removing barriers
6. Generate short-term wins Plan visible, unambiguous improvements within the first one to two years Generate short-term wins
7. Consolidate gains and produce more change Use early credibility to tackle bigger problems instead of declaring victory Sustain acceleration
8. Anchor new approaches in the corporate culture Show people how the new behavior improved results, and promote people who embody it Institute change

The right-hand column comes from Kotter Inc.’s current description. Kotter’s central lesson in 1995 was that change moves through phases that usually take a long time; skipping steps, he wrote, creates only an illusion of speed. Logan Holdsworth and Todd Bridgman note that the eight steps closely mirror the three-step model attributed to Kurt Lewin, though Kotter does not cite him directly (see Lewin’s change model).

Kotter later revised the model in a 2012 Harvard Business Review article and his 2014 book Accelerate. A 2018 Kotter Inc. ebook contrasts the 1996 process, which handles episodic change “in finite and sequential ways,” with the 2014 version, which runs the steps “concurrently and continuously.”

Urgency and the burning platform

Kotter gave the first step special weight. He wrote that well over 50% of the companies he watched failed at this phase. Sometimes executives underestimated how hard it is to move people out of their comfort zones; sometimes they overestimated their progress or lost patience. Urgency is high enough, he wrote, when about 75% of a company’s management is honestly convinced that business as usual is unacceptable. In a few of the most successful cases, he reported, a group manufactured a crisis; one chief executive engineered the largest accounting loss in the company’s history.

The burning platform metaphor that now accompanies this step did not come from Kotter, and his 1995 article does not use it. Consultant Daryl Conner has described taking it from the 1988 Piper Alpha oil platform fire in the North Sea. A survivor, Andy Mochan, jumped fifteen stories into the water rather than stay on the burning rig. Conner put the story in his 1992 book Managing at the Speed of Change. He says he used it to convey the depth of leadership commitment a major change requires, and that it has been widely misinterpreted.

The two ideas merged in later writing. Appelbaum and colleagues note that Armenakis and colleagues (1999) called the gap between current and acceptable performance a “burning platform,” and tied it to the sense of urgency in Kotter’s first step. Kotter’s firm now frames urgency around opportunity rather than threat: “a bold, aspirational opportunity.”

Example: urgency for whom?

Consider a hypothetical county government moving building-permit applications from paper to an online portal. The director follows Kotter’s sequence. She presents data on six-week backlogs until most of her managers agree the current process is unacceptable. She forms a guiding group of managers, an IT lead and two senior clerks. She sets a vision of a two-week turnaround and picks a short-term win: put the simplest permit type, residential fences, online first.

The model helps here. It reminds the director that a memo rarely moves an organization, that visible early progress builds support, and that new routines fade unless they become part of how the department runs. But the model is silent on a different question. Urgency among managers does not tell the team what clerks and applicants must do differently, or whether they can.

Suppose online fence applications rise every month, which looks like a short-term win. If half arrive incomplete, clerks must chase the missing details, and each permit can take longer than it did on paper.

Online applications would then rise while turnaround, the outcome that mattered, got worse. That is what Jason Hreha calls a Pyrrhic Intervention: a change that improves one metric while harming a more important one. Kotter’s steps say to celebrate wins. They do not say which measure should count as one, a problem the entry on Goodhart’s law takes up.

What the evidence shows

Kotter’s original evidence was his own observation of companies. In their 2012 review, Appelbaum, Habashy, Malo and Shafiq note that Leading Change did not reference outside sources. Searching 15 years of literature, they found support for most individual steps but no formal studies covering the whole model. Most of the evidence they found came from Kotter’s own 2002 follow-up book with Dan Cohen, The Heart of Change. In their words, “Kotter validated Kotter.”

They also found that the importance of following the steps in order remained under-investigated, and judged that the model’s popularity comes more from its direct, usable format than from scientific consensus. They found no evidence against the model and called it “a recommendable reference.” Separately, they wrote that it would be most useful as an implementation planning tool. Complementary tools, they added, should also be used to adapt to contextual factors or obstacles.

Later work in healthcare points the same way. A 2021 systematic review by Reema Harrison and colleagues found Kotter’s model in 19 of 38 healthcare studies, more than any other model. Most were nurse-led quality projects at a single unit or site. Stage models such as Lewin’s or Kotter’s, the reviewers observed, gave change agents goalposts to monitor and moments to celebrate. But they reported that “it was not possible to detect whether the use of a model, method or process contributed to the success.”

What the model is for

Back to the opening questions. Kotter proposed a checklist for leading an organizational effort, drawn from experience rather than tested research. The burning platform is Conner’s metaphor, attached to Kotter’s first step by later writers. The reviews found no formal test of the whole sequence.

The steps do not identify which behaviors must change or why people are not doing them. Individual models such as ADKAR and diagnostic tools such as COM-B work at that level; the guide to change management models compares the approaches. The margin chart may well win the first step. The test comes later, when the team chooses what counts as a win.

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