Kotter in a twenty-person firm: how much of the eight steps survives?

The owner of print shop P has 20 staff and wants to drop taking orders by Zalo and notebook in favour of an order-management package. The applied case I found for the eight steps is a large organisation, with "guiding coalition" and "communication" as its vocabulary, and I found no small-firm example. When the whole company fits around one lunch table, do you still need them? This post takes Kotter's eight steps, places each in shop P, and says which survive whole and which shrink. Shop P is invented.

What are Kotter's eight steps, and what evidence stands behind them?

The eight steps, as Pollack and Pollack summarise Kotter (1996): establish a sense of urgency, create the guiding coalition, develop a vision and strategy, communicate the change vision, enable broad-based action, generate short-term wins, consolidate gains and produce more change, and anchor new approaches in the culture (Pollack and Pollack, 2015).

Kotter's 1995 article grew out of watching more than 100 companies try to turn themselves into stronger competitors, under banners from total quality management to restructuring, with results mostly between success and failure and tilted towards the lower end (Kotter, 1995). That is one person's observation, not an experiment. Pollack and Pollack cite a review by Appelbaum and colleagues (2012): most of the evidence for the model was compiled by Kotter himself, and the model is famous for its usable form more than for scientific consensus (Pollack and Pollack, 2015). So I use the eight steps as a list of questions to answer, not as a proven formula.

The applied study that Pollack and Pollack report is a knowledge-management programme at an Australian finance and insurance organisation of more than 10,000 staff, running for over two years to keep knowledge as the workforce aged. One of the two authors was the change manager, who used the eight steps as a guide; the paper draws on interviews between the two of them (Pollack and Pollack, 2015).

What is left of each step in a twenty-person workshop?

The middle column below summarises what Kotter or Pollack and Pollack say; the right-hand column is my inference for shop P, not checked on a real small firm. The shop's figures are invented.

The two steps that lose the most form are two and four. A small firm has no organisation chart on which to draw a coalition, so "coalition" becomes a question: who in the company can say yes or no, and does the team know it? I call that openly known authority. Step four shrinks into a habit of talking, but it does not vanish: Kotter notes that managers underestimate how much communication is required (Pollack and Pollack, 2015).

What do Pollack and Pollack add to how we read the eight steps?

The authors' main finding is that the eight steps are usually drawn as a straight chain, but in the organisation they studied the change team had to run several rounds in parallel: each group went through the eight steps at its own time and speed (Pollack and Pollack, 2015). When a group of managers five levels below the CEO, ten months after the programme began, still did not see why change was needed, the team started again with that group alone: bringing in senior leaders to talk about the need for change, forming a small coalition for the group, and defining what the change meant for them (Pollack and Pollack, 2015).

The same is likely at shop P. The order-taker may be ready for step six while two long-serving machine operators are still at step one because they think the package will police them. Do not drag the whole shop forward then; go back to step one with the two operators, using their own numbers, for example how often the machine stops waiting for order information. The authors say their paper offers one example and that more case studies are needed (Pollack and Pollack, 2015).

When does it fit, and when not?

The eight steps fit if the change touches the habits of many people and needs them to work differently every day, such as changing how orders are taken or how shifts are handed over. They are surplus if one person carries out the change, such as an accountant changing their own software: no coalition is needed. They are also not enough when people resist for reasons the steps do not ask about, such as loss of status or a broken promise. For those cases, see Ten reasons people resist change and Four theories of resistance to change. If the shop's slogans and real habits differ, Schein's three levels of culture helps find the mismatch before you begin. To compare the eight steps with other models, see choosing between ADKAR, Kotter and Lewin. For who should lead each part of the change, see Change champions: three roles.

Going deeper: what did I read, and what did I not?

I read the full pre-publication text of Pollack and Pollack (2014) in the UTS OPUS repository; it carries no journal page numbers, so I relay Kotter's (1996) statements through the two authors without page references. Of Kotter's 1995 article I read only the summary and opening paragraph on the Harvard Business Review page, not the full text; I have not read Kotter's 1996 book. Everything I attribute to Kotter in the table above comes through Pollack and Pollack.

I found no study of the eight steps in a company of around 20 people, so the shop P material, from openly known authority to the step table, is my inference from an organisation very different in size. The figure of 14 in 120 orders and the other details about shop P are invented.