The eight-step model is the default. It appears in change management curricula, in the methodology sections of consulting proposals, and in the internal playbooks of organisations that have never read the original. Thirty years after it was published it remains the most widely used framework for organisational change.
It is worth knowing what it rests on, because it is not what most people assume.
Where the eight steps came from
John Kotter published Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail in the Harvard Business Review in 1995. The article drew on a ten-year study of more than a hundred companies that had attempted transformation, and it set out eight errors that recurred: not establishing enough urgency, not creating a powerful enough guiding coalition, lacking a vision, under-communicating the vision, failing to remove obstacles, not planning for short-term wins, declaring victory too soon, and not anchoring the change in the culture.
In 1996 the book Leading Change turned the eight errors into eight steps. That inversion is the origin of the model: a list of things that went wrong, restated as a list of things to do.
What that design can and cannot establish
Observing more than a hundred organisations attempting change over a decade is a serious piece of fieldwork, and it is exactly the right method for a particular question: what keeps going wrong. Patterns that recur across a hundred cases are worth writing down, and the eight errors have face validity that has survived thirty years of practitioners recognising themselves in them.
What that design cannot do is produce a rate or test a remedy. There is no comparison group, because there is no set of companies that did the same things differently under otherwise similar conditions. There is no operational definition of a successful transformation. And the observations and the conclusions come from the same person, which is a structure that identifies hypotheses rather than testing them.
The step from eight observed errors to eight prescribed steps carries an assumption that is never examined: that avoiding the errors produces the opposite outcome. That does not follow automatically. Knowing that aircraft crashes often involve pilot fatigue does not establish that a well-rested pilot flies well.
This is also, not incidentally, the same body of work that gets cited for the claim that 70 percent of change fails. A ten-year qualitative observation cannot produce a percentage, and the figure attributed to this literature has been traced through five published sources without an empirical basis being found at the end of any of them.
The 2016 review
Mark Hughes, the same researcher who traced the 70 percent claim, returned to Kotter in 2016 with a paper in Leadership assessing whether Leading Change had earned the claim, made in the 2012 preface, that it was more relevant than when first published.
Kotter openly acknowledged that he neither drew examples nor major ideas from any published source, except his own writing.
The review is not a dismissal. Its three conclusions are that Leading Change remains an enduring landmark leadership study, that it is stuck in the past, and that it today discourages change. The first of those is a real compliment and the paper means it.
The acknowledgement in the quote is Kotter's own, and stating it openly in the book was an honest thing to do. It does mean that the most influential change framework in use was assembled without reference to the research literature that existed at the time, and that its subsequent influence has not caused anyone to go back and connect the two.
What has and has not been tested since
In thirty years the eight-step model has not been subjected to a controlled evaluation. There is no study comparing organisations that followed the eight steps with matched organisations that did not, and no meta-analysis of the model as an intervention, for the straightforward reason that the primary studies do not exist.
That is an unusual state of affairs for something this widely adopted, and the comparison with adjacent fields is stark. Leadership training as an intervention has been tested across 335 independent samples. Workplace coaching has three meta-analyses. Change management's flagship model has none.
Some individual elements have evidence from other literatures. Urgency relates to research on readiness for change; the guiding coalition relates to work on coalitions and power; short-term wins relate to goal-setting theory, which is among the better supported theories in organisational psychology. Those are adjacent findings that are consistent with parts of the model rather than tests of it, and assembling them after the fact is not the same as the model having been validated.
How to use it anyway
The practical conclusion is not to abandon the eight steps. It is to be accurate about what they are.
They are a well-observed checklist of the ways organisational change has historically gone wrong, written by someone who watched a hundred attempts at close range. Used as a checklist, they are useful: most of the eight are things a change programme genuinely does forget, and a framework that reminds people to plan for short-term wins is doing real work.
They are not a validated method, they do not come with a success rate, and the sequence is an artefact of how the observations were written up rather than a tested ordering. Anyone presenting them as a proven methodology, particularly anyone charging for certification in them, is making a claim the evidence does not support.
The same standard applies to the alternatives, and it produces different answers for each of them. That comparison is in which change model has evidence behind it, and the strangest case in the field, a model attributed to a researcher who may never have proposed it, is in the model everyone credits to Kurt Lewin.
Common questions
What is Kotter's eight-step model based on? A ten-year observation of more than a hundred companies attempting transformation, published in 1995 as eight recurring errors and reframed in 1996 as eight prescriptive steps.
Has Kotter's model been scientifically validated? No controlled evaluation of it has been published. There is no study comparing organisations that applied the eight steps with matched organisations that did not.
Are the eight steps wrong? Nothing in them is contradicted by the research. They are a well-observed list of what commonly goes wrong in organisational change. What is missing is evidence that following them produces better outcomes than not following them.
What are the eight steps? Establish urgency, create a guiding coalition, develop a vision, communicate the vision, empower action by removing obstacles, generate short-term wins, consolidate gains, and anchor the change in the culture. They were first stated as the eight errors of failing to do each of these.
Did Kotter draw on the existing research literature? By his own acknowledgement, he drew neither examples nor major ideas from any published source other than his own writing, as noted in a 2016 review in the journal Leadership.
Does any part of the model have supporting evidence? Several elements are consistent with findings from adjacent literatures, such as goal-setting research for short-term wins and readiness-for-change research for urgency. Those are related findings rather than tests of the model.
Should we use a different change model instead? The alternatives have their own evidential problems, and none of the major practitioner models has been tested against a control. The useful question is which checklist fits the change at hand, not which one has been proven.
Sources
- Hughes, M. (2016), Leading changes: Why transformation explanations fail, Leadership 12(4), 449-469
- University of Brighton research repository record, including the full abstract
- Kotter, J. P. (1995), Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail, Harvard Business Review
- Hughes, M. (2011), Do 70 Per Cent of All Organizational Change Initiatives Really Fail?, Journal of Change Management 11(4), 451-464
