Most organizational change efforts fail. Not because the ideas are bad, but because leaders underestimate how difficult it is to actually change how people work. John Kotter’s 8-Step Change Management Model addresses this problem directly. It’s a framework that acknowledges a basic truth: lasting change requires more than an announcement and a new process document.
If you’re leading a shift to continuous delivery, adopting new quality practices, or restructuring how your teams work and adopting a product model, Kotter’s framework gives you a roadmap for making the change stick.
Kotter’s 8 Step Change Management Model:
1. Create a Sense of Urgency
Before anyone will embrace real change, they need to understand why the status quo is no longer acceptable. This isn’t about manufacturing crisis or fear. It’s about making the business case clear and immediate.
In product development, this might mean showing how current deployment cycles are losing you competitive ground, or how quality issues are eroding customer trust. Use data from your own systems. Show the trend lines. Make the cost of inaction tangible.
Without urgency, change initiatives get deprioritized when things get busy. And things always get busy.
2. Build a Guiding Coalition
One person, even a senior leader, cannot drive organizational change alone. You need a cross-functional group of people with enough credibility and influence to make things happen.
This coalition should include formal leaders, but also respected engineers, product managers, and others who have influence within their teams. The key is that these people need to be genuinely committed to the change, not just assigned to it.
A weak coalition means decisions take forever and resistance goes unchallenged.
3. Form a Strategic Vision
People need to understand where you’re going, not just what you’re stopping. A clear vision gives everyone a shared picture of what success looks like and why it matters.
A weak vision focuses on tools or processes: “We’re going to adopt Agile” or “We’re implementing DevOps practices.” A strong vision describes the future state in terms people can actually visualize and care about.
For example, if you’re transforming how your organization ships software, the vision might be: “Ship working software to customers every week, with quality built in and teams focused on solving customer problems rather than fighting internal processes.”
That vision is specific enough to be actionable but broad enough to encompass multiple initiatives. It connects to what engineers experience daily and to business outcomes that matter. Someone can repeat it without notes and understand what they’re working toward.
The test of a good vision is whether someone three levels down in the organization can explain it in their own words and connect it to their work. If your vision requires a slide deck to communicate, keep refining.
4. Communicate the Vision
Once you have the vision, communicate it relentlessly. Not just in an all-hands meeting or an email. You need to repeat it in team meetings, one-on-ones, and planning sessions. People need to hear it multiple times, from multiple sources, before it sinks in.
Leaders in the guiding coalition should be able to articulate the vision naturally and connect it to the work people are already doing. This consistency reinforces that the change is real and important.
Most leaders drastically underestimate how much communication is required. What feels like repetition to you is often the first time someone is actually processing the message.
5. Empower Broad-Based Action
Once people understand the vision, you need to remove the obstacles that prevent them from acting on it. This step is about clearing the path and giving people the authority and resources to drive change themselves.
Barriers come in many forms: outdated policies, misaligned incentives, managers who resist the change, or inadequate tools and systems. If you’re asking teams to write automated tests but they don’t have test environments, you’re setting them up to fail. If you’re pushing for faster releases but your approval process takes three days, the structure contradicts the message.
Empowerment also means giving people permission to take risks and try new approaches. If the only people who can make decisions are senior leaders, change will move at a crawl. Push decision-making down to the teams doing the work.
6. Generate Short-Term Wins
Major organizational change takes time, often years. Without visible progress along the way, momentum dies and cynics gain the upper hand.
Plan for short-term wins that clearly demonstrate progress. These should be unambiguous improvements that even skeptics can’t dismiss. When a team cuts its deployment time from months to weeks, celebrate it. When quality metrics improve, share the numbers.
These wins do two things: they prove the change is working, and they give early adopters recognition that motivates others to join.
7. Consolidate Gains and Produce More Change
The biggest risk in organizational change comes right after initial success. Leaders declare victory too early, attention shifts elsewhere, and old habits creep back in.
After your first wins, use that credibility to tackle the deeper, harder problems. The initial changes create momentum and proof that the transformation is working. Now is the time to address more systemic issues, bring more people into the process, and launch additional initiatives that build on what you’ve learned.
This step is about not stopping too soon. Real transformation takes years, not months. Each wave of change should set up the next wave, gradually expanding the scope and impact of the transformation until the new way of working becomes the standard across the organization.
8. Anchor Changes in Culture
Change becomes permanent when it becomes “how we do things here.” This means the new practices, behaviors, and values get embedded into hiring, onboarding, promotion criteria, and daily habits.
If your change is toward higher quality standards, that should show up in how you evaluate engineering candidates and how you recognize team achievements. If you’ve shifted to smaller batch sizes, that should be reflected in how you plan and how you measure productivity.
Culture is the last thing to change, but it’s also what makes change last.
Where Teams Go Wrong
Kotter designed his model as a sequential process, but practitioners often find they need to revisit earlier steps as conditions change. If urgency wanes after a few months, you may need to recreate it. If your coalition loses key members, you need to rebuild it. Implementation reveals new obstacles that require going back to empowerment. This flexibility matters because organizational change doesn’t follow a straight line, even when your framework does.
Another frequent problem is skipping steps because they seem unnecessary or take too much time. Each step serves a purpose. Skipping the coalition-building step means decisions lack credibility. Skipping short-term wins means people lose faith before seeing results.
Finally, leaders often underestimate the time required. Meaningful organizational change typically takes 18 to 24 months, sometimes longer. If you’re expecting results in a quarter, you’ll either give up too soon or settle for superficial compliance instead of real adoption.
Making It Work for Your Team
Kotter’s model isn’t a rigid checklist. It’s a framework that reflects how people actually respond to change. Some steps will require more effort in your context. The key is recognizing that each step serves a purpose and shortcuts create vulnerabilities.
While Kotter focuses on the organizational mechanics of change, the Virginia Satir change model addresses the emotional journey individuals go through during transformation. Understanding both models helps you support your teams through the psychological resistance that often undermines well-planned change initiatives.
The value is in understanding that change management is a discipline, not an announcement. It requires sustained attention, deliberate planning, and recognition that the human side of change is at least as important as the technical side.
If you’re leading organizational transformation and want to build the leadership capabilities to execute change effectively, the Building High-Performing Organizations workshop provides practical frameworks for aligning culture, structure, and governance to support lasting change.
