cameron and green making-sense-of-change-management

Organizational changeKOTTER’S EIGHT-STEP MODEL1. Establish a sense of urgency. Discussing today’s competitive realities,looking at potential future scenarios. Increasing the ‘felt-need’ for change.2. Form a powerful guiding coalition. Assembling a powerful group ofpeople who can work well together.3. Create a vision. Building a vision to guide the change effort togetherwith strategies for achieving this.4. Communicate the vision. Kotter emphasizes the need to communicateat least 10 times the amount you expect to have to communicate.The vision and accompanying strategies and new behaviours needs tobe communicated in a variety of different ways.The guiding coalition should be the first to role model new behaviours.5. Empower others to act on the vision. This step includes getting ridof obstacles to change such as unhelpful structures or systems. Allowpeople to experiment.6. Plan for and create short-term wins. Look for and advertise shorttermvisible improvements. Plan these in and reward people publiclyfor improvements.7. Consolidate improvements and produce still more change.Promote and reward those able to promote and work towards thevision. Energize the process of change with new projects, resources,change agents.8. Institutionalize new approaches. Ensure that everyone understandsthat the new behaviours lead to corporate success.Source: Kotter (1995)Our viewThis eight-step model is one that appeals to many managers with whomwe have worked. However, what it appears to encourage is an early burstof energy, followed by delegation and distance. The eight steps do notreally emphasize the need for managers to follow through with as muchenergy on Step 7 and Step 8 as was necessary at the start. Kotter peaksearly, using forceful concepts such as ‘urgency’ and ‘power’ and ‘vision’.Then after Step 5, words like ‘plan’, ‘consolidate’ and ‘institutionalize’seem to imply a rather straightforward process that can be managed by115