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Dr. John Kotter’s “8-step” program leads to organizational change, drives employees to adopt change, and works to preserve consistently accelerating change over the long term.
Every organization, company, or institution comes to that moment of truth when it understands there’s a need for change. This could be due to the system’s natural wear and tear, or because the company is no longer adapting fast enough to the rate of marketplace changes such as increased competition, changing client needs and so on.
The first stage in company recovery is to bring in an organizational consultant to lead the strategic change. Data shows, however, that more than 70% of efforts invested by companies in change are doomed to fail. With figures like those, what can ensure the successful assimilation of change?
For 40 years, Dr. John Kotter of the School of Business at Harvard University researched this issue in depth. He examined change strategies in hundreds of companies, identified and isolated the characteristics of success, and integrated them into his methodology, which he called “The 8-Step Process for Leading Change.”
According to Dr. Kotter’s research, most organizations do not adopt a consistent, holistic approach to internal change, and therefore do not invest in encouraging and incentivizing their human resources in an efficient way toward assimilating the change. In the past decade, Dr. Kotter shifted from research to implementation, developing an organizational consultancy company. Currently, he and his team of experts use the “8 Steps” method to make it possible for every business or institutional system to change its strategy in accordance with its needs, and equally importantly, to maintain that change.
Dr. Kotter’s keywords are speed, acceleration, and stability in the process of acceleration. The change strategy is determined by Kotter International’s experts within two to six weeks from the start of liaison. The next stage sees employees being presented with a program that encourages their recruitment to actively participate in the process of change. From this point on, stable acceleration comes into play. It’s at this point when crises may surface because a system’s natural tendency is to gradually move away from processes of change. And here is where the secret to the “8 Steps” method lies: penetrating stability into the change process turns acceleration into an ongoing procedure in a way that prevents the system from slipping back into its old, unsuccessful strategy.
