%% #note/sourcereview/article | #source/book📚/nonfiction #source/book📚/ingested | %% #on/change # Kotter's 8 Steps to Change _I had and participated in so many great ideas as a potential leader and change agent, yet almost none of them have outlived my personal energy and investment. The data was sound, the reasoning was clear (to me), and the ideas had proven themselves in other organizations. So , why does one project work and another fade? Why does a program designed to **create engagement** end up with frustration by the change agent and the recipients? Kotter's 8-steps, outlined in his original article (Kotter, 1995) and polished since then gives us the answers._ ## A Classic Case: Checklists in the OR In the seminal paper on peri-operative checklists (Haynes et al., 2009), Atul Gawande and the team at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston demonstrated incredible reduction in peri-operative complications and a nearly 50% relative risk reduction in periop mortality in an international cohort by implementation of a safety checklist. ![[CleanShot 2025-05-21 at 13.02.00.jpg]] When this surgical checklist was required by the province of Ontario, a very different story was told, no significant changein nearly any important outcome across the entire province. (Urbach et al., 2014): ![[CleanShot 2025-05-21 at 13.04.50.jpg]] ## What is the thesis? Change fails when we do not use the science of change. Change has _enormous_ barriers to overcome to make it happen and stick. We _overestimate_ people agreeing with our world view. We underestimate the time and energy required to prepare an organization for change. ## Am I convinced and why? Yes! I've seen time after time every change initiative, even the ones based in science and supported by the leadership fail to stick. ## Summarize the argument ![[CleanShot 2023-05-05 at 11.37.20.jpg]] 1. Create a [[sense of urgency]] to [[start with why]] change even has to happen. Ensure people agree that change is needed before moving onto the next step. If you aren't getting enough people to participate and experience the urgency, the answer at each step will be to go back and ensure that people agree there is a reason to change. 2. Use the science of [[Teaming]] to be the guiding coalition of the people who will be [[Leading]] the change. Too much change _management_ and not enough. Focus on this group being a team to model the end result culturally that is desired. 3. [[management is doing things right, leadership is doing the right things]], the vision needs to give people who have been motivated to change and are being lead to change by steps 1 and 2. There has to be a balance between leadership and management during this change process. Too much management can unintentionally crush the emergent property of a change process. The vision can be updated as the project moves along, as participation grows. 4. Enlisting a volunteer army is key to winning the hearts of the ground-level employees. The goal here is participation! [[hearts are volunteers]], this is a hearts and souls step. People need to feel [[Psychic Flourishing]] by the proper balance between participation and not alienation. Beware the [[Blind Spot]], ensure that you have accounted for all stakeholder groups, and the goal here is to employ the social graph of the organization. When creating the guiding coalition you are leveraging the org chart, when creating the volunteer army, you are leveraging the social graph. 5. [[remove to gain]] is the next step. [[The Basic Assumption (TM)]] is brought to the project and have the stance that people already want to do the right thing, the question is what is in our control that prevents them from doing it? What are we doing unintentionally that is creating the barriers, and here leaders need to be the ones to remove the barriers. This step can give the leaders credibility and keep the momentum going. 6. [[create the conditions]] for short term wins to exist! When the guiding coalition is engaged, the creation of [[SMART objectives]] that contain measurable outcomes that can be touted as wins early on is key. Supporters need to see that they are making a difference for their energy to persist, and fence-sitters will join when they see that the change is moving in a positive direction. 7. Sustain Acceleration: Create habits 8. Become the change: report the results, share the successes and learnings ## What is the other side of the argument? Is this process too managerially tight? How do we balance the need for this process with the need for emergence? ## What else do I wonder about? Creating short term wins assumes we can predict what will happen, but in complex systems we cannot predict. [[Thinking in Systems]] is a key challenge here. I suspect one answer is the vision step is about changing the purpose of the system. ## Action Always go back to ensuring people are ready to change %% ## References, Quotes, Ideas ```dataview table file.mtime.year + "-" + file.mtime.month + "-" + file.mtime.day as Modified from [[ ]] and !outgoing([[ ]]) sort file.mtime desc ``` %% ## Source: Haynes, A. B., Weiser, T. G., Berry, W. R., Lipsitz, S. R., Breizat, A.-H. S., Dellinger, E. P., Herbosa, T., Joseph, S., Kibatala, P. L., Lapitan, M. C. M., Merry, A. F., Moorthy, K., Reznick, R. K., Taylor, B., & Gawande, A. A. (2009). A Surgical Safety Checklist to Reduce Morbidity and Mortality in a Global Population. _New England Journal of Medicine_, _360_(5), 491–499. [https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMsa0810119](https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMsa0810119) Kotter, J. P. (2012). _Leading change_. Harvard Business Review Press. Kotter, J. P. (1995). Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail. _Harvard Business Review_, _March-Apri_, 59–67. [https://hbr.org/1995/05/leading-change-why-transformation-efforts-fail-2](https://hbr.org/1995/05/leading-change-why-transformation-efforts-fail-2) Kotter Book: Kotter, J. P. (2012). _Leading change_. Harvard Business Review Press. [[Kotter e-book 2022]] pdf: Kotter, J.P. (2022). The 8-Step Process for Leading Change | Dr. John Kotter. _Kotter International Inc_. Retrieved May 7, 2023, from [https://www.kotterinc.com/methodology/8-steps/](https://www.kotterinc.com/methodology/8-steps/) Urbach, D. R., Govindarajan, A., Saskin, R., Wilton, A. S., & Baxter, N. N. (2014). Introduction of Surgical Safety Checklists in Ontario, Canada. _New England Journal of Medicine_, _370_(11), 1029–1038. [https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMsa1308261](https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMsa1308261)