Significance of Study

Prosci research shows that change management, when not introduced at the beginning
of a project, usually falls upon the HR department; they are stuck trying to make the
project work. Project managers, team leaders and executives are notorious for forgetting
about the people side of change. The HR department then becomes the sole advocate
and only party dedicated to the people side of change. They are invited into the project
late, at the middle or the end, to magically create peace from chaos.
"Our plant has been working on managing a 'cultural change’ project. We have invested
thousands of hours planning and developing the strategy. If we had the opportunity to
attend Prosci’s ‘change management training’ and to use the tools provided in it before
starting this project we could have cut the amount of time and money spent by at least
50%.
—Jose Gonzales, LEAR, Director of Human Resources

Scope of Study
What Is Change Management?
Whenever an organization changes anything significant, it faces a significant period of
transition as workers and managers adjust to their new responsibilities or work
environments. Change management is a system of planning, analysis and execution that
attempts to minimize both short- and long-term disruption to make the transition as
seamless as possible.
HR professionals facilitate change management in two principal ways: 1) ensuring that
general change objectives are met by participating in the planning and execution stages
with other managers; and 2) using their familiarity with the organization’s employees to
understand their needs and expectations during a change. In many organizations, an
HR professional is the key link between structural change managers and the employees
who will be most affected by the change. (Villanova University,2019).

Introduction
Harvard professor John Kotter developed what is probably the most influential model
of change. However, seasoned change management professionals are often dissatisfied
with the model.
Kotter summarizes his approach to change in a simple eight-step model, which is
shown in the diagram below:

It’s sensible, easy to understand, and seems to promise a map to guide HR professionals
through the dangerous jungle of a change project. It’s one of those models that HR
professionals are expected to know. If you are in a meeting and the model comes up,
you don’t want to say, “Just a moment, let me Google that”. You want to have a few of
the steps in your head.
Notice how the model suggests that you don’t actually start changing anything until
midway through the project (i.e., Step 5: Empower people to act on vision). That’s a
smart insight; if you try to change things before the organization is ready, then you will
create a lot of resistance that could have been avoided. (Kotter,1996).
Geoff Matthews’ reflections on the Kotter model
Geoff Matthews is an HR consultant coach, and writer. He has served as VP HR with
Nestlé and Merck. Before we start critiquing the Kotter Model, let’s be fair about it and
recognize that many of the problems come from how people use the model. (Academy
to innovate HR,2022).
But let’s look at six flaws that Geoff Matthews, an experienced practitioner and lecturer
on change management, sees in the model:
1. A false sense of urgency
Mathews’ first concern about the Kotter Model is right in the first step: Create a sense of
urgency. This is often framed as the need to create a burning platform. That colorful
idea comes from Daryl Conner, another change guru and author of the book Managing
at the Speed of Change (1992). The image comes from the true story of men on an oil
platform on the North Sea. They took the extraordinary decision to jump off the high
platform down into the frigid waters of the sea below. What drove that remarkable
action? Well, the oil platform was on fire.
It can be exciting for a manager to try to whip up support for change by painting a dire
picture of what will happen if the change does not happen right away. However,
generating fear also generates stress or even paralysis. If there were only one change
effort every five years or so, that might be okay. But if change is frequent (and it is), this
repeated appeal to fear grinds people down. It risks burning out the very people you
are relying on to make change successful.
The other downside of whipping up a sense of urgency is that people will become
cynical if it’s overdone. Leaders will lose credibility. Yes, it may be true that changes to
a process may be important. But the message that the organization will be in trouble if
it’s not done this quarter will simply not be believed.
It might be better to say that the first step is to create an appropriate sense of urgency.
Help people understand why a change is essential. Explain the priority of this change
versus all the other urgent things employees are being asked to do, and how the
organization will support them in making this change.
2. The implication that the change process is linear
The model implies that you simply need to work through these eight steps, one after the
other. Then, you’ll end up with a permanent change that has been institutionalized in
your organization. Matthews cautions that in practice, things don’t necessarily work out
that way. Perhaps you get to step six of creating short-term wins only to find that the
vision was incomplete or that you need different stakeholders in your guiding coalition.
At that point, you cycle back to these earlier steps and start again.
It’s also possible that you need to start with a quick win (step six) so that you can get
the support of a guiding coalition (step two). In other words, you may jump around
between steps rather than follow them in a linear manner.
Notice that the steps are still useful things to do. The problem is that if a change leader
tries to follow the linear sequence laid out in the model, they may get into trouble.
3. The assumption the change is start and stop
One of the earliest models of change, and one that still haunts HR, is Kurt Lewin’s
model of Unfreeze-Change-Refreeze. It assumes the organization is a stable place that
goes through a change and then returns to being a stable place. Lewin’s model is
embedded in Kotter’s eight steps. The first steps are all about preparing the desired
change – unfreezing, the middle steps about changing, and the final step of refreezing is
about institutionalizing the change.
The problem, as anyone who has lived in a modern organization knows, change is not
start and stop; it is dynamic. The change leader who thinks they can work through this
neat change model and then relax will be thrown off balance as the vision—or more
granularly the goals that need to be achieved—keep changing.
Matthews points out that this means the parameters for any given change may alter as
business and other conditions shift. As a result, the vision, the guiding coalition,
communications, and so on may be much more dynamic. In a sense, you never really
complete a step. You have to keep all the balls in the air since – in a VUCA world –
change may have to be far more fluid in response.
4. The assumption that there is only one change at a time
Closely related to the idea that change is dynamic is the idea that it is also continuous.
Today, few organizations make one change at a time. More likely, multiple changes are
occurring simultaneously. Before one change has ended, others are underway.
Even as you are creating a sense of urgency, five other managers are busy telling
employees that their change is more critical than your one. Even as you are sending out
clear communications about the change, employees are finding their inboxes flooded
with clear communications about many other change efforts. They may not even have
time to read what you have sent them.
Managing multiple simultaneous change programs means that change leaders need to
coordinate their efforts to make sure they are not overwhelming employees and that
these changes don’t operate at cross-purposes. Senior leaders will have to make
decisions about which programs have priority at a particular moment in time.
In the end, the change management process is a lot messier than the Kotter model
would lead you to believe. You have to be very aware of what else is going on in the
organization as you work to navigate your own project forward.
5. The overly top-down nature of Kotter’s Model
Matthews points out that the Kotter model implies that change is primarily driven from
the top. It presumes a leader who can foresee precisely what needs to happen and
orchestrates the change. This leads to two problems:
It completely overlooks how much positive change is driven by actions and ideas that
bubble up from the bottom of the organization. Suppose you want an organization that
is continuously handling multiple change challenges effectively. In that case, you need
to find ways to support this bubbling up of initiatives from the bottom of the
organization. An over-reliance on the Kotter model will blind you to this.
It creates overconfidence that the needed change as initially defined by a leader’s vision
is correct. This can lead to change management projects that ignore insights arising as
the project proceeds, which, in turn, leads to failure.
These two problems won’t always exist. However, they exist often enough to leave
people wary of an overreliance on the Kotter Model.
6. The assumption that resistance is irrational
One other hidden assumption often associated with the Kotter model is that resistance
to change is irrational. It presumes employees won’t want to change and that leaders,
who, due to their superior insight, see the need for organizational transformation, have
to find a way to convince employees to get on board.
The idea that employees resist change and that this resistance is irrational is a half-truth.
For example, if you offer employees the chance to move from a cumbersome paper
expense form to an easy online one, you expect many will embrace the change. If they
don’t embrace the change, it might be because they are technologically illiterate
(something less and less likely these days). It could also be that there is a problem with
the online process that leaders are unaware of.
Matthews advises that, at the very least, change leaders should assume that there may
well be a logical reason why employees are resisting change. Make sure you learn what
their reasons are before pushing employees to adopt a change.