SC QUALITY GUILDChange management plan
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Plan an organizational change around Kotter's eight steps, map each group's support and resistance, choose a strategy for each, and check for the gaps that stall changes.
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Models of change
Lewin described change in three stages: unfreeze (create readiness by showing the current state can no longer hold), change (move to the new way, with support), and refreeze (lock the new way in through structures, measures and rewards). Kotter's eight steps are often read as an expansion of Lewin's three stages. In order, they are: create a sense of urgency, build a guiding coalition, develop a vision and strategy, communicate the vision, empower broad-based action, generate short-term wins, consolidate gains and produce more change, and anchor new approaches in the culture. His central finding was that skipping steps creates only an appearance of speed. Prosci's ADKAR model (awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, reinforcement) looks at the same journey for the individual.
Why people resist, and what to do about it
Kotter and Schlesinger named four common causes of resistance: parochial self-interest (people expect to lose something they value), misunderstanding and lack of trust, different assessments of whether the change makes sense, and low tolerance for change. They matched six approaches to situations:
- Education and communication where information is missing or wrong.
- Participation and involvement where others hold information you need or could block the change.
- Facilitation and support where people struggle to adjust: training, time off, listening.
- Negotiation and agreement where a group will clearly lose and has power to resist.
- Manipulation and co-optation where other tactics will not work or cost too much. People who feel tricked resist harder.
- Explicit and implicit coercion where speed is essential and the initiators have power. It leaves resentment.
Culture, leadership and empowerment
Culture is the shared assumptions that decide how work really gets done; a change that contradicts it fades unless step 8 anchors it. Leaders move people through motivation, negotiation and influence rather than authority alone. Socratic questioning, open questions that lead people to examine their own assumptions, builds understanding. Empowerment means delegating real decisions to the people doing the work and removing the systems and policies that stop them acting on them.
Job enlargement adds more tasks at the same level. Job enrichment, from Herzberg, adds responsibility, autonomy and decision-making, and is the form that motivates.
On the CMQ/OE exam
Expect to put Kotter's steps in order, to match a resistance situation with the best of the six strategies, and to tell job enrichment from job enlargement.