Kotter's 8-Step Change Model: Evaluating Its Relevance in Today's Dynamic Business Environment
John Kotter's 8-Step Change Model has been used for decades to help organisations manage transformation. But the workplace Kotter originally studied looked very different from today's.
Organisations now deal with AI adoption, digital transformation, hybrid teams, faster market shifts and multiple changes happening at the same time.
So is Kotter's model still relevant?
Yes, but it works better as a flexible guide than a rigid eight-step checklist.
What Is Kotter's 8-Step Change Model?
John Kotter first outlined his thinking in the 1995 Harvard Business Review article Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail, based on observations of more than 100 organisations undergoing transformation.
He later expanded the approach in his 1996 book Leading Change.
The model consists of eight steps:
1. Create a Sense of Urgency Help people understand why change is necessary.
2. Build a Guiding Coalition Bring together people who can lead and influence the change.
3. Form a Strategic Vision Create a clear picture of where the organisation is trying to go.
4. Enlist a Volunteer Army Build wider support from people who want to help move the change forward.
5. Enable Action by Removing Barriers Identify systems, processes or behaviours preventing progress.
6. Generate Short-Term Wins Create visible evidence that the change is producing results.
7. Sustain Acceleration Use early momentum to continue the transformation.
8. Institute Change Embed new behaviours and practices into how the organisation operates.
Kotter's current methodology still uses these eight ideas, although the approach has evolved beyond the original linear sequence.
So, Is Kotter Still Relevant?
The basic principles remain useful. People still need to understand why change matters. Organisations still need leadership, direction, participation, momentum and reinforcement.
What has changed is how those principles need to be applied.
Today's transformations are often less predictable and rarely move neatly from Step 1 to Step 8.
1. Create Urgency — But Don't Create More Anxiety
Creating urgency made sense when leaders needed to convince comfortable organisations that something had to change.
Today, many employees already feel that everything is urgent.
AI adoption. New competitors. Cost pressures. Restructuring. New systems.
Adding more urgency can simply create change fatigue.
The modern question is therefore not:
“How do we make this feel urgent?”
It is:
“Why does this change deserve attention compared with everything else?”
Leaders need to connect urgency with a clear problem and purpose rather than simply creating pressure.
2. Build a Guiding Coalition — Beyond Senior Management
Kotter's idea of forming a group to lead the transformation remains highly relevant.
But that group should not consist only of senior executives.
A modern guiding coalition may include managers, frontline employees, technical specialists, informal influencers and people closest to customers.
For a digital transformation, for example, senior leadership may understand the strategy while frontline employees understand where the existing process actually fails.
Both perspectives matter.
3. Form a Vision — But Keep It Adaptable
People still need to understand where the organisation is heading.
The difference today is that a transformation vision cannot always describe one fixed destination.
AI capabilities, technologies and customer expectations can change during the transformation itself.
A useful vision therefore provides:
Clear direction + room to adapt
Instead of saying:
“This exact solution will be our future.”
the organisation might say:
“We want customer issues resolved faster with less repetitive work, while keeping humans responsible for complex decisions.”
The direction remains clear even if the technology changes.
4. Enlist People — Don't Just Communicate at Them
Kotter recognised that large-scale transformation requires more than a small leadership team.
That is even more relevant today.
Employees increasingly expect to understand and contribute to changes that affect how they work.
A town hall explaining a completed plan is not the same as participation.
Modern change programmes should create opportunities for employees to raise concerns, contribute ideas, test new processes and influence how implementation happens.
This is where Design Thinking and co-creation can strengthen Kotter's model.
5. Remove Barriers — Look Beyond the Org Chart
Barriers to change are not always people resisting the idea.
They could be:
Legacy technology.
Lack of skills.
Conflicting KPIs.
Slow approval processes.
Poor access to data.
An employee may fully support the transformation but still be unable to change because the surrounding system makes the new behaviour difficult. Removing barriers therefore requires looking at the entire working environment.
6. Generate Short-Term Wins — Test Before You Scale
Short-term wins remain one of the strongest parts of Kotter's model.
Rather than launching a transformation across the whole organisation immediately, test it somewhere smaller.
For example:
Pilot → Measure → Learn → Improve → Scale
A successful pilot demonstrates that the idea can work while also revealing problems before a larger rollout.
The win should not simply be:
“We launched the system.”
A better win might be:
“The pilot reduced processing time from 20 minutes to 8 minutes.”
That connects progress to actual value.
7. Sustain Acceleration — Avoid the Pilot Trap
Organisations often become excited by an early pilot and then struggle to move beyond it.
Scaling requires different work.
Processes may need redesigning. Employees need training. Technology needs integration. Leadership attention needs to remain consistent.
Early success should therefore create momentum for the next phase rather than become the end of the project.
8. Institute Change — Build the Ability to Keep Changing
Kotter's final step originally focused on anchoring new approaches into organisational culture.
That idea remains important, but today's organisations face another challenge:
The next change may already be coming.
Instead of only embedding one new behaviour, organisations need to develop the capability to continuously learn and adapt.
This means creating feedback loops, developing employee capabilities and making experimentation part of normal operations.
Interestingly, Kotter's own methodology has evolved in this direction. Kotter now describes the original linear process as having developed into more dynamic 8 Accelerators, reflecting the need for change to operate continuously rather than as a one-off programme.
Kotter + Design Thinking
One useful modern approach is combining Kotter's organisational structure with the human-centred and iterative nature of Design Thinking.
Kotter provides questions such as:
How do we build momentum?
Who should lead the change?
How do we sustain it?
Design Thinking adds:
What are people actually experiencing?
What barriers are they facing?
What can we prototype before scaling?
Together, the process becomes less linear:
Understand → Align → Co-Create → Prototype → Learn → Scale → Reinforce
This is especially useful for digital transformation and AI adoption, where the solution may continue evolving during implementation.
Don't Treat the Eight Steps as Eight Boxes
Perhaps the biggest mistake today is treating Kotter as:
Step 1 finished → Move to Step 2 → Never return
Real transformation does not work that neatly.
You may discover a new barrier during implementation.
A pilot may reveal that the vision needs adjustment.
New employees may require renewed communication.
A change in technology may create new urgency.
The steps are better treated as conditions that need to exist throughout a transformation, rather than eight boxes that are permanently completed.
How Emerge Creatives Approaches Change
At Emerge Creatives, we combine structured change thinking with Design Thinking, Business Strategy and experimentation.
A practical transformation flow might be:
Understand the Problem → Align People → Define the Direction → Prototype → Implement → Measure → Adapt
Kotter's principles can support this process without forcing every transformation into a rigid sequence.
The framework provides structure.
Iteration provides adaptability.
Conclusion: Is Kotter's Model Outdated?
Kotter's 8-Step Change Model is not obsolete.
Its central ideas, urgency, leadership, vision, participation, removing barriers, early wins and reinforcement, still address fundamental human and organisational aspects of change.
What is outdated is applying it as a strictly linear formula.
Today's organisations need to combine those principles with faster experimentation, employee participation, continuous feedback and the ability to adapt as conditions change.
The more useful question is therefore not:
“Should we still use Kotter?”
It is:
“How should we adapt Kotter to the change we are facing?”
Structure + Participation + Experimentation + Adaptation
That combination makes a decades-old change framework much more useful in today's business environment.
Last Words
I will be adding more articles on Design Thinking, Strategy and Innovation throughout the year. Articles of these 5 Step Action Plan and Modern Soft Skills will be added periodically to give my readers a broader insights to how to crush complex problems, overcome future challenges and spot AI opportunities.
Check out more articles via my blog: https://www.emerge-creatives.com/blog-1
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About the Author
Daniel Ling is a regional ex-Design Leader turned educator, and business owner of Emerge Creatives, an registered SSG training provider (RTP) to deliver modern soft skills to professionals through Design Thinking, Business Strategy, and AI Innovation.
With over 15 years of experience in the financial and e-commerce tech industries- including key leadership roles at Lazada, NTUC Income, OCBC, and DBS- Daniel has led cross-regional design teams, built design functions from the ground up, and spearheaded large-scale transformation initiatives. But beyond industry success,
Daniel has reinvented himself as a “designer in a business suit”- equally fluent in creative strategy and commercial impact.
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