3.4 Evolving the n-Step Process and Kotter's Eight Accelerators

CM3 discusses the propensity of theorists to provide stepped processes to deliver change and asks you to pay particular attention to Kotter's eight-step process, the guiding coalition and the volunteer army. Learn the eight in order — sequence questions are common — and understand why Kotter reframed them.

Kotter's redesigned approach: eight processes or accelerators

1. Creating a sense of urgency around a single big opportunity
2. Building and maintaining a guiding coalition
3. Formulating a strategic vision and developing change initiatives designed to capitalise on the big opportunity
4. Communicating the vision and the strategy to create buy-in and attract a growing volunteer army
5. Accelerating movement towards the vision and the opportunity by ensuring that the network of people removes barriers
6. Celebrating visible, significant short-term wins
7. Never letting up. Keep learning from experience — mistakes and successes
8. Institutionalising strategic changes in the culture

What changed from the original eight steps

Two differences matter.

From steps to accelerators. The original formulation was a sequence: complete one, move to the next. The redesigned version treats the eight as processes running concurrently and continuously, which is a far better fit for organisations facing continuous change rather than a single discrete transformation.

From guiding coalition to volunteer army. Previously Kotter's eight steps were managed by a small powerful group known as the guiding coalition. In the more recent version, the accelerators "pull in as many people as possible from throughout the organization to form a volunteer army." This volunteer army is the new guiding coalition — a network of many change agents drawing from across the organisation and at all levels.

This shift connects directly to the change agent networks covered in the Change leadership and teams area. Both reflect the same conclusion: a small senior group cannot deliver change into an organisation of thousands; a distributed network of credible people can.

Getting the accelerators right in exam conditions

Three of the eight cause most of the confusion.

Accelerator 1 — urgency around a single big opportunity. Note the framing. It is not urgency in general and not a crisis; it is urgency around one big opportunity. Diffuse urgency across five competing priorities produces no urgency at all.

Accelerator 6 versus accelerator 7. Celebrating visible, significant short-term wins is about marking early achievements to build momentum and credibility. Never letting up is about continuing to press, keep learning from mistakes and successes, and change direction in response to pressure rather than declaring victory. If a question describes taking steps to change direction in response to external pressure, that is never letting up.

Accelerator 8 — institutionalising strategic changes in the culture. This is the final step, not an early one. Culture follows the change; it does not precede it. Attempts to change culture first, then deliver the change, invert Kotter's logic.

The syllabus warning about rigid use

CM3 does not present Kotter as a recipe. Among the behaviours it lists for effective change managers — covered in full alongside agile change practices — is an explicit instruction to avoid taking a single framework or model and applying it persistently or rigidly.

That instruction is the reason n-step processes are introduced under the heading evolving the n-step process. The proliferation of stepped models — Kotter's eight, ADKAR's five, and many others — is itself evidence that no single sequence fits every situation. A change manager who applies the same eight steps to a regulatory implementation, a culture change and an agile team-of-teams rollout is not being methodical; they are failing to read the context.

Where n-step processes fit best

Mapping back to Cynefin and to planned versus emergent change gives a usable rule of thumb. Stepped processes work well where the destination is known and the causal relationships are understood — planned change in the obvious or complicated domains. They work poorly where the end point is fuzzy and relationships are unknown — emergent change in the complex domain, where the continuous change management cycle and agile change practices are better suited.

That does not make Kotter useless in complex situations; several accelerators (urgency, vision, volunteer army, removing barriers, short-term wins) apply broadly. It means treating them as practices to draw on rather than a sequence to execute, which is precisely what the redesign into concurrent accelerators was intended to enable.

The trap of treating steps as evidence of progress

Stepped models create a reporting temptation that is worth naming. Because the steps are discrete and nameable, progress can be reported as "we have completed steps one to four" — which sounds like measurement and is not.

Completing the activity associated with an accelerator is not the same as achieving its effect. A programme can hold a launch event, publish a vision statement, run a communications campaign and stand up a network, and thereby have performed accelerators one to four while producing no urgency, no shared vision and no volunteer army. The activities are outputs; the accelerators describe outcomes.

The corrective is to define, for each accelerator you are relying on, what evidence would show the effect rather than the activity. For urgency, that might be leaders outside the change team spontaneously citing the opportunity. For the volunteer army, it is people joining the effort without being nominated. For short-term wins, it is the win being retold by people who were not involved in it.

That evidence question is also the bridge to change analytics, and it is why the redesigned accelerators — concurrent processes rather than a checklist — resist step-completion reporting by design.