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FAILURE OF CHANGES,
CHARACTERISTICS OF
EFFECTIVE CHANGE

1/23/2015
Kotter’s 8 Step Change Model

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 Kotter’s 8 Step Change Model
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STEP 1

CREATE URGENCY

In Kotter’s Words: Create a Sense of Urgency

Helping others see the need for change &

the importance of acting quickly
 Kotter’s 8 Step Change Model
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STEP 2

BUILD A GUIDING TEAM

In Kotter’s Words: Build a Guiding Coalition

Ensuring there is a powerful group, with the

appropriate leadership skills, credibility & authority to
guide the change process
 Kotter’s 8 Step Change Model
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STEP 3

CREATE A VISION FOR CHANGE

In Kotter’s Words: Form a Strategic Vision and

Initiatives

Creating a picture of the future & how it

will be different from the present
 Kotter’s 8 Step Change Model
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STEP 4

COMMUNICATE THE CHANGE VISION

In Kotter’s Words: Enlist a Volunteer Army

Ensuring everyone understands

& accepts the vision
 Kotter’s 8 Step Change Model
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STEP 5

REMOVE OBSTACLES

In Kotter’s Words: Enable Action by Removing

Barriers

Removing the barriers to making change successful

 Kotter’s 8 Step Change Model
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STEP 6

CREATE ‘SHORT TERM WINS’

In Kotter’s Words: Generate Short-Term Wins

Create clear, visible success stories early in the

process
 Kotter’s 8 Step Change Model
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STEP 7

CONSOLIDATE GAINS &

PRODUCE MORE CHANGE – DON’T LET UP

In Kotter’s Words: Sustain Acceleration

Recognise more change opportunities following the

‘quick wins’ to take full advantage of the momentum
for change
 Kotter’s 8 Step Change Model
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STEP 8

ANCHOR THE NEW APPROACHES

IN THE CULTURE

In Kotter’s Words: Institute Change

Ensure the new ways of behaving are recognised &

rewarded to embed the change into the
organisational culture
Kotter’s 8 Step Change Model

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 Applying Kotter 8-Step Change
Model
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 Failure of Change - Reasons
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 Lack of Knowledge
 Lack of Skill and practice
 Hidden Conflict working against change
 Culture working against change
 Lack of Plan
 Weak follow through
 Not investing resources
 But What is the Key
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Reason..???

Technology

People

Process
 Transition Steps
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 Review current roles and jobs

 Review new skills needed
 Assess skills and roles to support new process
 Determine skill gaps
 Review organisational jobs and roles
 Suggest methods for updating skills
 Obtain agreement regarding the new job
 Support transition
 Why Transformation Efforts Fail
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 Error 1: Not Establishing a Great Enough Sense of

Urgency
 Error 2: Not Creating a Powerful Enough Guiding
Coalition
 Error 3: Lacking a Vision
 Error 4: Under communicating the Vision by a
Factor of Ten
 Error 5: Not Removing Obstacles to the New
Vision
 Why Transformation Efforts Fail
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 Error 6: Not Systematically Planning for, and

Creating, Short-Term Wins
 Error 7: Declaring Victory Too Soon
 Error 8: Not Anchoring Changes in the
Corporation’s Culture
 Failure of Change can be due to
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 Lack of vision: When the corporate vision and/or

strategies are unclear, people are unsure about
how to interpret major new directives.
 A history of poor implementation: When there is a
track record of poorly implemented endeavours,
people tend not to expect much when new
changes are announced.
 Lack of middle-management support: When
midlevel managers are not enrolled in the change
process and lack a sense of involvement and
ownership, change objectives are jeopardized.
 Failure of Change can be due to
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 Lack of understanding or belief: When people

don’t understand or believe in changes being
attempted, they typically don’t support them.
 An environment of low risk taking: When there is a
tendency to overly punish errors or reward their
absence, people tend to avoid change.
 No consequence management: Where there are
few negative consequences for failing to comply,
people usually ignore new directives.
 Failure of Change can be due to
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 Lack of clear communications: When information

is allowed to filter down unmanaged, it often
becomes diffused and less specific and is open to
interpretation.
 Lack of planning for and management of
resistance: When overt resistance is not
acknowledged and managed properly, it goes
underground, creating slowdowns, malicious
compliance, or even outright sabotage.
 Lack of time: When insufficient time is allowed for
implementation, problems prevail and the
maintenance costs for change are high.
 Failure of Change can be due to
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 Poor follow-through: When projects are started

with much fanfare but there is no follow-through o
their finish, a legacy is created that threatens
future change efforts.
 Lack of synergy: When interdependence is not
recognized between key players or groups,
engaging change in one area will often cause
resistance from another.
 Rhetoric unsupported by actions: When leaders
say one thing but their behaviour suggests the
opposite, change goals are difficult to reach.
 Role Definitions During Change
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 Initiating sponsor
 The individual or group who strategically
legitimizes implementation of a change, either
within several major areas of the organization or
enterprise wide. Sponsors (regardless of their
level) sanction initiatives through influential
communications and meaningful consequences.
 Role Definitions During Change
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 Primary sustaining sponsor:

 The individual or group who formally sanctions the
change within relevant areas of responsibility,
providing a “united front” of leadership support for
the endeavour and coordinating implementation
activities (across functional or geographical lines
as necessary).
 Role Definitions During Change
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 Local sustaining sponsor:

 The individual or group who orchestrates the
communications and consequences within
relevant tactical areas of responsibility necessary
to ensure successful change implementation.
 Role Definitions During Change
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 Change agent:
 The individual or group who facilitates the
development and execution of the implementation
plans.
 Target:
 The individual or group who must actually change.
 Advocate:
 The individual or group who wants to achieve a
change but does not possess the necessary
legitimization power.
 Relationships Among Key Roles in
the Change Process
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 Characteristics of Highly Effective
Change Leaders
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 Low Level of Anxiety

 Emotional Stability
 Action Orientation
 Confidence
 Openness
 Risk Tolerance
 Characteristics of Change
management
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 Resistance
 Consistent Communication
 Training and Goal setting
 Recognition
 Characteristics of organisational
change management team
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 Lead by example
 Recognize achievements
 Promote accountability
 Include change agent
 Communicate effectively
 Change Curve
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 Our Iceberg is Melting
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 Norfolk Southern
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 The Norfolk Southern Railway is a Class I railroad

in the United States, owned by the Norfolk
Southern Corporation. With headquarters in
Norfolk, Virginia
 Norfolk Southern serves domestic and
international customers.
 As a leading transportation provider, Norfolk
Southern operates 20,000 route miles in 22 states
and D.C., supports international trade with service
to every major Eastern seaport, 10 river ports, and
nine lake ports, and operates the most extensive
intermodal network in the East.
 Norfolk Southern: Case Study
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 When Katie Frazier first joined Norfolk Southern’s

Atlanta terminal, she felt it was running well but still
felt more could be done to improve operations. She
was also concerned about safety issues.
 As she got comfortable in her new job, she was
wracking her brain, struggling with how to help the
company take its safety and operations standards
from just “good enough” to a higher level.
 One day, while in a local bookstore’s business
section, she noticed a book with penguins on the
cover. Penguins had always been her favourite
animal, but she wondered what such a book was
doing surrounded by books on management!
 Norfolk Southern: Case Study
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 The book, needless to say, was “Our Iceberg Is

Melting.” Once she started reading it, she thought to
herself, “wow, this is really helpful.”
 She noticed that behaviors in her company sometimes
mirrored the penguins’ behaviors, for
example, people would see a complex problem, and
then either ignore it or wait for someone else to fix it.
 Katie thought that if she could get other people in the
company to read the book, it might be a big help in
giving people perspective on the bigger picture. Katie,
being one of the few relatively young workers around,
faced an enormous challenge in getting her older co-
workers to buy in to the notion that penguins could
help the organization.
 Norfolk Southern: Case Study
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 There were many skeptics. She showed the book

to her manager, a former Marine. He told her
that the book was something his granddaughter
might read, not something he would value as a
business leader.
 Katie persevered and insisted that he read it. After
her manager actually did, he quickly began to
realize the same lessons could apply at Norfolk
Southern.
 He gave Katie approval to start applying the
learnings.
 Norfolk Southern: Case Study -
Step 1
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 Katie started by trying to create a sense of

urgency around a willingness to raise safety and
operational standards.
 Through evaluation of these problems, not only by
Katie but also by the broader leadership team,
people began to feel that urgency was more than
just the latest fad.
 That process of raising the urgency level inside
the Atlanta terminal of Norfolk Southern took about
2 months from start to finish.
 Norfolk Southern: Case Study -
Step 2
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 After sufficient urgency was raised, a guiding coalition

formed made up of a few conductors, engineers &
supervisors. Katie’s fear was that the group was too
homogenous – she actually wanted to include a few of
the company’s more skeptical employees to get their
feedback and help strengthen the group’s decision
making.
 The Guiding Coalition began meeting regularly and
called themselves “The Iceberg Group.” This group
started out small, but eventually grew to have about 9
people, changing over time, from different parts of the
organization, meeting regularly to see how to
implement the rest of the 8 Steps.
 Norfolk Southern: Case Study -
Step 3
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 The vision that the group created was designed to

change everyone’s mentality and attitude about
safety. Injuries could not be treated as an
acceptable risk at a railroad – they had to be
reduced in order to get the railroad’s efficiency up
and costs down.
 Norfolk Southern: Case Study -
Step 4
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 Communicating this vision was a constant battle,

since most of a railroad’s employees are on the move
at any given time. Furthermore, most of the crew
members did not have access to modern
communications like e-mail.
 As a result, the vision was communicated through a
vehicle called “job briefings,” where the days weather
& track conditions were discussed for crews about to
go out on to the tracks. These briefings happen 3
times a day, at the beginning of every shift.
 The Iceberg Group started communicating the change
vision at job briefings, around the clock, for two weeks
straight. Over time, every crew member was touched
by the vision multiple times, right at their point of
highest awareness – before going out to work on the
 Norfolk Southern: Case Study -
Step 5
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 The largest barrier Katie felt she needed to

overcome were related to the concept of raising
the bar on safety standards – how can you make
people really care about the highest possible
safety standards, when current standards are
already high? The way to do it, she said, was to
make it personal – get to the heart and not just the
mind.
 They forced people to think about their families
and how they would feel about an injury to their
loved ones. Over time, the message began to sink
in and people started to change their
behaviour. This created a high level of
 Norfolk Southern: Case Study -
Step 6
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 The Iceberg Group set a goal for a short term win –

six months injury free and communicated it broadly.
Since the inception of the Iceberg Group’s work, with
the exception of a small muscle pull, the Atlanta
terminal has gone almost 9 months injury free.
 Other outcomes resulted as well, for example,
because the terminal became so proficient, they’ve
never had to reduce the number of shifts running,
even as other companies have cut back.
 With injuries down about 97% over last year, the
Atlanta terminal has had fewer missed days of work,
fewer injury-related costs and more productive
workers, enabling it to gain a critical advantage over
the competition.
 Norfolk Southern: Case Study -
Step 7&8
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 Even with this success, the Atlanta terminal isn’t

content to let up. As they continue to move
through the 8 Step process, they hope to make the
change permanent by anchoring these new
changes into the culture.
 The Iceberg Group continues to meet, looking for
other ways in which they can help the company
improve its operations, and hopefully, spread the
Iceberg philosophy to other divisions of the
company
 Norfolk Southern - Vision
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 Be the safest, most customer-focused, and

successful transportation company in the world
 Norfolk Southern believes having a vision helps
create prosperity. It pushes boundaries, creates
new possibilities, and challenges people to roll up
their sleeves and do what it takes to achieve
goals.
 Hmm…
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