Here is a brief excerpt from a classic article written by John A. Kotter and published in Harvard Business Review (March 1995). To read the complete article, check out others, sign up for email alerts, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

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Years ago, during my interview of John Kotter, he told me that perhaps the most difficult challenge for change agents  is to change how people think about change. Many (if not most)  workers become hostage to what James O’Toole so aptly characterizes as “the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom.”

In this article, Kotter observes that the most general lesson to be learned from the several hundred change projects in which he was centrally involved is that “the change process goes through a series of phases that, in total, usually require a considerable length of time. Skipping steps creates only the illusion  of speed and never produces a satisfying result. A second very general lesson is that critical mistakes in any of the phases can have a devastating impact, slowing momentum and negating hard-won gains. Perhaps because we have relatively little experience in renewing organizations, even very capable people often make at least one big error.”

Here are the eight separate but interdependent steps to transforming almost any organization:

l. Establishing a sense of urgency
2. Forming a powerful guiding [leadership] coalition
3. Creating a [compelling] vision
4. Effectively communicating the vision
5. Empowering others to act on the vision
6. Planning for and creating short-term wins
7. Consolidating [building upon] improvements and producing still more change
8. Institutionalizing new [perspectives and] approaches

“There are more mistakes that people make, but these eight are the big ones. I realize that in a short article everything is made to sound a bit too simplistic. In reality, even successful change efforts are messy ands full oƒ surprises. But just as a relatively simple viusion is needed to guide people through a major changed, so a vision of the change process can reduce the error rate. And fewer errors can spell the difference between success and failure.”

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

John Kotter is the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership, Emeritus, at the Harvard Business School, an author, and the founder of Kotter International, a management consulting firm based in Seattle and Boston. He is a thought leader in business, leadership, and change.