Using Kotter's Eight Stage Process to Manage an Organisational Change Program : Presentation and Practice

Kotter's Eight Stage Process for Creating a Major Change is one of the most widely recognized models for Change Management, and yet there are few case studies in the academic literature that inquire into how this Process has been used in practice. This paper describes a Change Manager's Action Research inquiring into the use of this Process to manage a major organisational change. The change was initiated in response to the organisation's ageing workforce, introducing a knowledge management program focusing the interpersonal aspects of knowledge retention. Although Kotter's Process emphasizes a top-led model for change, the change team found it was necessary to engage at many levels of the organisation to implement the organisational change. The Process is typically depicted as a linear sequence of steps. However, this image of the change process was found to not represent the complexity of the required action. Managing the change required the change team to facilitate multiple concurrent instances of Kotter's Process throughout the organisation, to re-create change that was locally relevant to participants in the change process