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John Kotters Eight-Stage Change Model John Kotter (1996; Kotter & Cohen, 2002) has described a successful

model for understanding and managing change. According to Kotter , a general lesson learned from successful cases of organizational change is that the change process goes through a series of phases that, taken together, require a length of time. Skipping steps will only create the illusion of speed and never produce sat isfactory results, according to Kotter. Making mistakes in any of the phases may have devastating impact, slowing momentum and negating gains. Each stage acknowledges a key principle identified by Kotter, relating to peoples response and approach to change, how people see, feel, and then change. Kotters eightstep change model can be summarized as follows: 1. Establish a sense of urgency--inspire people to move, making objectives real and relevant. A threat of losing ground in some way sparks people into action, and they in turn will communicate a sense of urgency to others. Kotter suggests that the urgency level is high enough when 75% of the leadership is convinced that business as usual is no longer an acceptable plan. 2. Build the guiding team--get the right people in place with the right emotional commitment, and the right mix of skills and levels. Efforts for change may begin with one or two people. Regardless of the size of the organization, this beginning group for change needs to have three to five individuals leading the effort. This teams sense of urgency and sense of whats happening and what is needed is crucial. Involve leaders in this beginning coalition. 3. Get the vision right--get the team to establish a simple vision and strategy and focus on emotional and creative aspects necessary to drive service and efficiency. Successful transformation rests on a vision of the future that is relatively easy to communicate and appeals to customers, stockholders, and employees. The vision will clarify th e direction in which the organization needs to go. What is needed is a vision that can be communicated to someone in five minutes or less and that gets a reaction that shows both understanding and interest. 4. Communicate for buy-in--involve as many people as possible and communicate the essentials simply to appeal and respond to peoples needs. De-clutter communications--make technology work for you rather than against you. Kotter suggests that leadership estimate how much communication of the vision is ne eded and multiply that effort by ten. Use every existing communication channel and opportunity.

5. Empower action--Remove obstacles, enable constructive feedback and lots of support from leaders, and reward and recognize progress and achievements. Organization members need to be allowed to make changes in their areas of involvement. Budget money needs to be allocated to the new initiative. Remove any obstacles there may be to get on with the change. 6. Create short-term wins--set aims in bite-size chunks that are easy to achieve. Create a manageable number of initiatives. Finish current stages before starting new ones. Commitments to produce short -term wins will keep the urgency level up. 7. Dont let up; consolidate improvements and sustain momentum for change--foster and encourage determination and persistence, ongoing change, and ongoing progress reporting, highlighting achieved and future milestones. However, premature declaration of victory may kill momentum and allow the old system to regain ground. Leaders of successful efforts use the feeling of victory as motivation to explore their organization more deeply, moving people committed to new ways into key roles. Leaders need to keep in mind that the process may take years. 8. Make change stick; institutionalize the new approaches-reinforce the value of successful change via recruitment, promotion, and new change leaders. Weave change into culture. Change sticks when it becomes the way we do things around here. Two factors are particularly important for institutionalizing new changes: a conscious attempt to show how the new approaches, behaviors, and attitudes helped improve the organization, and ensuring that the next generation of leaders believes in and embodies the changes. Each of the stages involves many smaller steps. Steps 1 through 4 involve a defrosting of the hardened status quo. During steps 5 through 7, new practices are introduced. The changes need to be grounded in the culture during step 8.

THE OD ACTION RESEARCH (AR) PROCESS Action Research is a process which serves as a model for most OD interventions. French and Bell (1995) describe Action Research as a "process of systematically collecting research data about an ongoing system relative to some objective, goal, or need of that system; feeding these data back into the system; taking actions by altering selected variables within the system based both on the data and on hypotheses; and evaluating the results of actions by collecting more data." The steps in Action Research are: 1. Entry. This phase consists of finding needs for change within an organization. It is also the time to quickly grasp the nature of the organization, identify the appropriate decision maker, and build a trusting relationship. 2. Start-up and contracting. In this step, critical success factors and the real issues are identified. We link into the organization's culture and processes, and clarify roles for the consultant(s) and employees. This is also the time to deal with resistance within the organization. A formal or informal contract will define the change process. 3. Assessment and diagnosis. Here data is collected to find the opportunities and problems in the organization. This is also the time for the consultant to make a diagnosis, in order to recommend appropriate interventions. 4. Feedback. This two-way process serves to tell what was found out, based on an analysis of the data. Everyone who contributed information should have an opportunity to learn about the findings of the assessment process (provid ed there is no apparent breach of anyone's confidentiality.) The feedback should start with the executive client and his/her team. Usually it is cascaded down through the organization to reach all who have participated. This provides an opportunity for the organization's people to become involved in the change process, to learn about how different parts of the organization affect each other, and to participate in selecting appropriate change interventions.

5. Planning Change. In this step recommendations are distilled from the assessment and feedback. Alternative actions are considered and the focus of the intervention(s) is on activities that have the most leverage to effect positive change in the organization. An implementation plan is developed that is based on the assessment data, is logically organized, results- oriented, measurable and

rewarded. The next step is to plan for a participative decision -making process for the intervention. 6. Intervention. Now, and only now, the actual change process is carried out. It is important to follow the action plan, yet remain flexible enough to modify the process as the organization changes and as new information emerges. 7. Evaluation. Successful OD must have made meaningful changes in the performance and efficiency of the people and their organization. An evaluation procedure to verify this success, identify needs for new or continuing OD activities, and improve the OD process itself to help make future interventions more successful is needed. 8. Adoption. After steps have been made to change the organization and plans have been formulated, follow-up is started by implementing processes to insure that this remains an ongoing activity within the organization, that commitments for action have been obtained, and that they will be carried out. 9. Separation. It must recognize when it is more productive for the client and consultant to undertake other activities, and when continued consu ltation is counterproductive. The change should be monitored for its success possibly to plan for future change activities. Following these sequential steps is the ideal way to do AR. But AR is tricky in that the organization is dynamic and changes happen while we are in the middle of assessing it. Flexibility while keeping the integrity of the process as much as possible it is the art of the process. OD professionals need to know how and be ready to change their strategy when necessary. Often they will have to move back and repeat previous steps in light of new information, new influences, or because of the changes that have al ready been made. But for successful OD to take place, all of these steps must be followed. It works best if they are taken in the order described. And, since learning is really an iterative, not a sequential process, we must be prepared to re -enter this process when and where appropriate.

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