Leading Change and Crisis

Strategies and reorganisations look tidy on paper, yet most stall. They stall not because the plan is wrong but because change asks people to give up something familiar for something uncertain, and leaders underestimate how much reassurance and repetition that takes.

A crisis compresses all of this. Decisions must be made fast, fear runs high, and people watch their leaders closely for signals about whether to trust the path forward. The skills are the same as in ordinary change, urgency, communication, and support, but the margin for error is smaller.

Why change is hard

Change is situational; transition is the psychological process people go through to come to terms with it. William Bridges, in Managing Transitions, distinguishes the two and notes that every beginning starts with an ending, people must let go before they can take hold of something new. Ignore that inner process and even a sound plan meets resistance.

Creating urgency

Kotter argues that most change fails at the very first step: leaders do not establish a real sense of urgency. Without it, people cling to the comfortable status quo, and a change effort never gathers the energy it needs. Urgency is not manufactured panic; it is an honest, shared understanding of the opportunity or the threat.

Communicating relentlessly

Leaders routinely under-communicate the vision, by a factor of ten in Kotter's memorable phrase. A single memo or town hall cannot compete with the daily noise of ordinary work. Change requires the message repeated in many forms and, crucially, leaders whose actions match their words.

Supporting people through it

People can only cross uncertainty if obstacles are removed, small wins are made visible, and someone acknowledges the loss they feel. Empowering action and creating short-term wins are Kotter's fifth and sixth steps; together they turn belief into momentum.

A hospital must adopt a new records system. The director opens not with software but with urgency: current errors are harming patients. She builds a coalition of respected doctors and nurses, repeats the reason in every meeting, retires the old system so there is no fallback, and celebrates the first ward that goes live. Within months the change holds, because people understood it and were carried through it.

A retail chain's chief executive emails staff that the company is 'going digital', names a project team, and moves on. There is no urgency people actually feel, the vision is mentioned once, middle managers quietly keep the old routines, and early problems are read as proof it will never work. The plan was reasonable; the leadership of it was absent, and it dies within a year.

John Kotter, a Harvard Business School professor, studied why corporate transformations fail and published his findings in a 1995 Harvard Business Review article, expanded into the book Leading Change (1996). He observed that a large majority of major change efforts fall short, and traced the failures to a repeatable set of errors. His eight-step model reframes them as actions: establish urgency, build a guiding coalition, form a vision, communicate it widely, empower action by removing obstacles, generate short-term wins, consolidate gains without declaring victory too early, and anchor the new approach in the culture. Two themes run through it, begin with urgency, and communicate far more than feels necessary. Kotter later updated the framework in Accelerate (2014). His core lesson endures: change fails for human reasons, so it must be led, not merely announced.

• 'A good plan sells itself.' Logic rarely overcomes fear; people need the plan repeated and modelled.
• 'Announcing change is leading change.' The announcement is the start, not the job.
• 'Resistance means people are difficult.' It usually means they see a loss you have not yet addressed.
• 'Once it launches, you can move on.' Declaring victory too soon is a classic way that change unravels.

Think of a change you want people to make. In two sentences, write the honest reason it matters now, the opportunity or the cost of standing still, in words your team would actually feel. If your real reason is 'because I said so', you have not found the urgency yet.

Think Like a Maester: In change, a leader who believes they have communicated enough has usually communicated about a tenth of what people need to hear.

1. According to Bridges, what is the difference between change and transition?
2. Which step does Kotter identify as the one most change efforts get wrong first?
3. Why does Kotter warn leaders against declaring victory too early?
4. What does it mean to under-communicate the vision by a factor of ten?
5. Name two ways a leader can support people through the uncertainty of change.

Change is hard because it asks people to end something familiar before beginning something new. Leaders who guide it well start by making the reason urgent and shared, build a coalition, and then communicate far past the point they think necessary while removing obstacles and marking early wins. Kotter's eight-step model, drawn from studying why transformations fail, captures the pattern; a crisis simply raises the stakes. Change must be led through people, not pushed at them.

• Risk, Resilience, and Crisis
• Becoming a Leader Worth Following