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By John Kotter

This introductory section is for readers who would like to know more about the evolution of the ideas in this book and the evidence supporting them. If you are not one of those readers, I suggest you consider skipping this section and go directly to Chapter 1.

The roots of the work that led to Change began decades ago. At first, I was not focused on change. My interest then, and still today, was on performance, broadly defined. Why do some organizations outperform others? Why do some individual managers and executives produce so much more in terms of valued results? What allows individuals and enterprises to sustain high levels of performance over time? The research itself pulled my attention to the subjects of change and leadership. It provided compelling evidence again and again that the world was moving faster. Coping with the reality of that acceleration was one crucial factor at the core of performance.

Over nearly 50 years, my colleagues at Harvard Business School, and more recently my associates at Kotter International, the consulting firm I helped co-found, have in total launched 16 multiyear research projects. I estimate that we have studied in some depth well over 600 organizations. Most were businesses, but far from all. Research sites also included entities from the health, education, government, religious, and other nonprofit sectors. We have studied countless individual professionals, managers, and executives up close, again mostly but far from entirely in business. Indeed, the very first study in this program was of 20 big-city mayors who were in office during the tumultuous 1960s.

Although the details of how we gathered information varied from project to project, one commonality was an emphasis on getting case-study-like detail using observation and interviews. No project relied entirely on surveys or data sets created by others. The method for making sense of this information might formally be called qualitative pattern analysis. There has been a relentless focus on identifying the sequence of actions that drive successes and failures.

I believe this research program, studying organizational successes and struggles up close in a more rapidly changing world, is the largest of its kind ever undertaken.

In addition, during the last decade, through the Kotter International consulting organization, we have been able to turn research results into accessible playbooks. While working beside people executing those playbooks, we have seen, in detail, how well our expanded understanding of change can make a difference in practical terms. The results: in project after project, we have found executives say something along the lines of the subtitle of this book. In the words of one: “What we have accomplished would have been very hard for most of the staff to ever believe possible two or three years ago.”

Reports of our work have been shared through a variety of outlets, including educational programs, Harvard Business Review articles, speeches, blogs, and the mainstream press, but most robustly through books; 21 have been published, and 12 of these have been bestsellers. Our Iceberg Is Melting and A Sense of Urgency made the New York Times list. Iceberg was the number-one business book in Germany for a year and in Holland for more than a year.

Lists of the best business or management books of the year have honored 13 of these research reports. Inc. magazine, the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, strategy+business, and the Chartered Management Institute, for example, all selected Accelerate (2014) as a best-of-year book. Leading Change (1996), perhaps the most well known of these reports, has been translated into 26 languages and was chosen by Time magazine as one of the 25 most influential management books ever written.

The latest project, which led to this manuscript, formally began four years ago with the formation of a study group at Kotter International that focused on the newest insights from brain science. We quickly concluded that this line of research had developed a great deal in the prior two decades. We decided that there was much convergence in this work with our own observations about “human nature” and its role in resisting or facilitating change and innovation.

Further, it appeared that the combination of insights from brain science, our multidecade research program, a growing list of major consulting experiences, and some pioneering work in business history, organizational studies, leadership, and social anthropology had many important implications for why people struggle with change and what leaders can do to mobilize more successful responses to threats and opportunities. This perspective also gave us new insights into the underlying causal dynamics behind observations we have recorded again and again about why some enterprises outperform others.

And more than ever, this latest round of research has not only strengthened the evidence behind certain propositions but extended previous work in very new and highly actionable ways.

Some of the key themes explored in the pages that follow include:

 A more rapid and complex changing environment, including what is now called disruptive change, may be not just one factor but the central force shaping the challenges that organizations and people face nowadays.

 Neither human nature, nor the most common form of the modern organization, are designed to handle anything close to this degree of change. Instead, the strongest built-in emphasis is on stability, efficiency, reliability, quick threat elimination, and most of all short-term survival.

 As a result, there is a growing gap between the rate, amount, and complexity of change outside organizations and the ability of the hardwired enterprise and our human capacity to keep up. This gap presents both a danger and an opportunity as organizations work to agilely adjust, adapt, and get ahead of these contextual realities.

 Nevertheless, at least some enterprises (perhaps many) can be guided to close or reduce this gap. These companies can handle rapid change significantly better than the norm and astonishingly better than those struggling the most. They can be equipped to see relevant external change quickly, invent or adapt responses with speed, and get results that are hard for even their own people to imagine.

 Intentionally and thoughtfully improving individual, team, and organizational ability to respond and accelerate, even just a bit, could have a momentous effect on the lives of many, many millions of people worldwide.

 Over the past few decades, especially in the last four years, we have learned a great deal that has yet to be widely used. Our latest research and advisory-based experiences confirm for the first time that there is a growing science to change, especially large-scale change, which we clearly need to understand and implement as quickly as possible.

Our goal in Change is to show, in a concrete and actionable way, how this emerging science—with roots in neuroscience, organizational studies, business history, leadership, and more—can be understood and used to make a much-needed difference.

The list of people who have helped with this work is a long one. It starts with my colleagues at Harvard and extends to my associates and clients at Kotter International. I have been able to include some of these acknowledgments at the end of this book. For now, let me extend to all my deepest thanks.

John Kotter, March 2021