Develop a change model presentation: a planning guide

The word that decides this assignment is create. You are asked to investigate the change models now in use, evaluate them, and then create a model appropriate to your field and your organisation's culture. Reproducing Kotter's eight steps with your organisation's name in the header is not creating a model; it is applying one, and the rubric is written to catch the difference. What creation looks like in practice is a defensible synthesis: take the elements that fit your setting, discard the ones that do not, add whatever your culture demands that none of the published models supply, and be explicit about each of those three decisions. The evaluation you did is what licenses the model you built, so show it. A slide comparing three or four models against the constraints of your organisation is the cheapest way to demonstrate that the synthesis was reasoned.

The published models are worth knowing properly rather than in summary, because the differences between them are where your justification will come from. Lewin's unfreeze, change, refreeze is short and its central claim is about reversion: change decays back to the prior state unless the new state is deliberately consolidated. Kotter's eight steps front-load urgency, coalition and vision, and back-load consolidation. A systematic review of change management models in healthcare found both dominating the field, found programmes aligned more closely with Kotter reported as successful more often, and, importantly, declined to name any model as preferred. Its conclusion was that having a guiding framework with room to adapt mattered more than which framework it was. That finding is the strongest possible support for an assignment that asks you to build your own, and it is worth quoting on the evaluation slide, because it turns your synthesis from a student exercise into the thing the evidence actually recommends.

Six principles are named as the things your model will be evaluated on, and every one of them has to be visible in the diagram rather than only in the narration. Methods for determining whether a modification is required means your model needs a front end that senses a problem, not just a response to one somebody else identified. Criteria for selecting individuals or teams means naming how people are chosen, not that they are. Methods of communication, strategies for securing stakeholder support and overcoming opposition, strategies for implementation, and strategies for longevity complete the list. Draw the model, then check each of the six against it with a finger, and if any of them is not represented as a step, a loop or a gate, the model is incomplete regardless of how good it looks.

The graphic organiser is a real deliverable and its form should follow the argument. A flow chart suits a model whose sequence is the point, and a concept map suits one whose relationships are the point. Two features are worth building in whichever you choose. The first is at least one loop, because a linear diagram cannot express the sensing function the first principle requires, nor the reassessment that longevity depends on. The second is a decision point with a stated criterion, since overcoming opposition and selecting teams are both decisions rather than activities. A model that is a straight line of boxes will satisfy nobody, because it describes a project rather than a way of handling change, and the assignment asks for the latter. Label every arrow, too, since an unlabelled arrow in a change model is where the reader is expected to supply the mechanism you were asked to design.

The closing question is the interesting one and it contains a trap. Explain why this paradigm will result in long-term change when most change programmes fail. The premise, usually quoted as a seventy per cent failure rate, is far weaker than its ubiquity suggests. It traces back to an unscientific estimate in a 1993 management book, and the academic work that followed the citation trail found no valid empirical basis for it, with each source citing another that also had none. You can handle this two ways and both are strong. Answer the question as posed while noting the figure's provenance, or reframe it: change efforts fail for identifiable reasons, and your model should answer those reasons rather than a percentage. Either way, do not repeat the statistic as established fact. Checking a number that everybody quotes, and saying what you found, is the kind of thing that reads as graduate-level work in a deck that otherwise looks like every other deck.

On deliverables and format, count them before you build. A visual model in a graphic organiser of your choosing, a fifteen to twenty slide PowerPoint presenting that model and demonstrating its fit to your organisation's culture, and an explanation of why it produces long-term change. APA formatting, no abstract. Fifteen to twenty slides across six principles plus context, evaluation and justification is roughly two slides per principle, which is enough for a statement and an example and nothing more, so write the speaker notes rather than crowding the slides. One last thing the brief tells you and it changes how you should build: this change model will be used in your final paper. Make it something you would be willing to defend at more length later, which in practice means keeping the number of steps small enough to explain in a paragraph and specific enough that somebody could follow them.