5: Change Management in a VUCA World

Achieving success with organizational change initiatives has always been difficult, with research suggesting that up to 70% of change programs that were investigated had failed.¹ Leading change in today’s VUCA world has become even more challenging. Leaders can appreciate that the nature of organizational change is going to be different in the rapidly changing, turbulent and disruptive world or work, and will require a radical rethink of how they plan for, and implement, change.

With planned changes in organizations, models like Lewin’s unfreeze-change-refreeze, or Kotter’s eight steps (see Figure 5.1) provide leaders with the basic building blocks to design a planned change. Yet, even in relatively stable and predictable conditions, successful change is not easy to accomplish. Kotter’s eight steps provide a solution to each of the eight primary reasons for change failure that his research identified, namely: