When the organisation fights itself
Kotter’s landmark 1996 research emphasises that even when urgency is high, the coalition is strong, the vision is clear, and communication is good, change will stop or slow if barriers to action are not removed. This is supported by Sirkin, Keenan, and Jackson’s Harvard Business Review research which found that removing barriers early is one of the four factors most strongly predicting change success.
Here is an example. A retail chain rolls out a new customer service model. Store managers are trained, materials distributed, and the CEO communicates the vision enthusiastically. Six months later, only 20 percent of stores consistently implement the new approach. The easy conclusion is that frontline staff “just don’t care.” However deeper inspection and speaking to staff can reveal a different truth. For example: an incentive system still rewards speed of transaction rather than quality of customer interaction — staff being financially penalised for doing what the new model requires; a scheduling algorithm does not allocate enough floor time for the customer engagement the model requires, and regional managers, who have not been part of the guiding coalition, privately tell store managers to “focus on the numbers, not the soft stuff”.
Beer and Nohria identified what they call the “silent killers” of change implementation: misaligned management practices, conflicting priorities, inadequate leadership skills at lower levels, and poor vertical communication. These killers are silent because they are invisible to senior leaders. They exist at the execution level — in the daily reality of middle managers and frontline teams who are told to change but are not given room to do so.
In Gestalt theory, systems resist change because the current way of operating serves some function. Barriers are not random; they exist because they serve someone’s interests or protect against some perceived risk. Understanding the function a barrier serves is the first step to addressing it — because simply removing it without addressing the underlying concern will generate new barriers elsewhere.
The Barrier Audit
In the retail chain example given above, the analysis of barriers to change could be fed back to the leadership team. This would ideally lead to redesigning incentive matrices; adjusting the scheduling system and involving the regional managers in the change coalition.
The lesson is clear: when organisations announce a change but do not realign the systems that govern daily behaviour — incentives, processes, reporting lines, resource allocation — they are asking people to act against their own interests. Most people will not do that for long, no matter how compelling the vision.
The Power of Early Wins
Barrier removal works fastest when paired with strategic short-term wins. Kotter’s research shows that without visible, unambiguous successes within six to 18 months, most change initiatives lose support. Wins serve multiple functions: they prove that sacrifices are worth it, they reward change agents, they undermine cynics, they build confidence, and they keep senior leadership actively engaged.
Researchers Reay, Golden-Biddle, and Germann found that the most effective wins share three characteristics: they are visible enough for large numbers of people to see, unambiguous enough that no one debates whether they are real, and clearly connected to the change effort.
In the psychology of change, one visible win is worth a thousand strategy documents. It converts belief into experience.
The Four-S Framework
A useful tool for thinking about barriers is the “four-S” model. These are: Structures (organisation design, reporting lines), Systems (incentives, IT, processes), Skills (capability gaps, training needs), and Supervisors (leadership alignment at all levels). Mapping barriers across these four categories can reveal what is holding the old way of working in place — and can identify the specific interventions that will create space for the new.
So rather than just asking, “Are people willing to change”, it is helpful to ask, “Are we making it possible for people in our organisation to change”. If the answer is no — if the incentives point one way while the vision points another, if the processes demand old behaviours while the strategy demands new ones — then you do not have a people problem, have a design problem, which would need to have its own solution.
At Thornhill Associates, we have a range of assessment tools and skilled facilitators who can help proactively manage your change process, blending both experience and theory for effective and long-lasting results.