The Heart of Change: See-Feel-Change, and What the Research Says

What the book argues

The Heart of Change: Real-Life Stories of How People Change Their Organizations is by John P. Kotter and Dan S. Cohen. Harvard Business School Press published it on August 1, 2002 (Harvard Business Review Press, n.d.; Open Library, n.d.).

The publisher's description gives the argument in a few lines. Transforming an organization means changing more than its structure and operations. Change efforts fail when leaders rely too exclusively on data and analysis to win people over. What works better, the authors argue, is what they call the see-feel-change dynamic, and the book builds on Kotter's eight-step process from Leading Change, told through real stories of people in organizations (Harvard Business Review Press, n.d.). Publishers Weekly's review notes that the material is arranged by stage, with summaries at the end of each chapter, and that the authors treat changing people's behavior as the single biggest challenge (Publishers Weekly, 2002).

In my words: a slide deck rarely changes what people do on Monday. Seeing the problem with their own eyes, and feeling something about it, more often does.

Who it is for

Leaders who already know the eight steps and are stuck on the part where people have to act differently. The stories make it easier to read than Leading Change. It is less useful for someone looking for a method to diagnose why a specific change is not working, because it teaches by example rather than by tool.

What the research says

The book offers stories, not studies, and I found no test of the see-feel-change sequence itself in the evidence I use. Two questions can be checked: how Kotter's models are used in practice, and what research says about emotion during change.

In health care, Kotter's and other change models were often used as guides, not step by step. Harrison and colleagues (2021) reviewed 38 health care studies on change management models. According to their abstract, Kotter's model was the most used, in 19 studies, followed by Lewin's in 11, and the models were often applied as general guiding principles rather than step by step. That matters for this book: the one review I use, in health care, is evidence that people use Kotter's model, not that its sequence works better than the alternatives.

In one company, managers who feared their bosses shared less bad news. In the Atlas, Vuori and Huy's (2016) study of Nokia's smartphone effort is rated Medium. In that one company, researchers found that middle managers who feared their superiors and peers shared less bad news upward, while top managers did not fully reveal how serious the outside threat was. Leaders grew overly optimistic and the effort suffered. It is a qualitative case, so it shows how emotion worked in one setting, not how often. It supports the book's attention to feelings, with a twist the book does not stress: the feeling that blocked change there was fear, and it ran in both directions.

How leaders lead goes with how people react. Peng and colleagues (2021) pooled 30 studies. According to their abstract, transformational leadership went with more commitment and openness to change and less resistance and cynicism. The links were weaker for some outcomes in studies that followed people over time.

Where the evidence is thin

The see-feel-change dynamic is a claim drawn from interviews and stories, and I found no controlled test of it. The stories were chosen to illustrate the model, so they cannot show how often the approach fails. And as with Leading Change, the review I use shows that leaders use Kotter's ideas, not that the sequence is better than other ways of leading change. See the Atlas answer on emotions and change for what the research I track does show.

How it maps to the Unfrozen Loop

This mapping is my judgment. Seeing the problem directly fits Surface both ways, the part of the Unfrozen Loop about getting reality to travel up as well as down; the Nokia case shows what happens when it does not. Feeling the need for change together fits Make sense together, top included, where the people above say out loud what the change costs. And the culture ring (safe to speak, and speaking changes something) is the condition under which people will tell you what they actually feel.

What I take from it

The book is right that analysis alone rarely moves people, and the Nokia case supports the attention it pays to feelings. Where I would add to it is direction. As the publisher describes it, the book's advice is about leaders showing people something that makes them feel the need to change. The Nokia case is a reminder that leaders also need to feel what people below them already know. Before your next change, take the leadership group to see the problem where the work is done, and ask the people there what worries them. For the model it builds on, see Leading Change and Kotter's eight steps, and for the fable version, Our Iceberg Is Melting.