It depends on the change to be made. If you are trying to "go Agile", then that softly-softly, socialization-based approach is the right way to do it.

If the company is about to go bankrupt because of an external incident (like the tourism industry during the pandemic), then it needs to be urgent, centralized and consistently communicated because if it's softly-softly and everyone's off noodling around doing their own thing, it's not going to work. AirBNB survived, at least in large part, thanks to their swift and decisive pivot to online experiences.

You're talking about decades of research and then saying the "sense of urgency" stemming from decades of research makes no sense. I've seen Kotter's writings work in practice ... in the right circumstances. If it's a campaign to get people to recycle more, then your way is fine.