War Stories with Kotter, Part 5: Create a Sense of Urgency

Picking up our series on Kotter's 8-Step Process for Leading Change, I was intrigued to learn more about his book, Our Iceberg is Melting. I didn't know much about it, but wanted to research whether or not it was worth picking up a copy. As an introduction to our next step, Create a Sense of Urgency, I turned to the internet for the backstory on John Kotter's other New York Times Bestseller.

Our Iceberg Is Melting: Changing and Succeeding Under Any Conditions

This book is described as a business 'fable' that illustrates the essentials of embracing change and adaptability. Co-authored by John Kotter and Holger Rathgeber in 2006, it uses a penguin colony as a metaphor to convey insights into workplaces and organisations. This immediately intrigued me, bringing to mind Who Moved my Cheese (1998) by Dr Spencer Johnson.

Set in Antarctica, a colony of emperor penguins resides happily on their iceberg where they've lived for generations before encountering a crisis. An observant penguin, Fred, discovers alarming signs of fissures, canals, and water-filled caves forming. Fred realises that if the water freezes and expands, it could crack the iceberg open, endangering everyone.

Fred brings his concern to Alice a penguin leader. Together, they visit the Leadership Council which hesitates, and proposes an investigative committee. Alice points out that it's a crisis, indecision could lead to disaster, and it won’t be acceptable to claim they weren’t sure of the problem.

Fred provides proof and urgency through a demonstration of the danger: freezing water inside a glass bottle, causing it to break. The leaders finally acknowledge the issue and call a general assembly, where Alice and Fred explain the situation to the colony. Most of the colony agrees, recognising the urgency. The Head Penguin assembles a multi-disciplinary team to manage the crisis, and through team-building exercises, they become a cohesive group.

What seems immediately obvious from the precis, is that Our Iceberg Is Melting seems to have been ahead of its time in representing the global response to climate change. But beyond that, it serves as a reminder that adaptability and collective effort are crucial when facing change.

Fittingly, of Kotter's 8 steps or Accelerators, today we look at creating a sense of urgency.

From the website https://www.kotterinc.com/methodology.

In some ways change managers may feel like there is too much urgency plumping up the change pipeline (see for example You're at change saturation. Should you stop changing?). And, in Go Slow to Go Fast: Slowing down to build relationships makes change faster we discuss what can happen when a change manager's sense of urgency is misaligned to the change audience and project team.

Kotter's encouragement is that a sense of urgency that creates panic or chaos is pointless. While not every change will - thankfully - be an existential threat, what is needed is alignment on the gravity and priority of the change, and on the organisation's focus and approach towards it.

In a large technology infrastructure program for a government department, I was brought in as change lead just after the market scan had been completed, crucial hires for the program were underway, and technology submissions were under consideration. The program had a multi-agency impacts, alongside major community interests which intersected with almost every other infrastructure program in the jurisdiction.

While most people agreed the need for technology was obvious, forward thinking, and necessary, not everyone agreed on specifically what problem it would be solving.

Create a Sense of Urgency: Inspire people to act with passion and purpose. Excite them about a bold, aspirational opportunity and a compelling vision of the future

In order to agree the opportunity we were working towards, we needed to align on a specific sense of what our problem was.

I firstly developed a change management approach and ensured I achieved senior stakeholder agreement on it—in this case, I ensured I received written endorsements from leadership. I then planned out the four-year program of work in broad strokes, including distilling a large program document library of various consulting opinions into an induction resource for staff and program stakeholders. This highlighted the focus areas in the opinions we had procured and enabled the team to align on what we had agreed with senior stakeholders were the guiding materials.

The change team then ran a series of workshops to establish shared delivery values and an aligned technology strategy. We designed detailed scenarios that illustrated the problem we'd agreed we were solving, conducted walkthroughs of the root cause, and gathered data that demonstrated the frontline experience of the problem also aligned with the senior stakeholder vision for the solution. These workshops later provided solid use case information, establishing another aligned throughline to inform solution design.

Conclusion on Kotter's Step: Create a Sense of Urgency

Just as Kotter's Emperor penguins seem to have done, the work in this change management assignment established an alignment on what the sense of urgency was all about. It resolved the 'general sense' into a specific opportunity, allowing people to collaborate on the problem and solution. It enabled the stakeholders and team to become inspired by the technology's opportunities to build a future that eliminated the problem.

This alignment across the key workstreams, the inter-agency stakeholders, the delivery team, the frontline experience and the sponsors was important to have in place prior to a significant government spend.

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