Helping Change Happen. (Within an Organisation)
Steps in the Process
Step One Increase urgency
Step Two Build the Guiding Team
Step Three Get the Vision Right
Step Four Communicate for Buy-in
Step Five Empower Action
Step Six Create Short-Term Wins
Step Seven Don’t Let Up
Step Eight Make Change Stick
Stage One: Increase Urgency - Raise a feeling of urgency so that people say “let’s go” making a change effort well positioned for launch.
What Works:
Showing others the need for change with a compelling object that they can actually see, touch, and feel.
Showing people valid and dramatic evidence from outside the organisation that demonstrates that change is required.
Looking for cheap and easy ways to reduce complacency.
Never underestimating how much complacency and anger exists, even in good organisations.
What Doesn’t Work:
Focussing exclusively on building a “rational business case, getting top management approval and racing ahead while mostly ignoring all the feelings that are blocking change.
Ignoring a lack of urgency and jumping immediately to creating a vision and strategy.
Believing that without a crisis or burning platform you can go nowhere.
Thinking that you can do little if you are not the head person.
Stage Two: Build the Guiding Team - Help form a group that has the capability - in membership and method of operating - to guide a very difficult change process.
What Works:
Showing enthusiasm and commitment (or helping someone do so) to help draw the right people into the group.
Modelling the trust and teamwork needed in the group (or helping someone else to do that)
Structuring meeting formats for the guiding team so as to minimise frustration and increase trust.
Putting your energy into Step One (Raising Urgency) if you cannot take on the Step Two challenge and if the right people will not.
What Doesn’t Work:
Guiding change with weak task forces, single individuals, complex governance structures, or fragmented top teams.
Not confronting the situation when momentum and entrenched power centres undermine the creation of the right group.
Trying to leave out or work around the head of the unit to be changed because he or she “is hopeless”.
Stage Three: Get the Vision Right - Create the right vision and strategies to guide action in all the remaining stages of change.
What Works:
Trying to see - literally - futures Visions that are so clear that they can be articulated in one minute or written up on one page.
Visions that are moving - such as commitment to serving people.
Strategies that are bold enough to make bold visions a reality.
Paying careful attention to the strategic question of how quickly to introduce change.
What Doesn’t Work:
Assuming that linear or logical plans and budgets alone adequately guide behaviour when you are trying to leap into the future.
Overly analytic, financially based vision exercises.
Visions of slashing costs, which can be emotionally depressing and anxiety creating.
Giving people fifty four logical reasons why they need to create strategies that are bolder than they have ever created before.
Stage Four: Communicate for Buy-in - Communicate change visions and strategies effectively so as to create both understanding and a gut-level buy-in.
What Works:
Keeping communications simple and heartfelt, not complex and technocratic.
Doing your homework before communicating, especially to understand what people are feeling.
Speaking to anxieties, confusion, anger, and distrust.
Ridding communication channels of junk so that important messages can go through.
Using new technologies to help people see the vision (intranet, satellites, etc)
What Doesn’t Work:
Under communicating, which happens all the time.
Speaking as if you are only transferring information.
Accidentally fostering cynicism by not walking the talk.
Stage Five: Empower Action - Deal effectively with obstacles that block action, especially disempowering bosses, lack of information, the wrong performance measurement and reward systems, and lack of self-confidence.
What Works:
Finding individuals with change experience who can bolster people’s self-confidence with we-won-you-can-too anecdotes.
Recognition and reward systems that inspire, promote optimism, and build self-confidence.
Feedback that can help people make better vision-related decisions.
“Retooling” disempowering managers by giving them new jobs that clearly show the need for change.
Ignoring bosses who seriously disempower their subordinates.
What Doesn’t Work:
Solving the bosses problem by taking away their power (making them mad and scared) and giving it to their subordinates.
Trying to remove all the barriers at once.
Giving in to your own pessimism and fears.
Stage Six: Create Short-Term Wins - Produce sufficient short-term wins , sufficiently fast, to energise the change helpers, enlighten the pessimists, and defuse the cynics, and build momentum for the effort.
What Works:
Early wins that come fast.
Wins that are as visible as possible to as many people as possible.
Wins that penetrate emotional defences by being unambiguous.
Wins that are meaningful to others - the more deeply meaningful the better.
Early wins that speak to powerful players whose support you need and do not yet have.
Wins that can be achieved cheaply and easily, even if they seem small compared with the grand vision.
What Doesn’t Work:
Launching fifty projects at once.
Providing the first win too slowly.
Stretching the truth.
Stage Seven: Don’t Let Up - Continue with wave after wave of change, not stopping until the vision is a reality, despite seemingly intractable problems.
What Works:
Aggressively ridding yourself of work that wears you down - tasks that were relevant in the past but not now, tasks that can be delegated.
Looking constantly for ways to keep urgency up.
Using new situations opportunistically to launch the next wave of change.
As always - show ‘em - show ‘em - show ’em.
What Doesn’t Work:
Developing a rigid four year plan (be more opportunistic).
Convincing yourself that you are done when you aren’t.
Convincing yourself that you can get the job done without confronting some of the more embedded bureaucratic and political behaviours.
Working so hard that you physically and emotionally collapse (or sacrifice off-the-job life).
Stage Eight: Make Change Stick - Be sure the changes are embedded in the very culture of the enterprise so that the new way of operating will stick.
What Works:
Not stopping at Stage Seven - it isn’t over until the changes have roots.
Using new employee orientation to compellingly show recruits what the organisation really cares about.
Using the promotions process to place people who act according to the new norms into influential and visible positions.
Telling vivid stories over and over about the new organisation, what it does, and why it succeeds.
Making absolutely sure you have the continuity of behaviour and results that help a new culture grow.
What Doesn’t Work:
Relying on a boss or a compensation scheme, or anything but culture, to hold a big change in place.
Trying to change culture as the first step in the transformation process.
Source: John Kotter
