At the peak of this election season and the ongoing financial crisis, the call for change seems to be everywhere. As a reader of this blog, it is very likely that you are also focused on change within your organization - moving from the current state to one where Lean and Six Sigma principles are interwoven into the fabric of your company, and your processes are performing at the highest levels of quality and efficiency. But what is the most important factor in driving real change?

In his most recent book, A Sense of Urgency, Harvard professor and respected change expert John Kotter argues that “urgency” - as the title suggests - is the single most important factor leading to true, positive change. Interestingly, Kotter splits urgency into two categories:

1. A False Sense of Urgency:  Depicted by lots of energetic activity, with people running from meeting to meeting, creating endless PowerPoint presentations, and managing long action item lists. These people appear to want to abandon the status quo and seem to have a high sense of urgency; however, more often than not this behavior is driven more out of past failures or some form of intense pressure put on them. People in this environment tend to feel angry, frustrated, anxious and tired. While there is lots of activity, it is often focused on protecting themselves or pointing the blame at others, rather than a disciplined, productive focus on real issues and opportunities.  … Hmm, this sounds a lot like the behavior of the U.S. Congress during the recent Wall Street bailout issue.

2. A True Sense of Urgency:  Depicted by an alert, fast-moving approach, highly focused on the most important external (marketplace) issues. It is also accompanied by a relentless and ongoing purging of non-important activities to free up people and other resources to focus on what matters, without burning them out. People in this environment feel highly energized and have a deep desire to move and win, now.

Based on Kotter’s research, he views a false sense of urgency to be just as insidious as complacency in preventing true change from taking hold.

So how do you increase true urgency? Kotter suggests that while it can start with giving everyone the necessary important facts, it needs to go further. By connecting to people’s emotions, it’s possible to win over their hearts as well as their minds. He lays out four key tactics to build emotional buy-in, leading to a true sense of urgency:

1. Bring the Outside in:  Ensure that external opportunities and hazards are consistently made visible to all, using emotionally compelling video, people and data.
2. Behave with Urgency Every Day: Don’t act content, angry or anxious. Instead, demonstrate - as visibly as possible — an ongoing consistent sense of urgency in all of your actions and communications.
3. Find Opportunity in Crises:  Look at the “glass is half-full” side of crises to find opportunity rather than pending disaster.
4. Deal with the NoNos: Remove or neutralize all the urgency-killers - not the people who are healthy skeptics, but those who are determined to maintain the status quo and potentially create false urgency.

While Kotter doesn’t explicitly state it, his focus on relentless prioritization of activities, as part of true urgency, links directly to the use of the key quality tool, the Pareto Principle..  I’ll talk more about that in next week’s blog entry.

For now, you can click on the following link to learn more about Kotter’s new book:

Kotter, John P., A Sense of Urgency, Boston, MA, Harvard Business Press, 2008

This entry was posted on Monday, October 6th, 2008 at 6:51 am and is filed under Change Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.