Another oft-quoted, but unchallenged, notion is Kotter\u2019s \u201cStep 1\u201d of his eight-step change leadership process: \u201ccreate a sense of urgency.\u201d\u00a0 One can imagine a business where that might be true, where change initiatives drift along, on the back burner, far from the top priorities of change leaders. \u00a0 Today that is extremely rare.\u00a0 Whether it be globalization, or the speed of information flows, the pace (urgency) with which today\u2019s businesses must move is very fast.\u00a0 Most business people today are urgency junkies, forever juggling things that need to happen \u201cyesterday\u201d.<\/p>\n
Let us also consider the companies we admire today.\u00a0 Google? IBM?\u00a0 Is \u201curgency\u201d something they do well?\u00a0 Reflect for a moment on whether your favorite companies \u201ccreate a sense of urgency\u201d around change.\u00a0 Well-run companies, and great leaders, are best at taking care of the non-urgent (the important\/ non-urgent quadrant in Covey\u2019s excellent model) – and keeping their eyes on the five and ten year vision.<\/p>\n
Finally, urgency can be associated with fear, or stress.\u00a0 In fact, the metaphor we taught in change leadership in the 1990s (mea culpa) was the \u201cburning platform\u201d – the most unhelpful change metaphor ever (and I have a very long list of horrible change metaphors).\u00a0 This is simply incorrect and unhelpful – when people are under stress (trying to get off the platform), neuroscience suggests they make worse decisions, remember less, and learn more slowly.<\/p>\n
Neither of those two statements (Drucker and Kotter) is completely wrong, but probably both are more wrong than right, and both, to me, seem anachronistic with respect to today\u2019s business context.<\/p>\n
The thing to note, to return to the point made in my first paragraph, is that hard debate and discussion rarely happen around these statements nor many pronouncements of \u201cgurus\u201d. \u00a0 \u00a0The situation is worsened by Twitter, where there simply is not space to elaborate ideas and people quickly like and retweet without (ever) thinking deeply about what was said. \u00a0\u00a0This makes the world of business ideas increasingly shallow, and lowers the level of critique and debate of such ideas. (A woefully bad thing for business.)<\/p>\n
The next time a business \u201ctruism\u201d passes your way, pause and give it some thought, is it true? Always true? Still relevant? Helpful? Validated by research?<\/p>\n
Book release – The Science of Successful Organizational Change: How Leaders Set Strategy, Change Behaviors, and Create Agile Cultures.<\/strong><\/p>\n The Science of Organizational Change (FT Press) is just out, and in select (few) bookstores, and on Amazon. \u00a0One reviewer, Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer, of Stanford, said \u201cGibbons applies scientifically founded, rigorous thought, and practical wisdom to this charlatan-filled domain.\u201d\u00a0 My sincere hope is that the book generates controversy and debate rather than attempting to have the final word on issues that are immensely complex. (If you like mice, cheese, penguins, and icebergs, it probably is not the book for you.)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In no domain that I can think of, do writers get a \u201cfree pass\u201d, that is that their words are taken as axiomatic (or gospel if you prefer).\u00a0 Even the most famous scientists of the 20th century, Einstein, Turing, Watson (DNA), lived with a torrent of criticism and debate through their lives. Certainly our time […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":400,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[38,36,29,37],"yoast_head":"\n