True Urgency for Real Change
A Sense of Urgency by John P. Kotter
(Chapters 1-3)
Hi!! I am so excited to share with you what I’ve learned so far this week!
In previous posts, I went into detail about two different change efforts I tried to bring about:
- Formalizing a Technical Health Program.
- Realizing increased retention and attraction of talent
In both cases, and in many others I can recall, the barrier to change was one of two things:
- The decision maker didn’t recognize that there was a problem.
- The decision maker acknowledged the problem and thought they were already solving it.
As a natural problem solver, I’ve tried to figure out how to make more headway in these situations - hence this year long study of change management. I used to assume I needed to become the decision maker. But it finally hit me last year that there is no situation in which you are in a position with complete autonomy. Even as CEO, you have to answer to a board or to customers and even to your own employees.
And it’s really discouraging to realize that it’s not guaranteed that the people you report to are the most competent. We keep it real on this blog.
So, how then can we be maximally effective as leaders and bring about necessary change? Continuous learning is the key!
At the start of our deep dive into leading successful change efforts, we learned of the dangers we would face and were instructed to learn to manage our environment as well as ourselves. One aspect of managing our environment is to cook the conflict - learn how to convey the urgency of the need to change and also lower the heat to mitigate turmoil.
Over the next few weeks, we will focus on conveying the urgency around the need to change and we will use John P. Kotter’s A Sense of Urgency as a study guide.
False Urgency vs. True Urgency
This book calls out the power that complacency has in hindering a change effort. However, I don’t want to focus on that. What is much scarier and prevalent is the idea of false urgency. This book specifically makes a distinction between false urgency and true urgency.
With a false sense of urgency, an organization does have a great deal of energized action, but it’s driven by anxiety, anger, and frustration, and not a focused determination to win, and win as soon as is reasonably possible.
With false urgency, the action has a frantic feeling: running from meeting to meeting, producing volumes of paper, moving rapidly in all circles, all with a dysfunctional orientation that often prevents people from exploiting key opportunities and addressing gnawing problems.
People constantly see the frenzied action, assume that it represents true urgency, and then move ahead, only to encounter problems and failures not unlike what would happen if they were surrounded by complacency.”
(excerpt from A Sense of Urgency)
Insidious…what a powerful word!
Reflecting back to the scenario where I tried to convince the company to take a more effective approach to hiring, I can clearly see that the decision makers were blinded by false urgency. Everyone acknowledged something needed to be done and they immediately started doing a lot of things. Certainly the executive leaders heard weekly updates of what was being done to address the problem and felt confident that the urgency was there. Years later, no gains have been realized. They’ve simply wasted a lot of time and money.
But when you know better, you do better. This study of urgency will teach us how to recognize false urgency and not fall prey to its illusion. We will know how to foster true urgency. We will do better.
With a real sense of urgency, when people see an opportunity or a problem of significance to their organization, and other’s don’t, they quite naturally search for effective ways to get the information to the right individual - and not when they meet him or her next month.
With a true sense of urgency, people want to come to work each day ready to cooperate energetically and responsively with intelligent initiatives from others. And they do. People want to find ways to launch smart initiatives. And they do. They don’t move at thirty-five miles per hour when sixty-five is needed to win.”
(excerpt from A Sense of Urgency)
The Strategy and Four Tactics
The core of this book is a strategy for increasing true urgency and the four tactics to accomplish the strategy. Here’s a summary so you get the full picture.
The Strategy
Create action that is exceptionally alert, externally oriented, relentlessly aimed at winning, making some progress each and every day, and constantly purging low value-added activities - all by always focusing on the heart and not just the mind.
The 4 Tactics
- Bring the Outside In - reconnect internal reality with external opportunities and hazards.
- Behave with Urgency Every Day - demonstrate your own sense of urgency always and do so as visibly as possible to as many people as possible.
- Find Opportunity in Crises
- Deal with the NoNos - remove or neutralize all the relentless urgency-killers, people who are not skeptics but are determined to keep a group of complacent, or if needed, to create destructive urgency. (Oooh, a callback to Reactance!!)
Over the next four weeks, we'll dive into each of these tactics. As always, I'm excited and feel more empowered the longer we spend studying this topic!
Thanks for reading!
A Sense of Urgency by John P. Kotter
(Chapter 4: Tactic One - Bring the Outside In)