Next year will mark the twentieth anniversary of John Kotter’s guide to change management Leading Change, which introduced his 8-Step Process for Leading Change within an organization. The book was very influential, but since then the pace of change in the business world has sped up greatly. How do those eight steps look today? Kotter updated the process, after extensive research, in his 2014 bookAccelerate. The points below illustrate four key revisions he made to his steps for change to make them work in today’s environment.
Leading Change: 8-Step Process (1996)
- Respond to or affect episodic change in rigid, finite, and sequential (step by step) ways
- Drive change with a small, powerful core group
- Function within a traditional hierarchy
- Focus on doing one new thing very well in a linear fashion over time
Accelerate: 8-Step Process (2014)
- Run the steps concurrently and continuously
- Form a large volunteer army from up, down and across the organization to serve as the change engine
- Function in a network flexibly and agilely outside of, but in conjunction with, a traditional hierarchy
- Operate as if strategy is a dynamic force by constantly seeking opportunities, identifying initiatives to capitalize on them, and completing them quickly and efficiently
Engaging your volunteer army
What I find particularly compelling is the concept of the volunteer army (the “new” Step 4) because it embodies size, speed, complexity and power in service of change. It is very difficult for an organization to harness these four elements in combination. When it does, large numbers of employees rally under an opportunity, take action and transform their company. For example:
- In a renowned consumer products company, 2,000 volunteers signed up in six weeks with the purpose of transforming their global supply chain
- In order to adjust to large shifts in both the competitor landscape and buyers’ buying behaviors, more than 9,000 employees across a national auto re-seller’s 70 locations volunteered to help increase sales
- When two companies merged to form the largest publishing company in history, their two sales forces, formerly arch competitors, came together in a volunteer army to defeat the enemy of most mergers: failed integration of people and systems
- A division of a global defense and aerospace giant set out to raise a volunteer army of 350 to seed a growth culture, but the broad appeal of the opportunity attracted 2,300 in only six weeks.
Celebrating the “small” stuff
The generation of short-term wins (Step 6) also remains vital to any large-scale change: wins are the molecules of results. Their influence ranges from cultural to financial. For instance, a broad communication about an achievement is an injection of the positive that activates an optimistic desire in the workforce to do more. Celebrated wins from cost-reduction or revenue-generating efforts openly link specific thinking and behaviors to the bottom and top lines.
What we’ve seen is a doubling down on efforts to define what a win is based on the company’s culture and on their transformation’s objectives. Increased rigor and discipline in collecting, tracking and evaluating wins in significant volume pays off. The prize is any unassailable correlation between a win – or body of like wins – and a business result. The bonus can be bigger than the win itself. Some wins, when detailed and celebrated, can go viral and expand their impact by creating copycats.
The carefully coordinated volunteer armies named above collected wins to document their transformations in real time:
- The consumer products company amassed 1,300 wins in 24 months and returned 900 percent on what they invested in the effort.
- The strategic initiatives undertaken by the auto re-seller’s volunteer army generated 2,000 wins that contributed to a $40-million increase in sales in a 10-month period.
- Nearly 60 percent of the publishing company’s merged sales force signed up to take part in 21 strategic initiatives designed to unify the function. They achieved their goal of cultural integration in only 12 months.
Comparing today’s business environment to 20 years ago, it strikes me that wins – and an intentional approach to producing them – have only increased in importance as the fuel of large-scale sustainable change. The energy they produce can overpower the effects of speed, distraction, and dilution that conspire against change efforts. They can help break down change-blocking silos. So, too, the complexity of globalization, which increasingly feels like a high-speed game of 3-D chess.
How have you helped your organization adjust to the increasing rate of change? What methods are working? And how do you know?
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