CRITICAL THINKING
which you can do a lot of other stuff. But at least you’ve got the conditions that aren’t going to lead you to take off, to think that indeed you’re making great progress, and then to discover that everything kind of slows down on you because in the background people either think this isn’t necessary or this is stupid or it’s not my job or a million other reasons why they inadvertently don’t help, or become blockers.”
To help leaders develop a clear, coherent vision for the future, Kotter developed a five-minute rule. “A good vision can be explained, and explained in a way that’s clear enough and also emotionally compelling enough, without 53 PowerPoint slides. It can be done verbally in a relatively short period of time, we discovered—hence that so-called five-minute rule.” If the leader couldn’t explain the vision in five minutes, “it usually meant that it was just not clear in their own heads, which means their capac- ity to communicate it and make it clear in anybody else’s heads, much less get them excited about it, just wasn’t there. Because a vision is not an operating plan.”
b), producing sustainable change that doesn’t just get pushed back by the forces of history.”
COMMUNICATE, COMMUNICATE, COMMUNICATE A strong vision for the future of an organization doesn’t do any good if you don’t let people know what it is, Kotter said. “Number one is forget the fantasy that four people in a communications department is going to do it for you. You want to start with as many people who kind of understand it and can talk about it as your initial team, and you want that to grow. But you want as many people as humanly possible talking about this. Tere is no such thing as undercommunicating on this stuff.”
Every meeting, every encounter, every group email is an opportunity to explain your vision, Kotter said.
IT TAKES AN ARMY Enlisting an army of true believ- ers is vital to effecting real change, Kotter said. Develop a group of people who buy into the need for change and who want to be a part of it, and organize them in a way that enables them “to become your first phalanx of folks out there spreading the word.” And don’t just use them as an echo chamber, he said, but sound them out for ways to get to the desired goal. “Tey can come up with ideas that you and I would never dream of that are relevant within their context and within the culture that they’re in.” Tat, in turn, gets other people’s attention and “gets them moving toward that feel- ing of ‘we got to do something,’ and this is too important. … And they start infecting or attracting more and more people and it just kind of grows, and more and more people help out, coming up with more ideas to attract more people.
“Te whole thing eventually gets to the point where, like I say, you’ve got huge numbers of people with a real sense of urgency around the relevant issue, and you’ve got something that you can build off of and has some real chance of a) producing change and,
To lead an organization in a time of change, creating a sense of urgency is vital. Maintaining that sense of urgency is just as important as creating it.
“You get people to understand, to buy in, when you get enough music played loud and long enough in surround sound. Surround sound is in a sense [that] they hear it from their peers, they hear it from their bosses, and they start to hear it from their subordinates. … You get the music played on a regular basis and in surround sound and growing in terms of how many speakers you got out there that are actually blasting it out, and you’ve got a chance then of being able to catch people’s attention and win over their hearts and minds on this.”
CULTURE CHANGE Organizations, when looking to move in a new direction, often say they want to change their culture. Indeed, culture change is often at the top of the list of organization objectives. But Kotter said the very nature of culture means that it will be the last thing an organization can change.
“Culture is air. It’s mist,” he said. “Good luck trying to grab it and twist it into some new form.” Kotter points to the 30 years following World War II, when anthropologists discovered islands in the South Pacific that had had no contact with modern tech- nology or civilization. Anthropologists studied how these groups made decisions on feeding their families, seeking shelter and solv- ing conflict.
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