CRITICAL THINKING
“A good
vision can be explained, and
explained in a way that’s clear enough and also emotionally compelling enough, without 53 PowerPoint slides.
”
is just the way people did things. I mean, nobody had to keep reinventing this stuff; after a while it became a habit. Tis is how we fish, this is how we build huts.”
Eventually, Kotter said, these ways of performing tasks became the group’s culture—norms of behavior and under- lying assumptions or beliefs about what is good, what is bad and what is valued or not valued, that are shared by a group of people.
“Culture changes the same way,” he said. Groups are either unsatisfied with current practices or think there might be a better
way. “Tat’s step one. Step two is if it works and it’s pretty unambiguous that indeed this produces a better result. Tey communicate that, there’s a little bit of cheering and high-fiving, and then you do your rinse and repeat.” Eventually the new habits replace the old, and the culture has changed.
“And, as it turns out, that exact same pattern is what we find when we study businesses or units of the government, or nonprofits or health or education or any organization,” Kotter said. “… So culture as a word can come up earlier in the discus- sion, but it’s not changing it. Tat happens all as a result of all these other actions.”
CONCLUSION Leading change requires not just intellect, but emotion, too, Kotter said. “If there are principles that we have found that seem to cut across all industries, all sizes of organi- zations, public and private … one is that change happens because it’s not just a head exercise, it’s a head and a heart exercise. Change happens not just because people have to, because it’s their job, but because they want to.”
That emotional buy-in allows for the rapid change that today’s technologies require. “Tat’s why some of these startups, even when they grow to some size—not hundreds of people, but thousands of people—continue to move at speeds that seem incomprehensible to older organi- zations. It’s because they build, indeed, a solid management structure … but they don’t lose that kind of want-to, voluntary, into it for something emotional, network- type organization that helped get them started when they were very young.”
On the other end of the spectrum are orga- nizations (such as the Army) that “keep the number of people who are in a sense empowered to help produce change small
and controllable,” Kotter said, without recognizing that a strict hierarchical orga- nization is “built much more to produce efficiencies and reliability just to get the job done. It wasn’t invented to change itself … or to invent radically new ideas that can do things radically better.”
For more information, go to https://
www.kotterinc.com/.
MICHAEL BOLD provides contract support to the U.S. Army Acquisition Support Center. He is a writer-editor for Network Runners Inc., with more than 30 years of editing experience at newspapers, including the McClatchy Washington Bureau, Te Sacra- mento Bee, the San Jose Mercury News, the Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He holds a Bachelor of Jour- nalism from the University of Missouri.
https://asc.ar my.mil
77
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128
