I’ve been very grateful to have recently received a signed copy of John Kotter’s ‘A sense of Urgency’ book (thanks to a comment I made on his Facebook page, who said wasting time on social media doesn’t pay off?!). Grateful because I feel our change story is loosing some mometum, that sense of urgency, so important in building acceptance for change, is waning.
Why? Dr Kotter talks about the ‘red flags’. Instead of the CEO saying ‘We need to deal with this as fast as possible both to stop the slide and to position ourselves for the future’, consultants are hired to look into prosposals, or a taskforce is established without the CEO on it. Months drift by…nothing happens.
And so I find myself in the position of not much action happening. There are months between Board Meetings where important decisions are signed off, and nothing else much happens inbetween. This is troubling as people drift back to their normal way of doing things and the push to move in a new direction becomes harder.
So what have I been doing to push that sense of urgency? Our team meetings contain information that was previously withheld as it might upset people. Are we achieving our targets or not? I urgue that people need to know to understand the context of the situation. The next step is to urgue the CEO to start telling the stories of his interactions with customers. He’s been having the conversations, he understands what they want to see, but do staff? They need to hear it as well. I’m working on it…
Has anyone else used stories to build the sense of urgency, and if so, what were the benefits?
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Hi Roberta – a technique a couple of people I know have used is the strategic corridor hijack, where the person responsible for change used to check the schedules of key people who needed a bit of a boost, and then just happen to be in the corridor outside as they left a meeting. One person I spoke to a couple of weeks ago knew that there was going to be a fire drill at a particular date and time, and “happened” to be on the ninth floor where the director of HR was located. When the fire bell rang, she had nine flights of stairs to have a conversation about how the change initiative was (or wasn’t) going, with stories that needed to be told about what was or wasn’t happening. They got so involved that they stood outside in the parking lot for a while and then went for a coffee together. By the end of the conversation, my friend had a new mandate.
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