Was Kotter wrong?

I am reading John Kotter’s “LEADING CHANGE” again. If you need some new ideas, read an old book. Kotter wrote his master piece back in 1994, almost a quarter of a century ago, at a time that I was just starting my own Consultancy in Barcelona. For me Kotter was a real eye opener, as for so many of my generation and those after. But…decades later change efforts still massively fail.

Was Kotter wrong?

John P. Kotter starts his book pointing out the eight most common mistakes of change, which later on becomes the base of his famous eight step approach. So if things still go wrong, does that mean we are still making the same mistakes? Let me jump to conclusions, yes we are and no, Kotter wasn’t wrong. He was spot on, and still is.

Let’s take a look.

Error 1. Allowing too much complacency

Rightly this was and still is one of the main problems in Change and in my experience, part of the solution is not identifying resistant employees, but detecting those managers in the backbone of the company that are in permanent denial and untreatable or untrainable by character. In legacy companies, the guys with the bricks, this may be well above 25% of all managers! Unless the company removes them from mainstream change efforts, or all together, Error 1. will stick around for the next decade and stay a project killer all by itself.

Error 2. Failing to create a powerful guiding coalition

This one now battles for the position of Error 1 as instead of creating these strong coalitions Kotter recommended, I observe that companies have moved in the opposite direction hiring single change and project managers who have no power, and no authority. They often completely depend on the goodwill of a single change project owner, who himself may not have gone through Kotter and didn’t create a coalition first either. This tendency is a shortcut to kill projects before they start.

Error 3. Underestimating the power of a Vision

Many current Company Visions are paper tigers. A paragraph composed with the COMMON BLAHS, which could easily be interchanged between companies. Researcher Simon Wardley proofed this to be true. Even with lots of goodwill, it’s very hard for line management to “translate” such BLAH into specific and actionable plans and build up credibility and the energy that can motivate people to actually move forward on them. Generally, Board Rooms need to get rid of the COMMON BLAHS and take much deeper dives into Vision and Mission, into the WHY ARE WE DOING THIS, while engaging personally in the coalitions that need to be built as well. This is where the leaders step up and managers step down. Dirty hands are needed. Employees need not only to understand, but also see their managers do what they say. A few rotten apples in the barrel are enough to infect and kill the project.

Error 4. Under communicating the Vision by a Factor 10 or 100 or even, 1000

I have written before about the dead bodies in the change equation. Marketing and Publicity are ever more needed inside the company than on the product marketing and sales side. Yet take any random change management budget and try to find a minimum viable publicity budget in it. Let me know if you got lucky. Over the last decades I only found four change projects that initially budgeted correctly. These where DSM Resins and DSM Deretil on a large productivity improvement projects, Clariant Iberica on a production turnaround project and Philips on a serious crisis management project, and recently also Kuwait Oil Company on her Asset Digitalization project KwIDF. It may be a coincidence, but all four projects won industry prizes for Best Practice and Results. But this isn’t only about the money, it’s also about the behavior, about how leaders communicate. All four projects had also in common aligned strong transformational leadership. So even if you have the budget, if the message says A. and the management does B., do not expect employees to follow. As Kotter wrote already in the early days ”Nothing undermines Change more than inconsistent behavior of important persons”. It destroys credibility overnight.

Error 5. Permitting obstacles to block the new Vision

We know today that it’s well possible to deal with the blocks in people’s heads and we have improved with emotional intelligence, mindfulness and other useful tools and trainings that help people overcome their fears by understanding better their own emotions and deal with them, which has also very positive effects on collaboration. Although not yet gone mainstream, there is enough proof out there that this is the key initiator of powerful change. Change Management has now only to deal with the few people, including managers, which act with too much self-interest.

The current obstacles, really hindering now, are those in the operational and organizational structures, in the HR systems, in the workflows… to name a few. This requires more holistic change approaches and methods, involving much more stakeholders as well. Today 90% of companies do not go beyond the usage of mechanical toolsets like PROSCI or Kotter himself. They are ok for smaller and more isolated changes, but current mega challenges of transformational size and shape need more powerful methods and tools.

Error 6. Failing to create short term wins

Creating momentum is a vital and complex piece of the change game, maintaining it is even more challenging. A few months ago I was asked to engage on a SAP project of a brewer and the lady in charge said this would take 3 years from now. And it wasn’t even that big a deal. I told her that timeline was a killer to outcome and communicating it openly even more. People need to see the benefits on the work floor almost immediately to accept some pain, and they need to see it in front of their noses and as often as possible and they need to have a clear unmovable deadline in the horizon. An ambitious but realistic horizon that can be reached. Anything else drops the urgency levels and the project will fail. Good preparation is half the battle. Starting to run without having gone through this basic need is unfortunately still common habit and a slow killer.

Error 7. Declaring Victory too soon

When Kotter wrote his book, he was still envisioning cultural changes to take years, even a decade. At the time it was not yet clear that companies would need to move into a culture where continuous and even strategic changes would become the new normal. It’s always good to declare victories and celebrate them, if they truly are. But companies will do well to build Change Management into their genes. At DOFAS we work hard these days to help organisations set up In House Muscle to make that happen. Indeed, this is by far not yet the new normal!

Error 8. Neglecting to anchor changes firmly in the Corporate Culture

For me this error is overruled by globalization, speed and uncertainty. There is no more need for anchoring change in the culture. The culture needs to be one of consistent, fast, planned and permanent adaptation to the fast moving and very competitive global world. Very few organisations and enterprises escape from this today. The social norms and shared values and behaviors can now only be those that support the fast changes companies of any size, shape or character need to make. It doesn’t matter anymore if you are into bricks, services or The Cloud.

Mistakes in the above translate into the bottom line, now to the level of making enterprises disappear.

Kotter was spot on, but he was ahead of his time. Now that the world needs more of the happily Bold and Brave, his learnings are still a sharp sword of change.