Change is now a permanent process, not a one-off event. Here is a brief and personal review of how thinking about leading change has itself changed, and the principles I would keep.
Kotter's eight steps
Back in the steadier times of 1996, Harvard's John Kotter published Leading Change. By examining the change efforts of 100 companies, he set out to understand what leaders got right and wrong, and codified an approach in eight stages: create urgency, build a guiding coalition, form a vision, communicate it, empower action, create short-term wins, consolidate gains and anchor the change in the culture.
At the time I was a director at the Design Council, and we used Kotter's ideas to restructure the organisation to fit the vision and strategy we had inherited. Having a map of the steps helped, the logic was useful, and the journey was better for it.
Times change faster than models of change
Looking back, Kotter's 1996 account fits less well in turbulent times. It looks like a single-use process: switch it on when change is needed, then return to business as usual. To be fair, in 2012 Kotter refreshed his thinking in a Harvard Business Review article, Accelerate, adding the idea of a second, more agile network running alongside the hierarchy. It is worth reading.
Living vision, emergent strategy
In 2006, working with the Innovation Unit at the Department for Education and Skills, I came across a model of change leadership with two ideas that stood out. Vision might be living, and therefore able to evolve and grow. Strategy might be emergent, and therefore able to change. A model of change that can adapt to change.
The same model emphasised leadership partnerships. In a networked world, leadership is no longer only leadership of employees. It is leadership with partners, suppliers, customers and even competitors.
Six principles that last
There is no one right way to lead change. What works for a charity may not work for a corporation or a family business. But looking across these approaches, and others I have worked with since, six principles keep appearing:
- Understand the changing context.
- Embrace participation and collaboration. People support what they help to create.
- Seek purpose and meaning.
- Be agile, and allow emergence.
- Communicate for real, in both directions.
- Learn alone, and learn together.
I have been lucky to work with brilliant people on change processes, often using the ideas of participatory leadership. Change will keep placing demands on us all, and the ideas that underpin it will change too. I would bet these principles remain.
Where facilitation fits
Every one of these principles shows up, or fails to, when people meet. A strategy that 120 people helped shape is more likely to be delivered than one written by eight, as University of the Arts London found. That is why we design strategy work as a sequence of participative workshops, not a document. See workshop facilitation, or for longer programmes on strategy, leadership and culture, our sister practice Serious Outcomes.
Sean Blair is the founder of ProMeet and Serious Outcomes, an IAF Certified Professional Facilitator and a LEGO® Serious Play® Master Trainer. About Sean.