Change. Gaurav Gupta
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executives say something along the lines of the subtitle of this book. In the words of one: “What we have accomplished would have been very hard for most of the staff to ever believe possible two or three years ago.”
Reports of our work have been shared through a variety of outlets, including educational programs, Harvard Business Review articles, speeches, blogs, and the mainstream press, but most robustly through books; 21 have been published, and 12 of these have been bestsellers. Our Iceberg Is Melting and A Sense of Urgency made the New York Times list. Iceberg was the number-one business book in Germany for a year and in Holland for more than a year.
Lists of the best business or management books of the year have honored 13 of these research reports. Inc. magazine, the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, strategy+business, and the Chartered Management Institute, for example, all selected Accelerate (2014) as a best-of-year book. Leading Change (1996), perhaps the most well known of these reports, has been translated into 26 languages and was chosen by Time magazine as one of the 25 most influential management books ever written.
The latest project, which led to this manuscript, formally began four years ago with the formation of a study group at Kotter International that focused on the newest insights from brain science. We quickly concluded that this line of research had developed a great deal in the prior two decades. We decided that there was much convergence in this work with our own observations about “human nature” and its role in resisting or facilitating change and innovation.
Further, it appeared that the combination of insights from brain science, our multidecade research program, a growing list of major consulting experiences, and some pioneering work in business history, organizational studies, leadership, and social anthropology had many important implications for why people struggle with change and what leaders can do to mobilize more successful responses to threats and opportunities. This perspective also gave us new insights into the underlying causal dynamics behind observations we have recorded again and again about why some enterprises outperform others.
And more than ever, this latest round of research has not only strengthened the evidence behind certain propositions but extended previous work in very new and highly actionable ways.
Some of the key themes explored in the pages that follow include:
A more rapid and complex changing environment, including what is now called disruptive change, may be not just one factor but the central force shaping the challenges that organizations and people face nowadays.
Neither human nature, nor the most common form of the modern organization, are designed to handle anything close to this degree of change. Instead, the strongest built-in emphasis is on stability, efficiency, reliability, quick threat elimination, and most of all short-term survival.
As a result, there is a growing gap between the rate, amount, and complexity of change outside organizations and the ability of the hardwired enterprise and our human capacity to keep up. This gap presents both a danger and an opportunity as organizations work to agilely adjust, adapt, and get ahead of these contextual realities.
Nevertheless, at least some enterprises (perhaps many) can be guided to close or reduce this gap. These companies can handle rapid change significantly better than the norm and astonishingly better than those struggling the most. They can be equipped to see relevant external change quickly, invent or adapt responses with speed, and get results that are hard for even their own people to imagine.
Intentionally and thoughtfully improving individual, team, and organizational ability to respond and accelerate, even just a bit, could have a momentous effect on the lives of many, many millions of people worldwide.
Over the past few decades, especially in the last four years, we have learned a great deal that has yet to be widely used. Our latest research and advisory-based experiences confirm for the first time that there is a growing science to change, especially large-scale change, which we clearly need to understand and implement as quickly as possible.
Our goal in Change is to show, in a concrete and actionable way, how this emerging science—with roots in neuroscience, organizational studies, business history, leadership, and more—can be understood and used to make a much-needed difference.
The list of people who have helped with this work is a long one. It starts with my colleagues at Harvard and extends to my associates and clients at Kotter International. I have been able to include some of these acknowledgments at the end of this book. For now, let me extend to all my deepest thanks.
John Kotter, March 2021
Chapter 1 Threats and Opportunities in a Rapidly Changing World
As we write this, we are going through a rather extraordinary spike in uncertainty, change, and volatility caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. There is a lot of discussion about what the “new normal” will be in 6 to 18 months. While this conversation is interesting and can be provocative, it is all too often misleading. A focus on this pandemic as a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon can lead us to be passive and to miss the most important lesson: that this crisis is not an aberration but a spike in a trend that has long and deep roots.
Specifically, the amount, complexity, and volatility of change going on around us has been in general expanding in waves since even before the start of the industrial revolution. And virtually all the data says that this trend will continue in any number of ways after the current COVID-19 crisis abates. The potential forces of change are not limited to another pandemic. There are plenty of additional possibilities: artificial intelligence, other disruptive technologies, global integration, as well as social and political movements that now have worldwide impact.
Furthermore, a gap is clearly growing between the amount of change happening around us and the change we are successfully, smartly implementing in most of our organizations and lives. As we will show you in the following chapters, this disconnect is increasingly dangerous, especially when people have been convinced that their continuous incremental improvements are all that is needed.
The risks we are taking are also increasingly unnecessary, because the emerging science of change, outlined in the next chapter, offers steps to mitigate bad outcomes. This information is accessible and actionable. It draws on brain research, business history, organizational studies, leadership, and more. We have found it possible to turn the science into replicable, teachable methodologies and then, in any specific situation, into executable playbooks.
Some enterprises have already tapped into this knowledge base. These companies are mobilizing their people to produce hard-to-imagine results by taking advantage of the opportunities presented by more change. These opportunities also have the potential to add great value to society at large.
“The Storm Is Just Beginning”
On January 16, 2020, Volkswagen Group CEO Herbert Diess told VW's senior managers, “If we continue at our current speed, it is going to be tough.…The storm is just beginning. The era of classic car making is over.”
We would only add that both our formal research and our advisory work suggest that the long-term change trend has reached a point where the era of classical business and government may be over or may soon be over.
Whether dealing with threats from low-cost competitors or opportunities for growth from innovative products or acquisitions, organizations today need greater speed and flexibility, sometimes much greater, not just to deal with extraordinary events like COVID-19, but to deal with the shifting reality of our present and future. More broadly, the need to adapt rapidly is equally important for society to resolve threats like climate change or food security, as well as to continue capitalizing on opportunities for progress toward a more equitable and prosperous world.
A few enterprises have become adept at facing these challenges by identifying trends