Driving change in large organizations
John Kotter in “A sense of urgency” talks about how to drive sense of urgency in an organization. I can’t really recommend the book because it is mostly fairly banal, cliched, stuff.
Here is a hypotheses on what sort of change you should even attempt to drive in an organization. Change should take one of the following two forms -
1) Continuous improvement in clearly defined metrics which everyone agrees on. There should always be a financial component like operating margin, ROE, etc. and others like customer satisfaction, pace of innovation, etc which define cultural foundations of an organization.
2) An effort, product or organizations, can be declared a failure which gives the change-agent mandate to re-build it.
What is not included above are “changes” which fit neither. Without a clear declaration of “failure” organizations have large inertia to resist change. It is very likely a large effort will be spent by management on how to respond to the mandate of the specific change. It will lead to the false sense of urgency that Kotter talks about. And the end result is likely to be organizational cynicism and unproductive use of money and attention.
You are much better off “improving” an organization rather than “changing” it. Of course, it means an open mind to adapt the strategy to the organization rather than attempting to force a change in the organization to deliver to the strategy that you seek to put in place.
There were moments like Lou Gerstner taking over IBM or, more recently at Nokia or Motorola, where the mandate to change is very unclear given the dire circumstance in the organization. Other moments call for twin approach of improvement and addition.
The above hypotheses is neither supported by any research or detailed analysis but merely an attempt to document something that should be considered if you are asking the question why the organization seems to have a lot of activity but not sure about what meaningful change is being implemented.
