Fostering Change
Order Instructions:
Fostering Change
Drawing on the theories and strategies of change you learned about this week, consider how you, as a leader, would foster change that you think is needed within this organization as well as within your community.
Answer the following Questions:
1. Describe steps to take to foster the change process in your selected organization. Provide a rationale for these steps from this week’s Learning Resources. What challenges would you expect, and how would you deal with them?
2. Compare and contrast this with the steps you would take to foster the change process in your own community to positively impact public health. Again, provide support for your assertions. Explain any challenges you think might arise from this process and the ways in which you would use change theory to bring about positive results.
USE THESE ARTICLES ONLY
1. Kotter, J. P. (2007). Leading change. Harvard Business Review, 85(1), 96-103.
This articles shares the author’s research findings surrounding a ten-year study concerning how businesses cope with changing business trends while attempting to maintain market leverage.
2. Senge, P. M. (1990). The leader’s new work: Building learning organizations. Sloan Management Review, 32(1), 7-23.
This article describes the skills and tools needed by public health leaders who want to develop learning organizations that encompass creative tension while managing corporate change.
Leading Change
Section: BEST OF HBR | 1995 THE TESTS OF A LEADER
Why Transformation Efforts Fail
Editor’s Note: Guiding change may be the ultimate test of a leader — no business survives over the long term if it can’t reinvent itself. But, human nature being what it is, fundamental change is often resisted mightily by the people it most affects: those in the trenches of the business. Thus, leading change is both absolutely essential and incredibly difficult.
Perhaps nobody understands the anatomy of organizational change better than retired Harvard Business School professor John P. Kotter. This article, originally published in the spring of 1995, previewed Kotter’s 1996 book Leading Change. It outlines eight critical success factors — from establishing a sense of extraordinary urgency, to creating short-term wins, to changing the culture (“the way we do things around here” ). It will feel familiar when you read it, in part because Kotter’s vocabulary has entered the lexicon and in part because it contains the kind of home truths that we recognize, immediately, as if we’d always known them. A decade later, his work on leading change remains definitive.
Leaders who successfully transform businesses do eight things right (and they do them in the right order).
OVER THE PAST DECADE, I have watched more than 100 companies try to remake themselves into significantly better competitors. They have included large organizations (Ford) and small ones (Landmark Communications), companies based in the United States (General Motors) and elsewhere (British Airways), corporations that were on their knees (Eastern Airlines), and companies that were earning good money (Bristol-Myers Squibb). These efforts have gone under many banners: total quality management, re-engineering, rightsizing, restructuring, cultural change, and turnaround. But, in almost every case, the basic goal has been the same: to make fundamental changes in how business is conducted in order to help cope with a new, more challenging market environment.
A few of these corporate change efforts have been very successful. A few have been utter failures. Most fall somewhere in between, with a distinct tilt toward the lower end of the scale. The lessons that can be drawn are interesting and will probably be relevant to even more organizations in the increasingly competitive business environment of the coming decade.
The most general lesson to be learned from the more successful cases is that the change process goes through a series of phases that, in total, usually require a considerable length of time. Skipping steps creates only the illusion of speed and never produces a satisfying result. A second very general lesson is that critical mistakes in any of the phases can have a devastating impact, slowing momentum and negating hard-won gains. Perhaps because we have relatively little experience in renewing organizations, even very capable people often make at least one big error.
Error 1: Not Establishing a Great Enough Sense of Urgency
Most successful change efforts begin when some individuals or some groups start to look hard at a company’s competitive situation, market position, technological trends, and financial performance. They focus on the potential revenue drop when an important patent expires, the five-year trend in declining margins in a core business, or an emerging market that everyone seems to be ignoring. They then find ways to communicate this information broadly and dramatically, especially with respect to crises, potential crises, or great opportunities that are very timely. This first step is essential because just getting a transformation program started requires the aggressive cooperation of many individuals. Without motivation, people won’t help, and the effort goes nowhere.
Compared with other steps in the change process, phase one can sound easy. It is not. Well over 50% of the companies I have watched fail in this first phase. What are the reasons for that failure? Sometimes executives underestimate how hard it can be to drive people out of their comfort zones. Sometimes they grossly overestimate how successful they have already been in increasing urgency. Sometimes they lack patience: “Enough with the preliminaries; let’s get on with it.” In many cases, executives become paralyzed by the downside possibilities. They worry that employees with seniority will become defensive, that morale will drop, that events will spin out of control, that short-term business results will be jeopardized, that the stock will sink, and that they will be blamed for creating a crisis.
A paralyzed senior management often comes from having too many managers and not enough leaders. Management’s mandate is to minimize risk and to keep the current system operating. Change, by definition, requires creating a new system, which in turn always demands leadership. Phase one in a renewal process typically goes nowhere until enough real leaders are promoted or hired into senior-level jobs.
Transformations often begin, and begin well, when an organization has a new head who is a good leader and who sees the need for a major change. If the renewal target is the entire company, the CEO is key. If change is needed in a division, the division general manager is key. When these individuals are not new leaders, great leaders, or change champions, phase one can be a huge challenge.
Bad business results are both a blessing and a curse in the first phase. On the positive side, losing money does catch people’s attention. But it also gives less maneuvering room. With good business results, the opposite is true: Convincing people of the need for change is much harder, but you have more resources to help make changes.
But whether the starting point is good performance or bad, in the more successful cases I have witnessed, an individual or a group always facilitates a frank discussion of potentially unpleasant facts about new competition, shrinking margins, decreasing market share, flat earnings, a lack of revenue growth, or other relevant indices of a declining competitive position. Because there seems to be an almost universal human tendency to shoot the bearer of bad news, especially if the head of the organization is not a change champion, executives in these companies often rely on outsiders to bring unwanted information. Wall Street analysts, customers, and consultants can all be helpful in this regard. The purpose of all this activity, in the words of one former CEO of a large European company, is “to make the status quo seem more dangerous than launching into the unknown.”
In a few of the most successful cases, a group has manufactured a crisis. One CEO deliberately engineered the largest accounting loss in the company’s history, creating huge pressures from Wall Street in the process. One division president commissioned first-ever customer satisfaction surveys, knowing full well that the results would be terrible. He then made these findings public. On the surface, such moves can look unduly risky. But there is also risk in playing it too safe: When the urgency rate is not pumped up enough, the transformation process cannot succeed, and the long-term future of the organization is put in jeopardy.
When is the urgency rate high enough? From what I have seen, the answer is when about 75% of a company’s management is honestly convinced that business as usual is totally unacceptable. Anything less can produce very serious problems later on in the process.
Error 2: Not Creating a Powerful Enough Guiding Coalition
Major renewal programs often start with just one or two people. In cases of successful transformation efforts, the leadership coalition grows and grows over time. But whenever some minimum mass is not achieved early in the effort, nothing much worthwhile happens.
It is often said that major change is impossible unless the head of the organization is an active supporter. What I am talking about goes far beyond that. In successful transformations, the chairman or president or division general manager, plus another five or 15 or 50 people, come together and develop a shared commitment to excellent performance through renewal. In my experience, this group never includes all of the company’s most senior executives because some people just won’t buy in, at least not at first. But in the most successful cases, the coalition is always pretty powerful — in terms of titles, information and expertise, reputations, and relationships.
In both small and large organizations, a successful guiding team may consist of only three to five people during the first year of a renewal effort. But in big companies, the coalition needs to grow to the 20 to 50 range before much progress can be made in phase three and beyond. Senior managers always form the core of the group. But sometimes you find board members, a representative from a key customer, or even a powerful union leader.
Because the guiding coalition includes members who are not part of senior management, it tends to operate outside of the normal hierarchy by definition. This can be awkward, but it is clearly necessary. If the existing hierarchy were working well, there would be no need for a major transformation. But since the current system is not working, reform generally demands activity outside of formal boundaries, expectations, and protocol.
A high sense of urgency within the managerial ranks helps enormously in putting a guiding coalition together. But more is usually required. Someone needs to get these people together, help them develop a shared assessment of their company’s problems and opportunities, and create a minimum level of trust and communication. Off-site retreats, for two or three days, are one popular vehicle for accomplishing this task. I have seen many groups of five to 35 executives attend a series of these retreats over a period of months.
Companies that fail in phase two usually underestimate the difficulties of producing change and thus the importance of a powerful guiding coalition. Sometimes they have no history of teamwork at the top and therefore undervalue the importance of this type of coalition. Sometimes they expect the team to be led by a staff executive from human resources, quality, or strategic planning instead of a key line manager. No matter how capable or dedicated the staff head, groups without strong line leadership never achieve the power that is required.
Efforts that don’t have a powerful enough guiding coalition can make apparent progress for a while. But, sooner or later, the opposition gathers itself together and stops the change.
Error 3: Lacking a Vision
In every successful transformation effort that I have seen, the guiding coalition develops a picture of the future that is relatively easy to communicate and appeals to customers, stockholders, and employees. A vision always goes beyond the numbers that are typically found in five-year plans. A vision says something that helps clarify the direction in which an organization needs to move. Sometimes the first draft comes mostly from a single individual. It is usually a bit blurry, at least initially. But after the coalition works at it for three or five or even 12 months, something much better emerges through their tough analytical thinking and a little dreaming. Eventually, a strategy for achieving that vision is also developed.
In one midsize European company, the first pass at a vision contained two-thirds of the basic ideas that were in the final product. The concept of global reach was in the initial version from the beginning. So was the idea of becoming preeminent in certain businesses. But one central idea in the final version — getting out of low value-added activities — came only after a series of discussions over a period of several months.
Without a sensible vision, a transformation effort can easily dissolve into a list of confusing and incompatible projects that can take the organization in the wrong direction or nowhere at all. Without a sound vision, the reengineering project in the accounting department, the new 360-degree performance appraisal from the human resources department, the plant’s quality program, the cultural change project in the sales force will not add up in a meaningful way.
In failed transformations, you often find plenty of plans, directives, and programs but no vision. In one case, a company gave out four-inch-thick notebooks describing its change effort. In mind-numbing detail, the books spelled out procedures, goals, methods, and deadlines. But nowhere was there a clear and compelling statement of where all this was leading. Not surprisingly, most of the employees with whom I talked were either confused or alienated. The big, thick books did not rally them together or inspire change. In fact, they probably had just the opposite effect.
In a few of the less successful cases that I have seen, management had a sense of direction, but it was too complicated or blurry to be useful. Recently, I asked an executive in a midsize company to describe his vision and received in return a barely comprehensible 30-minute lecture. Buried in his answer were the basic elements of a sound vision. But they were buried — deeply.
A useful rule of thumb: If you can’t communicate the vision to someone in five minutes or less and get a reaction that signifies both understanding and interest, you are not yet done with this phase of the transformation process.
Error 4: Undercommunicating the Vision by a Factor of Ten
I’ve seen three patterns with respect to communication, all very common. In the first, a group actually does develop a pretty good transformation vision and then proceeds to communicate it by holding a single meeting or sending out a single communication. Having used about 0. 0001% of the yearly intracompany communication, the group is startled when few people seem to understand the new approach. In the second pattern, the head of the organization spends a considerable amount of time making speeches to employee groups, but most people still don’t get it (not surprising, since vision captures only 0. 0005% of the total yearly communication). In the third pattern, much more effort goes into newsletters and speeches, but some very visible senior executives still behave in ways that are antithetical to the vision. The net result is that cynicism among the troops goes up, while belief in the communication goes down.
Transformation is impossible unless hundreds or thousands of people are willing to help, often to the point of making short-term sacrifices. Employees will not make sacrifices, even if they are unhappy with the status quo, unless they believe that useful change is possible. Without credible communication, and a lot of it, the hearts and minds of the troops are never captured.
This fourth phase is particularly challenging if the short-term sacrifices include job losses. Gaining understanding and support is tough when downsizing is a part of the vision. For this reason, successful visions usually include new growth possibilities and the commitment to treat fairly anyone who is laid off.
Executives who communicate well incorporate messages into their hour-by-hour activities. In a routine discussion about a business problem, they talk about how proposed solutions fit (or don’t fit) into the bigger picture. In a regular performance appraisal, they talk about how the employee’s behavior helps or undermines the vision. In a review of a division’s quarterly performance, they talk not only about the numbers but also about how the division’s executives are contributing to the transformation. In a routine Q&A with employees at a company facility, they tie their answers back to renewal goals.
In more successful transformation efforts, executives use all existing communication channels to broadcast the vision. They turn boring, unread company newsletters into lively articles about the vision. They take ritualistic, tedious quarterly management meetings and turn them into exciting discussions of the transformation. They throw out much of the company’s generic management education and replace it with courses that focus on business problems and the new vision. The guiding principle is simple: Use every possible channel, especially those that are being wasted on nonessential information.
Perhaps even more important, most of the executives I have known in successful cases of major change learn to “walk the talk.” They consciously attempt to become a living symbol of the new corporate culture. This is often not easy. A 60-year-old plant manager who has spent precious little time over 40 years thinking about customers will not suddenly behave in a customer-oriented way. But I have witnessed just such a person change, and change a great deal. In that case, a high level of urgency helped. The fact that the man was a part of the guiding coalition and the vision-creation team also helped. So did all the communication, which kept reminding him of the desired behavior, and all the feedback from his peers and subordinates, which helped him see when he was not engaging in that behavior.
Communication comes in both words and deeds, and the latter are often the most powerful form. Nothing undermines change more than behavior by important individuals that is inconsistent with their words.
Error 5: Not Removing Obstacles to the New Vision
Successful transformations begin to involve large numbers of people as the process progresses. Employees are emboldened to try new approaches, to develop new ideas, and to provide leadership. The only constraint is that the actions fit within the broad parameters of the overall vision. The more people involved, the better the outcome.
To some degree, a guiding coalition empowers others to take action simply by successfully communicating the new direction. But communication is never sufficient by itself. Renewal also requires the removal of obstacles. Too often, an employee understands the new vision and wants to help make it happen, but an elephant appears to be blocking the path. In some cases, the elephant is in the person’s head, and the challenge is to convince the individual that no external obstacle exists. But in most cases, the blockers are very real.
Sometimes the obstacle is the organizational structure: Narrow job categories can seriously undermine efforts to increase productivity or make it very difficult even to think about customers. Sometimes compensation or performance-appraisal systems make people choose between the new vision and their own self-interest. Perhaps worst of all are bosses who refuse to change and who make demands that are inconsistent with the overall effort.
One company began its transformation process with much publicity and actually made good progress through the fourth phase. Then the change effort ground to a halt because the officer in charge of the company’s largest division was allowed to undermine most of the new initiatives. He paid lip service to the process but did not change his behavior or encourage his managers to change. He did not reward the unconventional ideas called for in the vision. He allowed human resource systems to remain intact even when they were clearly inconsistent with the new ideals. I think the officer’s motives were complex. To some degree, he did not believe the company needed major change. To some degree, he felt personally threatened by all the change. To some degree, he was afraid that he could not produce both change and the expected operating profit. But despite the fact that they backed the renewal effort, the other officers did virtually nothing to stop the one blocker. Again, the reasons were complex. The company had no history of confronting problems like this. Some people were afraid of the officer. The CEO was concerned that he might lose a talented executive. The net result was disastrous. Lower-level managers concluded that senior management had lied to them about their commitment to renewal, cynicism grew, and the whole effort collapsed.
In the first half of a transformation, no organization has the momentum, power, or time to get rid of all obstacles. But the big ones must be confronted and removed. If the blocker is a person, it is important that he or she be treated fairly and in a way that is consistent with the new vision. Action is essential, both to empower others and to maintain the credibility of the change effort as a whole.
Error 6: Not Systematically Planning for, and Creating, Short-Term Wins
Real transformation takes time, and a renewal effort risks losing momentum if there are no short-term goals to meet and celebrate. Most people won’t go on the long march unless they see compelling evidence in 12 to 24 months that the journey is producing expected results. Without short-term wins, too many people give up or actively join the ranks of those people who have been resisting change.
One to two years into a successful transformation effort, you find quality beginning to go up on certain indices or the decline in net income stopping. You find some successful new product introductions or an upward shift in market share. You find an impressive productivity improvement or a statistically higher customer satisfaction rating. But whatever the case, the win is unambiguous. The result is not just a judgment call that can be discounted by those opposing change.
Creating short-term wins is different from hoping for short-term wins. The latter is passive, the former active. In a successful transformation, managers actively look for ways to obtain clear performance improvements, establish goals in the yearly planning system, achieve the objectives, and reward the people involved with recognition, promotions, and even money. For example, the guiding coalition at a U.S. manufacturing company produced a highly visible and successful new product introduction about 20 months after the start of its renewal effort. The new product was selected about six months into the effort because it met multiple criteria: It could be designed and launched in a relatively short period, it could be handled by a small team of people who were devoted to the new vision, it had upside potential, and the new product-development team could operate outside the established departmental structure without practical problems. Little was left to chance, and the win boosted the credibility of the renewal process.
Managers often complain about being forced to produce short-term wins, but I’ve found that pressure can be a useful element in a change effort. When it becomes clear to people that major change will take a long time, urgency levels can drop. Commitments to produce short-term wins help keep the urgency level up and force detailed analytical thinking that can clarify or revise visions.
Error 7: Declaring Victory Too Soon
After a few years of hard work, managers may be tempted to declare victory with the first clear performance improvement. While celebrating a win is fine, declaring the war won can be catastrophic. Until changes sink deeply into a company’s culture, a process that can take five to ten years, new approaches are fragile and subject to regression.
In the recent past, I have watched a dozen change efforts operate under the reengineering theme. In all but two cases, victory was declared and the expensive consultants were paid and thanked when the first major project was completed after two to three years. Within two more years, the useful changes that had been introduced slowly disappeared. In two of the ten cases, it’s hard to find any trace of the reengineering work today.
Over the past 20 years, I’ve seen the same sort of thing happen to huge quality projects, organizational development efforts, and more. Typically, the problems start early in the process: The urgency level is not intense enough, the guiding coalition is not powerful enough, and the vision is not clear enough. But it is the premature victory celebration that kills momentum. And then the powerful forces associated with tradition take over.
Ironically, it is often a combination of change initiators and change resistors that creates the premature victory celebration. In their enthusiasm over a clear sign of progress, the initiators go overboard. They are then joined by resistors, who are quick to spot any opportunity to stop change. After the celebration is over, the resistors point to the victory as a sign that the war has been won and the troops should be sent home. Weary troops allow themselves to be convinced that they won. Once home, the foot soldiers are reluctant to climb back on the ships. Soon thereafter, change comes to a halt, and tradition creeps back in.
Instead of declaring victory, leaders of successful efforts use the credibility afforded by short-term wins to tackle even bigger problems. They go after systems and structures that are not consistent with the transformation vision and have not been confronted before. They pay great attention to who is promoted, who is hired, and how people are developed. They include new reengineering projects that are even bigger in scope than the initial ones. They understand that renewal efforts take not months but years. In fact, in one of the most successful transformations that I have ever seen, we quantified the amount of change that occurred each year over a seven-year period. On a scale of one (low) to ten (high), year one received a two, year two a four, year three a three, year four a seven, year five an eight, year six a four, and year seven a two. The peak came in year five, fully 36 months after the first set of visible wins.
Error 8: Not Anchoring Changes in the Corporation’s Culture
In the final analysis, change sticks when it becomes “the way we do things around here,” when it seeps into the bloodstream of the corporate body. Until new behaviors are rooted in social norms and shared values, they are subject to degradation as soon as the pressure for change is removed.
Two factors are particularly important in institutionalizing change in corporate culture. The first is a conscious attempt to show people how the new approaches, behaviors, and attitudes have helped improve performance. When people are left on their own to make the connections, they sometimes create very inaccurate links. For example, because results improved while charismatic Harry was boss, the troops link his mostly idiosyncratic style with those results instead of seeing how their own improved customer service and productivity were instrumental. Helping people see the right connections requires communication. Indeed, one company was relentless, and it paid off enormously. Time was spent at every major management meeting to discuss why performance was increasing. The company newspaper ran article after article showing how changes had boosted earnings.
The second factor is taking sufficient time to make sure that the next generation of top management really does personify the new approach. If the requirements for promotion don’t change, renewal rarely lasts. One bad succession decision at the top of an organization can undermine a decade of hard work. Poor succession decisions are possible when boards of directors are not an integral part of the renewal effort. In at least three instances I have seen, the champion for change was the retiring executive, and although his successor was not a resistor, he was not a change champion. Because the boards did not understand the transformations in any detail, they could not see that their choices were not good fits. The retiring executive in one case tried unsuccessfully to talk his board into a less seasoned candidate who better personified the transformation. In the other two cases, the CEOs did not resist the boards’ choices, because they felt the transformation could not be undone by their successors. They were wrong. Within two years, signs of renewal began to disappear at both companies.
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There are still more mistakes that people make, but these eight are the big ones. I realize that in a short article everything is made to sound a bit too simplistic. In reality, even successful change efforts are messy and full of surprises. But just as a relatively simple vision is needed to guide people through a major change, so a vision of the change process can reduce the error rate. And fewer errors can spell the difference between success and failure.
Reprint R0701J; HBR OnPoint 1710
EIGHT STEPS TO TRANSFORMING YOUR ORGANIZATION
1. Establishing a Sense of Urgency
• Examining market and competitive realities
• Identifying and discussing crises, potential crises, or major opportunities
2. Forming a Powerful Guiding Coalition
• Assembling a group with enough power to lead the change effort
• Encouraging the group to work together as a team
3. Creating a Vision
• Creating a vision to help direct the change effort
• Developing strategies for achieving that vision
4. Communicating the Vision
• Using every vehicle possible to communicate the new vision and strategies
• Teaching new behaviors by the example of the guiding coalition
5. Empowering Others to Act on the Vision
• Getting rid of obstacles to change
• Changing systems or structures that seriously undermine the vision
• Encouraging risk taking and nontraditional ideas, activities, and actions
6. Planning for and Creating Short-Term Wins
• Planning for visible performance improvements
• Creating those improvements
• Recognizing and rewarding employees involved in the improvements
7. Consolidating Improvements and Producing Still More Change
• Using increased credibility to change systems, structures, and policies that don’t fit the vision
• Hiring, promoting, and developing employees who can implement the vision
• Reinvigorating the process with new projects, themes, and change agents
8. Institutionalizing New Approaches
• Articulating the connections between the new behaviors and corporate success
• Developing the means to ensure leadership development and succession
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PHOTO (COLOR)
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by John P. Kotter
Now retired, John P. Kotter was the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership at Harvard Business School in Boston.
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Authors: Senge, Peter.
Source: Executive Excellence.
Jan1999, Vol. 16 Issue 1, p12. 2p. 1
Color Photograph, 1 Black and White Photograph. .
Document
Type: Article.
Subject Terms:*MANAGEMENT
*LEADERSHIP.
Abstract: Explains the corporate concept of creative tension. Orientation of primary institutions; How to resolve and generate creative tension..Full Text Word Count:1650.ISSN:8756-2308.Accession Number:
Creative Tension.
Leaders build organizations where people are continually expanding their capabilities to shape their futures.
WE ARE DESIGNED FOR learning. We come fully equipped with an insatiable drive to explore and experiment.
Unfortunately, the primary institutions of our society are oriented predominantly toward controlling rather than learning, rewarding individuals for performing for others rather than for cultivating their natural curiosity and impulse to learn. The young child entering school discovers quickly that the name of the game is getting the right answer and avoiding mistakes — a mandate no less compelling to the aspiring manager.
“Our prevailing system of management destroys people,” wrote W. Edwards Deming. “People are born with intrinsic motivation, self-esteem, dignity, curiosity to learn, joy in learning. The forces of destruction begin with toddlers — a prize for the best costume, grades, degrees, and gold stars. On the job, people, teams, and divisions are ranked — reward for the one at the top, punishment at the bottom. Quotas, incentive pay, and separate business plans cause further loss.”
Ironically, by focusing on performing for someone else’s approval, corporations create the very conditions that predestine them to mediocre performance.
Over the long run, superior performance depends on superior learning. The need for understanding how organizations learn and accelerating that learning is greater today than ever before. It is simply no longer possible for anyone to “figure it all out at the top.” The old model, “the top thinks and the local acts,” must now give way to integrating thinking and acting at all levels. While the challenge is great, so is the payoff. “The person who figures out how to harness the collective genius of the people in his or her organization,” according to former Citibank CEO Walter Wriston, “is going to blow the competition away.”
The Integrating Principle
Leadership in a learning organization starts with the principle of creative tension. Creative tension comes from seeing clearly where we want to be, our “vision,” and telling the truth about where we are, our “current reality.” The gap between the two generates a natural tension.
Creative tension can be resolved in two basic ways: by raising current reality toward the vision, or by lowering the vision toward current reality. Individuals, groups, and organizations who learn how to work with creative tension learn how to use the energy it generates to move reality more reliably toward their visions.
The principle of creative tension has long been recognized by leaders. Without vision there is no creative tension. Creative tension cannot be generated from current reality alone. Analysis alone will never generate a vision. Many who are otherwise qualified to lead, fail to do so because they try to substitute analysis for vision. They believe that, if only people understood current reality, they would surely feel the motivation to change. They are then disappointed to discover that people resist the changes that must be made to alter reality. The natural energy for changing reality comes from holding a picture of what might be that is more important to people than what is.
But creative tension cannot be generated from vision alone; it demands an accurate picture of current reality as well. Vision without an understanding of current reality will more likely foster cynicism than creativity. The principle of creative tension teaches that an accurate picture of current reality is just as important as a compelling picture of a desired future.
Leading through creative tension is different than solving problems. In problem solving, the energy for change comes from attempting to get away from an aspect of current reality that is undesirable. With creative tension, the energy for change comes from the vision, from what we want to create, juxtaposed with current reality. While the distinction may seem small, the consequences are not. Many people and organizations find themselves motivated to change only when their problems are bad enough to cause them to change. This works for a while, but the change process runs out of steam as soon as the problems driving the change become less pressing. With problem solving, the motivation for change is extrinsic. With creative tension, the motivation is intrinsic.
Reflection and Inquiry Skills
Many of the best ideas in organizations never get put into practice because new insights and initiatives conflict with established mental models. The leadership task of challenging assumptions without invoking defensiveness requires four reflection and inquiry skills:
1. See leaps of abstraction. Our minds literally move at lightning speed. Ironically, this often slows our learning, because we leap to generalizations so quickly that we never think to test them. We then confuse our generalizations with the observable data upon which they are based, treating the generalizations as if they were data.
2. Balance inquiry and advocacy. Most managers are skilled at articulating their views and presenting them persuasively. While important, advocacy skills can become counterproductive as managers rise in responsibility and confront increasingly complex issues that require collaborative learning among different, equally knowledgeable people. Leaders in learning organizations need to have both inquiry and advocacy skills. When advocating a view, they need to explain the reasoning and data that led to their views and encourage others either to test their views or to provide different views. And when inquiring into another’s views, they need to seek to understand the other’s views, rather than simply restate their own views.
3. Distinguish espoused theory from theory in use. We all like to think that we hold certain views, but often our actions reveal deeper views. For example, I may proclaim that people are trustworthy, but never lend friends money and jealously guard my possessions. Obviously, my deeper mental model (my theory in use) differs from my espoused theory. Recognizing gaps between espoused views and theories in use (which often require the help of others) can be pivotal to deeper learning.
4. Recognize and defuse defensive routines. As one CEO put it, “Nobody ever talks about an issue at the 8 a.m. business meeting exactly the same way they talk about it at home that evening or over drinks at night.” The reason is what Chris Argyris calls “defensive routines,” entrenched habits used to protect ourselves from the embarrassment and threat that come with exposing our thinking. For most of us, such defenses began to build early in life in response to pressures to have the right answers. Organizations add new levels of performance anxiety and thereby amplify and exacerbate this defensiveness. Those who are best at revealing and defusing defensive routines operate with a high degree of self-disclosure regarding their own defensiveness.
Systems Thinking Skills
Leaders should help people see the big picture. But how? In my experience, successful leaders often are “systems thinkers.” They focus less on day-to-day events and more on underlying trends and forces of change. But they often feel frustrated that others cannot see the world the way they do. Future leaders will need five skills:
1. See interrelationships, not things; processes (scenes), not snapshots. Most of us have been conditioned to focus on things and to see the world in static images. This leads us to linear explanations of systematic phenomenon.
2. Move beyond blame. We tend to blame each other or outside circumstances for our problems. But it is poorly designed systems, not incompetent or unmotivated individuals, that cause most problems. Systems thinking shows us that you and the cause of your problems are part of a single system.
3. Distinguish detail complexity from dynamic complexity. Some types of complexity are more important strategically than others. Detail complexity arises when cause and effect are distant in time and space, and when the consequences over time of interventions arc subtle and not obvious to many participants in the system. The leverage in most management situations lies in understanding dynamic complexity, not detail complexity.
4. Focus on areas of high leverage. Some have called systems thinking the “new dismal science” because it teaches that most obvious solutions don’t work — at best, they improve matters in the short run, only to make things worse in the long run. But there is another side to the story. Systems thinking also shows that small, well-focused actions can produce significant, enduring improvements, if they are in the right place. Systems thinkers refer to this idea as the principle of “leverage.” Tackling a difficult problem is often a matter of seeing where the high leverage lies, where a change — with a minimum of effort — would lead to lasting, significant improvement.
5. Avoid symptomatic solutions. The pressures to intervene in management systems that are going awry can be overwhelming. Unfortunately, given the linear thinking that predominates in most organizations, interventions usually focus on symptomatic fixes, not underlying causes. This results in only temporary relief, and it tends to create still more pressures later on for further, low-leverage intervention. If leaders acquiesce to these pressures, they can be sucked into an endless spiral of increasing intervention. Sometimes the most difficult leadership acts are to refrain from intervening through popular fixes and to keep the pressure on everyone to identify more enduring solutions. While leaders who can articulate systematic explanations are rare, those who can will leave their stamp on an organization.
Many charismatic leaders manage almost exclusively at the level of events. They deal in visions and in crisis, and a little in between. Under their leadership, an organization hurtles from crisis to crisis. Eventually, people become reactive, burned out, and cynical. People have no control over their time, let alone their destiny.
In a learning organization, leaders are designers, teachers, and stewards. These roles require new skills: the ability to build shared vision, to challenge prevailing mental models, and to foster more systematic patterns of thinking.
Without vision there is no creative tension.
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By Peter Senge, Peter Senge is chairman of Society of Organizational Learning and a senior lecturer fit MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He is the author of The Fifth Discipline, 617-253-1572.
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SAMPLE ANSWER
Fostering change
Steps to foster change process
Change is inevitable in any organization. However, it is as well difficulty to trigger change in organization, as it requires application of specific techniques. Not many people will embrace change that easy (Kotter, 2007). To foster change in my organization, I will do in-depth research to establish whether it is indeed necessary to embrace change. This will help to identify whether the change will be of benefit to the organization or not or whether, the other stakeholders will accept it or not. I will as well incorporate the views and opinions of other stakeholders. Stakeholders will have to deliberate on the change idea and provide their own recommendation. Communication is also very important when implementing change (Kotter, 2007). All the parties that the change is going to affect will be informed progressively about the change and its benefits. This will help to reduce the level of resistance. Some of challenges that should be expected is increased resistance from the stakeholders, poor communication techniques, insufficient resources to implement the change and inadequate personnel with adequate skills to ensure proper implementation of the change. However, these changes can be managed by recruiting additional staffs that have requisite skills to implement the changes, adopting effective communication media, convincing/persuading the stakeholders on the benefits of the changes and soliciting funds and other resources through credit facilities.
Comparison and contrast of steps to take to foster change process in my own community to impact public health.
To foster change in my own community I will first engage with the community leaders to share this idea with them. Afterwards, I will communicate the vision to the rest of the community members and receive their response. I will then act on their feedback and persuade them about the need to embrace the change. This will require that I demonstrate good leadership skills that they should not worry about the project. These steps are not consistent with the previous steps as there is no in-depth research conducted. The steps are appropriate because they will help to motivate and persuade the community to accept the changes with minimal or no resistance. One challenge likely to be encountered is resistance by some section of the community. To counter this, I will bring experts and opinion leaders that will demonstrate to them that the changes have worked elsewhere and therefore they should embrace the same for their own benefit (Senge, 1990)
References
Kotter, J. P. (2007). Leading change. Harvard Business Review, 85(1), 96-103.
Senge, P. M. (1990). The leader’s new work: Building learning organizations. Sloan Management Review, 32(1), 7-23.
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