Managing Change: John P. Kotter

YC: Thank you so much for being here in the podcast. Uh, professor Carter. So thank you for making the time to be with me today.

JK: No, my pleasure really.

YC: Following your work, I wanted to talk to you about it because, um, change is such a difficult thing for organizations to implement, but first of all, why did you decide to focus on that particular topic?

JK: My original interest, which goes back to graduate school was in a performance of organizations and individuals in those organizations. My doctoral thesis actually was on big city mayors in the United States during the 1960s. And one of the things that was so striking was that the distance between the three best performing mayors and the two worst performing mayors by any measure, the impact on the community, their own reelection, uh, how well the city did economically was galactic. I mean, it was so large. It was the three, three got to on a one to 10 scale, three deserved a 10 and two deserve the one. And I wonder good heavens uh, if you could get more of the fives, if you will, up to a seven or an eight and the ones up to four and the nine to 10, it would have a huge impact on cities.
And subsequently as I did my research at Harvard business school on companies and their customers and their employees and their supply chain, et cetera, et cetera, that took me, uh, to the topic of leadership, which at first, um, was a little fuzzy for me. I didn't think the literature helped a lot, uh, and clarifying exactly what leadership was. There were just lots of opinions, but eventually that took me then to the topic of change because what leaders did my mayors and then the executives in the businesses that I studied more than anything is they help their organizations figure out where to go in a shifting environment and mobilize people to make the changes that were needed to get there. So it was a performance leads me to leadership, leads me to change. And I became convinced a couple of decades ago that the world was changing faster and faster, which has, and therefore, uh, that understanding why the world changing more and faster and how organizations can adapt better, faster, smarter, and the leadership it takes to do that, um, would be a fascinating thing to study. And I have been for decades now leading up to as of last Wednesday, my latest book, I just looked on Amazon for the first time and it's already an Amazon bestseller. So number seven books in the broad category of business management. So people are initially finding it useful. Definitely.

YC: Yes. And congratulations. Yeah. Cause you have all this other publications. I mean, each one, you find something new, like it all kind of boils down as well to this eight steps that you have. And I want to ask you about those eight steps that we'll be establishing a sense of urgency, creating a coalition, uh, also developing a vision, uh, communicating the change vision, empowering, um, broad-based action and generating short-term wins, consolidating gains and anchoring new approaches in the culture. Um, and correct me if I'm wrong, if anything, have they shifted overall throughout this, uh, this years? And how do you came up with those boiling down to that kind of formula?

JK: At one point a number of years ago, I started putting together, uh, cases, teaching cases, research cases, and simple written reports that I had done on change efforts, mostly in businesses, but not entirely. We had public sector, some nonprofits, some universities, and I managed to get the number of cases up to about a hundred, uh, which is for clinical research where you're going out and actually talking to people, watching what's going on. Um, and trying to understand up close is a lot. And I then divided the hundred into either three or four categories in terms of their outcomes, the ones in which they managed to achieve their aspirations for change. Uh, pretty much close to all of that. It was a very small group, the ones that achieve most of their aspirations, the kind of disappointments and the total failure. And the question then is, as I'm reading through these stacks is what, what, if anything, is a pattern that helps explain why you lean one way or another?
And what I discovered is that, uh, the low end, the people that are really struggled or failed, made more often than not a predictable set of mistakes and conversely on the high end, uh, they not only avoided the mistakes, but they kind of made up for what the problem was, if you will, and got some, um, uh, acceleration in the right direction. So it was, and, and I, I remember them beginning to write this up, but it was based on, uh, a hundred detailed cases. And it's what in, uh, an academic might call it qualitative pattern analysis. And that's what we did. 

YC: And when you were describing the predictable set of, uh, of mistakes that, uh, these organizations have made, what were, uh, a few of those that persist today that you have observed through your research?
JK: One back when we first found it complacency by too many people was the single biggest problem. Uh, you might have, uh, a head of an organization who is says this big strategic initiative that is going to change us to make us better is important. Uh, but if you go down inside the organization, you find people either don't know about it, don't believe in it, et cetera, et cetera, and who think things are fundamentally, okay. Uh, these days you do find that, but you find another thing that is not a sense of urgency, which is what you need, which I would call I've called a false surgency at times. And it's when people, it it's panic is what it is. It's when people are, are, it's not like they're sleeping at their desks. They're there running around from meeting to meeting and emailing like man and doing 16 zooms in a day.
And so the bosses think sense of urgency. We've got it, but it's not, it's, it's, it's literally, it's, uh, it's survival induced panic, uh, with a lot of, uh, anxiety and anger. Um, and to the point where people don't even deal with the short-term problems very well. And it kills the energy that, uh, is needed to, uh, take on big strategic projects and make them work over time to produce changes. Another one that we found at the beginning that has become more important, I think is what you call short-term wins. Especially when these, when you're dealing with really difficult changes that they have to be made. Uh, and a lot of them, it's incredibly important that you build momentum and nothing helps you build momentum more than, uh, an accomplishment that is vision and relevant for the change that can be communicated to the skeptics or the cynics and celebrated, which brings in more people who are willing, willing to try additional things.
And if you guide that that's part of the guiding coalition job appropriately, even more of these short-term wins, which get brings in more people, et cetera, that's that kind of virtuous cycle, which people MIS often executives who are sincerely trying to think long term who've been accused so often of being short-term thinkers, don't pay enough attention to getting really credible results in the short term that that are obviously related or leading indicators, if you will, that you're on a good path that the change that you're trying to produce, um, makes sense. What we have found in our, on the consulting side of my world is that we like 90 day projects and they're not projects really, but 90 day initiatives that, um, can produce results that will literally surprise people, catch people's attention and get them interested in what are you doing and what can I do to help?
And we have found a kind of a methodology for putting together groups of people who are, have some sense of urgency and are interested in the change and getting them to set the goals, not having senior management, hand them some plan to execute, but letting them kind of, uh, think through the change challenge, uh, whatever it is, and set the goals. And, um, the kinds of results that we find you can produce on a regular basis are actually astonishing. I mean, people take, uh, cycle times in factories where for example, to set up, uh, for a new production run normally takes, uh, two days, uh, shutting down the factory and then moving things around, putting into it. And, uh, we had one client that, um, came up with a bunch of ideas, executed those ideas in less than 90 days and turned the two day cycle time down to three hours, two days to three hours.
We've had, uh, people who have, uh, call centers, uh, for service where the average wait time was two minutes, which if your customer can seem like a long time, it's not, but it can seem like if, especially if you're upset that your product is working the way you wanted it to, and then a 90 day well-designed and well-executed initiative reduce the two minutes down to 15 seconds, these types of results are dramatic enough that they catch people's attention again. And as long as their vision relevant to the change, you're trying to produce to take advantage of some opportunity that's being created by an ever changing world. Uh, it can make a big difference.

YC: Yeah, certainly. And about the guiding coalition, what is a good advice you have for people who want to create a good guiding coalitions? Are there certain attributes of those people that should be part of, uh, of, of that?

JK: Yes. The inclination of most people, we have found executives because of the way they've been brought up in the managerial world is to go to people they know, and they trust number one number, which means they go to the same people again and again, and again for project number two, to keep the group small, because it just seems logical. It's a lot easier to manage a smaller group than a large group, and to keep it, um, at one level, depending upon the nature of the project, it could be anywhere from the executive level to senior, middle management on down to frontline people. What we have found is larger, more diverse groups, as long as you, they want to be involved. Number one, and number two, that, that you create the context in which they can effectively operate or another is you, you provide the context in which the leadership is good to make this group function are much more powerful.
You've got more brains in there with more information. So you want people from all of the silos and from multiple levels, which is really hard for people who have been raised in a traditional managerial context. I understand why you'd ever want a senior vice president and his executive assistant in the same group. Well, they live in different worlds. They have different connections to people. They've got different data. And if you can get that group to work well with more data, more connections for execution, they can be quite spectacular. So as long, so people who want to do it, diverse group, larger group, we work with 40 and 50 typically, and obviously some leadership capabilities in there. Uh, although what we find over and over again is people surprise you. If you create the good, a good context, somebody that has never shown any leadership potential suddenly starts showing it. Not always, obviously, but it happens. And, um, those are some of the characteristics of really effective guiding coalition. 

YC: Good advice. Cause it's usually, and get the people that we know and that we're kind of all in agreement. And of course, as you mentioned, that will probably not be effective in the long-term. There's a few things I want to ask you because there's a lot of things that happen, of course, with the pandemic and a lot of change had to happen immediately. And what we're seeing is a trend of kind of things going to the status school of the way they were before. So if for some reason, things changed for the best thing and particular organization, and we want to be able to stick with that change. What do you suggest, uh, for either managers or for employees to do?

JK: Okay. It's a good question. I I'm reading a lot in the last few weeks about quote, going back to work usually. And my, uh, my own observation, again, understanding, uh, the changes that are going to be needed or the kinds of efforts that are going to be needed to, to go back to work and to be successful is you shouldn't try to go back to work. You should try to go back to work better. That should be the goal. Now that will mean that because of the pandemic, you were forced to actually to give up processes or habits or whatever. But if you look at what happened in the last year, actually, you haven't missed those at all. They cost you money and the lack, but you want to intentionally identify those because the last thing you want is for them to come back, just because of old habits, a second category are things that you didn't do before the pandemic circumstances kind of pushed you in that direction.
And you've been doing it for the last year and you're getting better results. You want to intentionally identify those too, to make sure you don't lose them, that they become a way, uh, of, uh, normal work, um, after the pandemic and sober and overall, you want people to think about the going back to work. It's not a settling down. The data is overwhelming. And we've written about this in the new book that the world has been moving faster, producing more change, more volatile change, all of which produces more uncertainty for a couple of centuries now ever, uh, driven by the industrial revolution. And this has kicked up with, uh, the information revolution and computers, and it's even kicking up more. Now the future. I mean, too many people talk about the world as pre pandemic pandemic, post pandemic, not a good way to think the world is going through this, this almost exponential, upward climb and has been for some time, uh, of more change, more rapid change, more vulnerable change.
And this going back to work offers you an opportunity to look again with fresh eyes, since changes have to be made. And what are the opportunities out there now, and what should we be doing to take, to capitalize on those opportunities? And then to execute that another way to think about it is going back gives you because it will require changes. It gives you an opportunity to develop, you know, your, your organizational and your personal change muscle, which you're going to need more of because the change Olympics, if you will, are going to just become more frequent and more in the future. There's no question about that. So that's the way I think about going back to work. And I think a few people I can see already are thinking along similar lines, and they're going to take advantage of that. And I think we're going to see, unfortunately, some real train wreck where people go back, they lose some of the new habits they'd developed during pandemic. They embrace some of the old habits that were, uh, irrelevant, and they don't use it as a, a time to develop sophistication with respect to change. Um, all they do is, uh, make some, uh, too many arbitrary decisions arbitrary in the sense that so much is changing. It's hard to analyze this stuff and make their employees, man. And that's the last thing we need. 

YC: So taking this opportunity to kind of improve, I like what you mentioned, that it's an opportunity to work better. Certainly. Uh, just a couple more things I want to ask you. Uh, I want to go back to that example that you mentioned at the beginning of how you started in it, the theme or the research area of change, and those may years that you were studying. So where is there any impact, anything in particular of the, either the personality or the straight traits of those people that perhaps could help with change? Are there any skills that we can cultivate to become like better change agents?

JK: I think, I think in retrospect, what you see in that first study, we found in subsequent studies and we've come to understand infinitely better than we did way back then. Uh, the people who performed the best, first of all, we're very opportunity oriented that isn't to say that they ignored short-term threats, uh, problems. They didn't, they dealt with them, but they were, but they were much more oriented toward trying to help their cities thrive and not just survive, survive as a board, but thrive one personality, uh, did not come into it, uh, of the three top mayors, two of them, one, one was an, a credible Irish politician, extrovert, smiley face guy in politics, all his life. Another was a former CEO of a company, very kind of a statesman like gentleman, you know, always in a suit and tie low, uh, low key, not, uh, uh, extroverted.
So personality wasn't a thing, but vision was, I mean, these guys worked with their communities to be able to think and help people think 3, 5, 10 years ahead, and to talk about it in a way that people could understand and could kind of see, oh, I see what you're talking about. And I, I see why that's a, a, a attractive future again, how they communicated varied a lot, but they all communicated a lot and not just to their bureaucracy, but to the outside world too. And to various sub-communities in their outside world. And they all were willing to within parameters or constraints associated with the vision kind of guardrail associated with the vision. They all were willing to allow people to kind of pick up and initiate and provide leadership themselves, uh, to make things happen. They didn't have kind of an obsessive need to control.
And all of that adds up to a lot of what leadership is all about. Uh, all three of them to more than one were very good managers, but more importantly, for the changes they made, the results they got, uh, they were good leaders and that's a pattern. I mean, one of the biggest messages in this book is we need a lot more leadership from a lot more people. And the notion that that is naive, that somehow you, you have to be born with a very, very rare set of genes to ever, um, provide leadership. We have found again and again, in our consulting practice that, um, if you create the right conditions, people you've never heard of you as an executive will step forward and provide leadership that will surprise you get results. You need push things in the right direction, take advantage of opportunities. And it's very, it's very exciting to see,

YC: Thank you so much for your time. And I liked that ending with the message of that. We can all become things, the opportunity to lead and become leaders in this particular environment. So thank you so much for your time, and what's the best way if people wanted to contact you or have any questions for you?

JK: Um, I would be easiest way is to go to, uh, not the Harvard side, but the consulting side websites. So the consulting company is named after me. So it's K O T T E R Kotter international. And inside that website, first of all, is a lot of interesting material and stories, which are all free, but it's also, there's a contact and just say no for Dr. Kotter and asked me a question and then it'll get to me. Great.

YC: Thank you so much for your time. And for being here with me today on the show.