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This article was first published in the April 2016 international edition of Accounting and Business magazine.

John Kotter points out in his book, Leading Change, the importance of creating a ‘guiding coalition’. Every organisation, he says, has its oracle – the individual everyone turns to for an answer (‘You need to talk to Bob’). These oracles exist right across the organisation and may hold seemingly unimportant positions. Do not be fooled.

Firms need to invest in these gurus. One organisation held three two-week workshops about the implementation of its planning tool. Yes, that’s six weeks of workshops. The CEO was present for part of each one, and the wisdom from the oracles was channelled, by an expert facilitator, into a successful blueprint for the project.  

Kotter in Leading Change, and Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan in their book, The Three Laws of Performance, also stress the importance of compelling and motivational future-based language in setting out a vision and strategy. This is crucial, they say, if the journey is to be seen and resources made available.

More communication

In communicating the change vision, Kotter says that if you undercommunicate, you will probably undercommunicate a lot – by a factor of more than 10. This will undermine your initiative, no matter how well planned. During a project, the project leader needs to obtain permission from the CEO to gate-crash any gathering in the organisation for a 10-minute slot to outline the project and explain progress made so far. One sure-fire route to failure is to believe that staff will read your project newsletters and emails. They won’t.

Kotter also advocates empowering ‘broad-based action’: the need for change and the right to change must be handed over to teams early on. Zaffron and Logan concur with this view. Once the invented future is set in the minds of employees, they will march towards this future. All the great writers state that some chaos is good, so let teams embrace the project in their own way.

Next Kotter talks about the need to generate quick wins – obvious, yes, but frequently missed. Always remember, he says, that senior management can sometimes suffer from attention deficit. You progress in a methodical and introverted way at your peril. You need easy wins, celebrated extrovertly, and you need to ensure you set up the CEO to score the easy goals. ‘Consolidate gains and produce more change’, urges Kotter. This is the fly-wheel effect so well expressed by Jim Collins in his books Built to Last and Good to Great: when staff are working in unison, the fly-wheel of change will turn faster and faster. 

Finally, Kotter talks of the importance of anchoring new approaches in the culture. Make heroes of the change agents; ensure their values are embedded in the corporate values; and be sure to weed out those in management who have not embraced the change and who, over time, will be dowsing the fire at night when nobody is looking. 

David Parmenter is a writer and presenter on measuring, monitoring and managing performance