John Kotter

Um, and so I think it's, it's important to look at, uh, and to be ready for the realignment that needs to happen afterwards.

John Kotter and his Leading Change book and his book, A Sense of Urgency, which Sense of Urgency then became a key component or maybe grew out of, I can't remember the order, as a key component of that book, Leading Change, really talks a lot about a sense of urgency, right? And if you're going to drive change, I think doing things in decisive fashion is important.

It's hard to do because You're coming into a new environment, right, where, as I said, people have been together a long time.

People in general are resistant to change, particularly if they've been somewhere for a long time and they've been together for a long time.

absolutely.

So change management 101. of Kotter's framework is build the guiding coalition.

Well, in an organization, everyone's in the guiding coalition.

There might be a task force, but the whole organization has to shift for a transformation.

And this is where the change, again, change management.

Kotter's rules of change.

Repeat.

Repeat the message.

So maybe there still needs to be some stable platform amongst this flotilla or how do you call that a flagship boat that can organize at skill because the skill will still be needed in some parts of the organization now it's always of course on those intermediary frames right in the interfaces between the smaller boats and the bigger ones that you run into problems because how do they connect and how do we make sure that they they synchronize at the right points in the right times

Your description is very akin, I think, to John Kotter's hybrid organization, I think.

Are you familiar with That's Not How We Do It Here? Where he basically talks about an aspect of networked organization, which is a looser, more entrepreneurial, more decentralized, like a flotilla of speedboats.

And then in the background of that, you have to have stable structure that then is going to kind of optimize your operation.

That the challenges we face are increasingly complex, and they inevitably span the borders of society.

organizations and we face a world of continuing uncertainty and that will be the case for some time to come so the imperative to lead through uncertainty and change reinforces the need for agility and resiliency and it requires a willingness for us all to question the continued relevancy of processes jobs and even some entire organizations and so it's important for all of us to be able to recognize and face change and successfully changing is about more than just solving problems John Kotter's latest book is titled Change, and he notes that our brains are hardwired for two things.

A survive channel that's fast and has been with us since prehistoric days and helped protect us with our peripheral vision from threats amongst us, from saber-toothed tigers to whatever else.

And we're really good at doing that.

It's the manager in you who does the right.

Again, I refer you to the article by Kotter.

I'm going to run very quickly through this just to give you a little flavor of what we're talking about.

But I recommend you go into the article, which goes into it in much more detail.

but a lot of regional things as well that are bringing us together through our IUs and just making sure our PD is really giving exploration time, but it's also honoring everybody's entry points because we aren't all in the same place even today.

And if we don't have that psychological safety, if we don't recognize Kotter's change framework, which when I took an AI for Education course, Those two pieces really, really have made the biggest difference.

You know, we need to honor everybody and this can feel like fear for some people because it's actually challenging supposedly who you are, but it's actually just challenging where we are and what we're doing.

and how we're going to respond to this moment.

So my BRAVER model is a breathing change model.

that fits on top of ADKAR, Kotter, McKinsey, any of the linear models, because change is not linear.

So where you get that chaos is when people say, well, well, things have changed within the change.

And what are we going to do? We're in this step of it.

It's like, yeah, these are the things you should pay attention to because they're showing up in more than one place.

Much like Jan stated earlier with, you know, Kotter's principles and stuff like that.

So all this stuff is like, you know, pay attention.

This is good stuff.