The Sixth Sense

Implementing change

The world we live in is constantly changing. As a result, the businesses, organisations, churches, etc, we are part of also need to be constantly changing. This is becoming an increasingly prevalent issue as the speed of change continues to increase.

This begs the question of how do we go about building flexible and adaptable organisations that are able to change in order to stay relevant to the changing world outside.

I was reading a great article in the Harvard Business Review entitled: Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail (subscription required for full article). The article by John Kotter lists eight reasons for failing to implement change. I’ll mention just the first one today: Transformation efforts fail because of a failure to establish a great enough sense of urgency.

The article then quotes someone who said the purpose of establishing a sense of urgency is “to make the status quo seem more dangerous than launching into the unknown.”

This really makes sense. If people don’t sense how important it is for the change to occur, why would anyone be motivated to get onboard?

Have you had experiences of trying to implement change in a team you lead or an organisation you’re part of? How was it? What did you learn?