The name of John Kotter has become synonymous with authority on change management. Most change managers will know about Kotter's eight steps, even if they haven't delved deeply into the research behind them.
Dr. John Kotter’s 8-Step Process for Leading Change was first introduced in the 1980s, and I first heard about it in the early 1990s. Over four decades, Dr. Kotter observed numerous leaders and organisations as they navigated transformations or executed strategies. He identified common success factors and documented them as the 8 Steps for Leading Change.
Kotter's 8 steps not only provide a structured approach, but an inspiring one. Being expressed in fairly familiar business parlance, its relatively easy to understand what the steps are getting at, and how they fit to create a whole, sound, practice of change management.
From the website https://www.kotterinc.com/methodology.
Although the last on the list of steps created by Kotter, Institute Change, I'm going to start with this because sustaining change is so often forgotten in the change management process. For more on sustainability, you can also read Rainmakers and change resistance: The Sustainability Honey Trap.
Institute Change: Make change stick by anchoring it in the organisational culture. Persistence and commitment are key.
Working for a large government agency, the project was to implement a Customer Relationship Management System (CRM) for the Secretary, his direct reports and each of the sub-agency CEOs and their executive teams.
The purpose of the system was to help the parent and sub-agencies manage engagement and contact with their stakeholders in such a way that stakeholders received a joined-up experience no matter whether they dealt with the parent agency or any of its 5 - 6 sub-agencies. The system was intended for use by the executives themselves - employees with C-suite titles - and their Executive Assistants.
The rollout of the system involved a technical team to build the solution and connect it to the agencies' existing CRM. Change management largely consisted of several short, sharp updates at each agency board culminating in a condensed training session, also offered while the board was sitting for other matters. In addition to that, we met with influential executives one on one to gain insight and feedback, and had one key executive assist as 'acceptance tester'.
We sat in discovery meetings with most EAs during solution design to gain insight as to how executives arranged engagements with industry stakeholders, such as events, intentional meetings and chance encounters.
As you can imagine, with this rollout plan, engagement and training metrics looked good. However, after going live, adoption metrics did not look good.
The project team checked in with key executives, and they were going to meetings, attending events and encountering stakeholders, but they were not recording these engagements in the CRM. But naturally, the question was - why not?
The project sponsor spun up an 8-week sustainability project placing key members of the project team and key business representatives on a project board. Each board member had equal voting status and accountability to deliver the outcomes agreed by the group.
Adoption metrics were the focus as the board closed in on the reasons for low system use.
The request of executives was that effectively they would make notes about what was discussed with a stakeholder during the interaction. These interactions may have been formal meetings, but they were also industry events, cocktail networking mixers, business lunches, discussion forums, government working groups etc. The establishment of this board enabled ideas to be put forward, canvassed, tested and resolved as to their potential to drive the desired executive behaviour.
The expectation that senior executives would fragment their attention at these events to make notes on the side about their discussions with key stakeholders turned out to be an unrealistic one.
Working together, the sustainability board understood the low adoption problem and came up with a very low-tech solution. In order to bridge the gap between making no shareable record of engagement with industry stakeholders (the old way) and making a shareable electronic record available instantly to all system users across every sub-agency (the desired outcome), we printed a notepad!
The sustainability board designed an old-school notepad that looked exactly like the main input screen of the online system and provided this to the executives who were not recording their key community and stakeholder interactions. The executives kept this notepad nearby prompting them to make a record of any stakeholder discussions on paper. These sheets were then passed on to their team members for entry into the CRM system.
Conclusion on Kotter's Step: Institute Change
Institute change is about making change stick by anchoring it in the organisational culture. We first need measurement to understand to what degree the change is sticking, and then we need to follow up with persistence and commitment.
By working with the existing culture of this government agency, the project team developed a bridge between the unaccountable old way of working and the desired new way of working. By working with an existing culture of C-level executives passing notes and documents to team members to arrange appropriate recording and filing, the stakeholder engagement CRM received greater adoption than it otherwise would have. By printing the notepad to resemble the online screen, executives became familiar with the information required, and were also gently lead to draw their own conclusions about double-handling and make an individual decision about whether that is a culture they wished to see continue in their own organisational unit.
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