Leading Transformation: The Power of Urgency

Transformation begins with a perceived need for change.

Unless and until the people in an organization understand the need for change, recognize the catalysts for change, and have some “picture” of what they are going to change into, transformation is difficult, if not impossible.

Under any set of conditions, transformation is the most challenging kind of change.  Transformation challenges the basic assumptions of a business, an organization, an industry.  Transformation leads to the creation of something new, and is a difficult, yet rewarding process.  It paves the way for the future.

I don’t care who you are or what you do, how good you are at what you do, in a dynamic, turbulent world, unless you are continually reinventing, redesigning, repositioning yourself, you will quickly fall behind.

Every transformation requires a “catalyst.”  The catalyst could be a leader, a major event (see the financial tsunami that has occurred since September '08), or a recognition that the world is changing quickly and the organization must co-evolve.  This catalyst challenges the integrity of the existing structure, and paves the way for the transformation.

John Kotter has identified how to fail at transformation.  The converse is – how to succeed.

See John Kotter’s Harvard Business Review (January 2007) article, “Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail,” and Kotter’s (1996) book, Leading Change (Harvard Business School Press).

The necessity for urgency in organizational transformation is so pressing, that Kotter has just published a new book, “A Sense of Urgency”.

Why such an urgent call for urgency?  Urgency is overlooked by an organization, particularly in a steady-state organizational phase, or during periods of success.  Organizations refuse to recognize and/or acknowledge the changing environment ( a lack of contextual intelligence), and want to keep on doing what they do so well.  Organizations that ignore urgency, leaders that don’t lead with urgency, find themselves quickly falling behind in a turbulent, dynamic, and continually changing world.

Learn from the Center For Life Cycle Sciences how to succeed at transformation.  Learn to distinguish transformation from other kinds of change and learn the necessary strategies, tools, and processes to lead an organization and its people through transformational change.

Even better, learn to make transformation a continuous process in your organization, and to create an organization that can continually co-evolve with its environment… always being current, always moving toward the leading edge, always anticipating and pre-empting in a changing world.

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