increased change around us drives an increased effort to change within the organizations that employ us, supply us with needed goods and services, and govern us. There are many variations of what this looks like by industry, sector, or region. But in general, the sheer number of organizational initiatives to produce change is now much larger than 30 years ago. Fifty years ago, virtually no organizations talked about changing their cultures, while today this is commonplace. The growing number of initiatives has led to more and more companies adopting formal project management offices (PMOs).
Source: Adapted from Ahir H, N Bloom, and H Furceri (2018) “World Uncertainty Index”, Stanford mimeo. The WUI is computed by counting the percent of the word “uncertain” (or its variants) in the Economist Intelligence Unit country reports.
Along with, and directly related to, the increase in the pace and complexity of change, the last two decades have seen a steep increase in the level of uncertainty. Complex change does that. The high level of economic and political uncertainty can make it difficult to know what initiatives will be necessary to stay competitive and to take advantage of new opportunities.
Unfortunately, as we will see in the examples laid out in this book, the internal change in organizations is not keeping pace with external change and volatility. This challenge affects everything: the quality and availability of health care; the stock market; the environment; the affordability of products that make life easier, more interesting, or more fun; the economy; the responsiveness of government; poverty; our ability to deal with medical emergencies, including pandemics; how many of us will lead comfortable and satisfying lives; even how many of us will die needlessly. The list is endless.
The Change Problem and Solution
In this book, we will dig into this increasing uncertainty, volatility, and change. We discuss the implications, as we now understand them, for people who are trying to make things better for their enterprises (and society). We argue that if we continue to improve our capacity to adapt and change only incrementally, we are taking a huge and unnecessary risk.
The good news is that we have learned much over the past few decades about why so many people and organizations struggle with change, why a minority thrive, and why more than a few literally do not survive. As you will see, for perfectly understandable but correctable reasons, much of this knowledge is not yet used in most organizations.
Our collective struggle with change often seems to be the result of ill-equipped, seemingly incompetent, or stubbornly myopic people. The stories of companies like Kodak, Blockbuster, or Borders are often told as cases of arrogant, stubborn leaders who refuse to see what should have been obvious. In hindsight, we question whether they even tried to change. To some degree these critiques are true. But they are not the whole story and hence are misleading.
The bigger story is that neither the core of human nature, hardwired into us many thousands of years ago, nor the central design of modern organizations, very much a late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century invention, were built to change quickly, easily, and smartly. People and organizations were designed mostly to be efficient and reliable enough to ensure survival. We do have the capacity to innovate and create new habits or products. But that capacity is not the most powerful force except in young people and organizations. With maturity comes all sorts of mechanisms that lean toward stability and short-term safety. So even when companies recognize new threats, they are often unable to change enough or fast enough to overcome these challenges.
Today, in a more complex and rapidly evolving twenty-first century, when we put a person designed for a world long gone into an organization that was not designed for this century, we regularly see too slow a pace of change in the face of uncertainty. We see too painful a process as individuals and organizations try to deal with inevitable transformation challenges. We get too little too slowly in terms of needed results, even though that deficit is not always obvious.
This struggle is today's reality and potentially tomorrow's catastrophe. But it does not have to be that way. Much more is possible.
We know this is true because we have seen examples of success where the gap between external and internal change is minimized or eliminated. When this correction is made, enterprises can leap into new and better futures with widely shared benefits.
Outstanding success is often attributed to a few larger-than-life leaders. There is truth in the observation that an individual can have an outsized impact in certain situations. But both research and our advisory experiences pretty clearly show that the most successful change comes from mobilizing more leadership from many more people. And three streams of research, discussed in the next chapter, seem to be particularly promising in providing insights into how to unleash this expanded idea of leadership. The first stream comes from brain science and deals with human nature and our response to threats and opportunities. The second is from organizational studies and business history and speaks to the limitations of the modern “management-centric” organization and how we can overcome those limitations. The third comes from a branch of leadership studies, one that specifically deals with the all-too-common pitfalls of leading change.
Taken together, these research streams can provide powerful insights into how you can realistically mobilize much more leadership from many more people to drive change faster and smarter and, thus, to close the gap between internal and external realities.
What is perhaps most encouraging is that we can say, with confidence, that this emerging science of change has gone beyond academic analysis to actual, often dramatic, impact in the real world. Throughout this book, we share examples where organizations have taken a substantially different path from the norm by utilizing methods and insights from this emerging science. What is equally as encouraging is that there is no magical sauce or impossible-to-replicate situation in these examples. We have seen, up close, again and again, that people can be guided, facilitated, educated, and motivated to adopt new ways of thinking and working, to actually change their actions, resulting in sometimes astonishing business or mission impact.
The companies that we discuss (and many more that we do not) have truly done some amazing things. They have implemented whole new strategies to help them roar out of financial crises. They have accomplished, in 90 days, changes and business results that were thought to be totally impossible within a year or two, much less in such a short period of time. These enterprises have significantly improved employee engagement and have seen their efforts reflected in winning awards for Best Place to Work. Big, older companies that have struggled to innovate have developed remarkably successful innovations in products, ways of working, and strategies. Some have changed smartly and swiftly and doubled or tripled their share prices in 2–3 years, or even less.
When you start to add up the people touched with such efforts, the numbers grow big quickly. These improvements are at the heart of Kotter International's vision of “millions leading, billions benefiting.” Real results like these are the product not just of research, but useable research. This is why we have organized the book in ways that make it immediately applicable to specific changes you might be experiencing or contemplating.
The Stakes
In a world where billions of people continue to lead lives few of us would want to conceive of, where we face growing environmental challenges that threaten to impact our children and grandchildren disastrously, where emerging technologies in the wrong hands or used for the wrong
