Dr. John Kotter | Change | Talks at Google

Summary

In this Talks at Google session, Dr. John Kotter delves into the intricate world of change management and leadership. He emphasizes the increasing rate of change in the world, driven by technological, economic, and social factors. Kotter highlights the need for organizations to adapt more quickly and effectively to maintain competitive advantage. By exploring principles of change science and the innovative dual operating system approach, he provides a roadmap for enhancing agility in organizations. This discussion also touches on the human aspects of change, emphasizing the need for leadership over management in today’s fast-paced world.

Highlights

• Dr. Kotter reveals how change is accelerating and organizations must adapt faster. 🕒
• Leadership is distinct from management and is essential for guiding change. 💼
• Understanding the dual operating system can help organizations be more nimble. 🎯
• Change initiatives need more leadership involvement, making jobs meaningful. 👥
• Short-term wins help maintain momentum in change initiatives. 💪

Key Takeaways

• Change is constant and accelerating, demanding agile adaptation from organizations. 🚀
• Leadership, not just management, drives effective change. 🌟
• The dual operating system combines hierarchical and network structures for adaptability. 🏗️
• The motivation for change is not monetary, it’s about meaningful impact. 💡
• Short-term wins are crucial to sustain motivation and encourage continued effort. 🏆

Overview

Dr. John Kotter, a renowned change management guru, joined Talks at Google to discuss the ever-evolving landscape of change. He explains that the rate of change has been on the rise for over 150 years due to technological, industrial, and social shifts. The challenge for organizations is not just to keep pace but to get ahead by improving their adaptive capabilities. 🌍

Central to Kotter’s insight is the distinction between leadership and management. While management focuses on planning and control, leadership is about embracing change, seizing opportunities, and cultivating a vision for the future. He discusses his 'dual operating system' framework, which integrates hierarchy and network structures to innovate more effectively in rapidly changing environments. 🏫

The conversation also covers the psychological and cultural aspects of change, stressing the need for intrinsic motivation and passion in driving change. Short-term wins are highlighted as a key strategy to maintain momentum. This engaging session provided valuable strategies for anyone looking to foster a more agile and change-ready organization. 🌟

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction The introduction chapter begins with a warm welcome accentuated by music, setting an engaging tone for the topic of discussion, which is 'change.' The chapter emphasizes the significance of change in both personal and organizational contexts. An important guest, influential in the host's career, is introduced to guide the discussion on how to effectively manage and adapt to change.
• 00:30 - 02:00: Dr. Kotter's Background and Influence Dr. John Kotter discusses his lifelong dedication to studying the science of change. He shares his motivations and the reasons he believes the study of change is crucial in today's world.
• 02:00 - 04:00: The Science of Change The chapter explores why certain managers and organizations outperform others, tying it to the topics of change and leadership. It suggests that organizations with better leadership, characterized by more people providing leadership, tend to perform significantly better. Leadership is identified as a central force driving success.
• 04:00 - 10:00: Strategic Planning and Leadership The chapter discusses the challenges and importance of strategic planning and leadership in a rapidly changing and increasingly unpredictable world. The speaker reflects on their career and the ever-evolving nature of change, noting that volatility and unpredictability have intensified over time. This context underscores the necessity for effective strategic planning and adaptive leadership to navigate and thrive amidst such dynamic conditions.
• 10:00 - 15:00: The Dual Operating System In this chapter titled 'The Dual Operating System,' the discussion centers around how new entrants in the market can disrupt established industries by seizing opportunities that incumbent organizations fail to capitalize on. The threat of disruption is portrayed also as an opportunity, emphasizing the need for organizations to adapt and change in the face of new competition. The dialogue suggests that examples of such disruptions and opportunities exist worldwide, and it sets the stage for a deeper dive into specific details and real-world examples of this phenomenon.
• 15:00 - 20:00: Network and Hierarchy: Balancing Roles This chapter highlights the evolving capability of executives and government officials in managing change effectively. Despite improvements over the past 20 to 30 years, the pace of change continues to accelerate, posing new challenges. The chapter delves into the key principles and findings from research on the science of change, emphasizing the need to balance roles within networks and hierarchies.
• 20:00 - 25:00: Sustaining Engagement and Short-term Wins The chapter discusses the increasing gap between the fast-paced demands placed on individuals and organizations and the average ability or capacity to handle these demands. It highlights the need for adaptability, agility, and staying ahead of the curve, emphasizing the importance of understanding the science of change to effectively respond to these challenges.
• 25:00 - 31:00: Organizational Success Stories The chapter discusses the increasing rate of change driven by technological and industrial advancements over the past 150 years, starting with the industrial revolution. It emphasizes the influence of recent brain research from the last two decades on understanding this trend and suggests that the rate of change is expected to continue rising without leveling off.
• 31:00 - 58:30: Audience Q&A The chapter focuses on the human species’ intrinsic bias towards survival. It discusses how the survival instinct leads humans to seek comfortable and stable conditions. Additionally, it touches upon the human capacity to learn and adapt, which assists in survival.
• 58:30 - 60:00: Conclusion and Acknowledgements The chapter discusses the evolutionary development of human instincts, highlighting the tension between the newer cognitive processes and the more primal survival instincts. It emphasizes that while humans have evolved to adapt to changes, the rapid pace of modern change challenges our instinctual behaviors, revealing a hardwired hesitation to quickly adapt to newfound conditions.

Dr. John Kotter | Change | Talks at Google Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 [Music] hello and welcome today we are here to talk about a topic which is central to everybody's life at the moment and most organizations out there when that topic is change and to do that we are welcoming somebody who's had a huge influence on my career and taught me a huge amount about how i can help
• 00:30 - 01:00 other people in other organizations go through change that's uh dr john cotter welcome john thank you bobby it's a pleasure really thanks thanks for spending the time with us really appreciate it um so you've uh you've devoted your life really to researching the science of change and uh before we get into the actual science uh why is it that you you did this and uh what do you why do you think it's so important to the world today well my original interest was in
• 01:00 - 01:30 why some managers and why some organizations seem to so outperform others so it was more just generic performance and that quickly took me to the topic of change and leadership that is to say better led companies the more people providing leadership seem to do a lot better and the reason for that is leadership was the central force
• 01:30 - 02:00 in dealing with the changing world and we were getting increasing even back down at the beginning of my career and increasing a changing world so that's the kind of thread that led to it and i've stuck with it because of course the rate of change has done nothing but go up even more there's more change it's more volatile it's a more hard to predict
• 02:00 - 02:30 and it's more of a threat and an opportunity for all of us yeah yeah and we've probably all wherever we are in the world got examples of organizations that have failed to change when a new entrant has seen an opportunity to uh to disrupt their industry as well absolutely absolutely so so um we'll get into some details and examples but um you've been researching the
• 02:30 - 03:00 science of change so what are some of the key principles or core findings of your research well it starts with the fact that we have even though the average executive and the average business or public part of government actually handles change better today than it did 20 years ago 30 years ago the rate of change has gone
• 03:00 - 03:30 up faster than the average ability has gone up to deal with it so we're having this growing gap between the demands placed on us to be adaptive agile get ahead of the curve and individuals and organizations capacity to respond and what the science of change tells
• 03:30 - 04:00 us first of all it helps explain why the rate of change has been going up not just for a few decades but literally for 150 years driven originally by the industrial revolution and why the most logical expectation is it will continue to go up it's not going to level off anytime soon but it also particularly brain research from the last 20 years is
• 04:00 - 04:30 demonstrating more and more clearly that we as a species our central bias is towards survival and for survival our bias is toward getting in a comfortable stable condition we have the capacity obviously to learn to adapt
• 04:30 - 05:00 to change but it's it's much newer in an evolutionary sense it's not nearly as strong as that survival instinct that means in the face of increasingly rapid change unconsciously we are hardwired not to immediately automatically
• 05:00 - 05:30 kind of go with the flow and try to get ahead of things the science of change at the organization level also shows that the modernization is the product basically of the end of the 19th century and it uh leveraged off of new technology from the industrial revolution and its bias is toward being able to
• 05:30 - 06:00 consistently and reliably produce a large number of products or services for a increasingly large audience its bias also is not for adaptation agility change not that it can't do that but that's not its central driving mechanism so you put two together organizations
• 06:00 - 06:30 built for an environment of 150 years ago human beings built for an environment of a hundred thousand years ago and plopped them into 2021 which is now going at times it seems like 900 miles an hour and you've got a potential real problem good news is we've learned a great deal from studying changing organizations and leadership about how you can reduce that gap and
• 06:30 - 07:00 actually get people to be much more flexible adaptive on top of things through leadership and how you can get organizations even large organizations to behave in ways that we associate with small highly successful organizations that is to say quick on their feet fast to react etc and for societies from society's point
• 07:00 - 07:30 of view where the number of challenges we face these days is just staggering globally we need a lot more organizations and a lot more people like you and me bobby uh and our bosses and our colleagues to get better at change yeah yeah i don't think you will get um anyone disagreeing with us there john for sure um so you know almost all companies i'd
• 07:30 - 08:00 imagine all organizations go through regular strategic planning either annually or biannually so uh you know this is this has been the strategy that people have taken to deal with change for a very long time so is that is that not enough what else is there what other techniques are there that are more successful strategic planning first of all only goes back into the 1970s and 1980s believe it or not
• 08:00 - 08:30 and um it can under the kind of condition in which it was born help organizations adapt to a certain level of change but strategic planning as it has been developed and is still used by most places today is uh what i call management centric management being planning budgeting
• 08:30 - 09:00 organizing staffing you know metrics controls etc to produce efficiency and reliability leadership is much more challenging status quo looking for opportunities creating a vision communicating that in a way that gets people to buy in intellectually and emotionally and then creating space for them to run with it so that things can actually change because you've got people aligned
• 09:00 - 09:30 and energized to make them change and take advantage of the opportunities strategic planning as it is practiced in most places today is a management-centric activity by definition that is not centered around trying to help you rapidly where a key word is rapid rapidly change if you tried to adapt in a simplistic way strategic planning
• 09:30 - 10:00 to the kind of environments were in these days you'd be throwing away the plan every two months and redoing it and since doing that once a year is a bad enough exercise every two months is not only impractical it's horrendous beyond thought and so people are adapting and finding new ways of thinking about strategy
• 10:00 - 10:30 and and using strategy to help them a strategy execution to help them adapt but they're also taking anything that can drive change and trying to fold into it kind of principles that we've learned that change science so that would include the obvious digital transformation but
• 10:30 - 11:00 m a work cultural change um restructuring even uh all of those can be done in ways that create more problems even though they're designed to help you change to meet the current requirements as the world is changing around you all of those can be done in ways that either kill innovation or slow you down or cost too much and they can be done in new ways
• 11:00 - 11:30 that are more compatible with the need for speed agility etc and the very best organizations are infusing into their digital transformations into their strategy exercises into anything that's associated with m a into any cultural initiative into agile
• 11:30 - 12:00 mythologies etc this new way of thinking which at its heart is again more leadership-centric than management-centric okay gotcha thanks very much so it sounds really intriguing and um i get i get the feeling that we're with that your research also has a uh has a model for how to do this successfully as well
• 12:00 - 12:30 so um you talk a little bit in your research about the uh the dual operating system um that successful companies are adopting um can you talk a little bit about that and what that looks like sure um it's useful to to remember if you've ever read about it that organizations tend to go through a life cycle where when they start
• 12:30 - 13:00 it's just a group of people with an idea the formal structure tends to be light if not non-existent systems processes policies etc aren't there what drives the system is vision and a lot of energy from the people and alignment among them about what they're trying to achieve
• 13:00 - 13:30 and the structure is network-like it's not hierarchy if they're successful of course at some point they have to start producing a product or service at some scale and what happens inevitably is inside that network they start growing something we would all recognize which is hierarchical structure policies processes job descriptions controls metrics
• 13:30 - 14:00 and the more successful they are of course the more that grows and all too often the typical story is at a certain point that part of the organization just crushes the original network structure and leader leadership and you end up with a modern bureaucracy in a stable enough environment if that bureaucracy is well organized has the right people and the right jobs
• 14:00 - 14:30 good metrics good controls it can do very well it could serve itself and society the problem is that kind of safe haven slow moving environment has been disappearing for decades now and anybody that thought that a rapid unexpected change could never never enter my world got a rude awakening a year ago when it entered
• 14:30 - 15:00 all of our worlds through a mechanism that nobody would have predicted i don't think a dual operating system simply says what you need today is both the hierarchy with the good management systems and various kinds of networked organizations with a lot of leadership working very close hand and glove together one to produce the
• 15:00 - 15:30 meet your commitments each and every day each and every week each and every quarter for the financial community and you need and to adjust to an ever changing world and it's not two separate organizations when we say dual system we mean two pieces that are a part of one system uh starting oh
• 15:30 - 16:00 gosh 30 or 40 years ago people started to see this coming at them and one of the solutions was to basically have two organizations so what would be an early example ah xerox in rochester new york and the palo alto research center out in california the concept being one would be one is very good at you know selling this week's quota
• 16:00 - 16:30 and manufacturing this week's stuff and doing it at a huge scale and the other would dream up all kinds of great stuff pitch it over to the mothership who would then produce it and all would be well that didn't happen in xerox's case and it hasn't happened in almost any days because what happens is the mother organization they're so different
• 16:30 - 17:00 and they're staffed by different people they they they trust each other they have uh negative stereotypes about each other one sees the other is a bunch of bureaucrats and the other sees the other is a bunch of wild crazy you know goofballs and it just doesn't work but a dual system has not two organizations but one organization where you've
• 17:00 - 17:30 everybody's got a job in the hierarchy and over time people kind of spin out at the hierarchy doing their job but because they feel so strongly about some initiative they literally beg to be a part of it and work over in a in a different structure or network and in a different um behavior basically they're not trying to
• 17:30 - 18:00 manage a project they're trying to lead an initiative to produce change to take advantage of opportunities that are being brought to them by an ever-changing world and what we've learned since we created a consulting company that you know of uh bobby that's named after me a decade ago is that you can take a mature organization that has lost its network component and
• 18:00 - 18:30 in a sense grow the network component but tightly aligned with a hierarchy and get benefits of both and that's where the world is going to move i mean the number of organizations that are really good at that right now is very very small but all organizations are going to have to continue to be reliable and efficient and become much better at
• 18:30 - 19:00 being adaptive and agile and it's going to require that dual structure okay so i want to dive into a couple of things that you said there so just to clarify you're saying that people have full-time jobs in the hierarchy whether they're a salesperson or doing service delivery or engineering a product or something like that and then they they go and do extra work on top of that in the network uh where do the cycles come from who pays for that
• 19:00 - 19:30 well there is no um payment per se remember people's energy your energy my energy anybody listening to us is not a zero-sum thing it can expand or contract when you're depressed it contracts when we get passionate about something it expands and it's because of that that it's
• 19:30 - 20:00 possible to have people doing their regular jobs and yet not all the time not 365 days a year year after year after year but occasionally to flow over to something that they feel strongly about um and uh it all adds up energy expands they can do both jobs um it's exciting and meaningful uh
• 20:00 - 20:30 sometimes it's a nice change of pace from the regular job sometimes they get more visibility up to our management because it's an important strategic initiative which is good for their careers and once you get it working well and you are sensitive to what allows networks to collapse which can happen you can have people
• 20:30 - 21:00 volunteering like mad and they volunteer for two meetings and then they disappear okay we've all seen this and that just means you haven't set it up right if you set it up right first of all people when they volunteer have a sense of what they're really volunteering for they have a a broader vision of the opportunities in front of the firm and they see how this this initiative
• 21:00 - 21:30 could connect to something that's really important to people um and it connects to something that they care about so they have a natural kind of sense of urgency i wanna you know i wanna grab this and that's a very good basis for two uh you don't just throw people together in a network and say you know do your stuff uh it requires obviously some leadership
• 21:30 - 22:00 and so you set it up that uh there is somebody in there that understands how a neck networked organization works and how you can pull together volunteers and get them on board and get them organized and then most all it requires proof of concept so to speak by producing what i've called short-term wins rule wins
• 22:00 - 22:30 one of the major reasons that network organizations collapse is people are excited they get in there and then either immediately after listening to the first meeting or two they can't imagine how they can this group is ever going to be able to achieve what they're talking about or they hang in there for a while but there's no proof there's no solid evidence that
• 22:30 - 23:00 they're making progress short-term winds fuel continued passion bring in more people if you need them and can keep an initiative going all the way to the end and help it to solidify if you will after it's made a change and be sustainable okay okay i'm starting to understand it
• 23:00 - 23:30 now so um if you're if you're a leader and uh i think probably all organizations have some element of this network side happening naturally in some organizations it may be maybe very small but i think probably every organization has some passionate people who are going above and beyond to try to drive change it sounds like there's limited amounts that you can do to actually assign people to the network um and that that role sounds like it's mainly around sort of facilitation
• 23:30 - 24:00 so if i'm a leader and i'm listening now and i want to help to i guess you have to nurture the network what are some of the main things that i could do to uh to do that well i think from the experiences uh that we had both in our research and in our consulting we've noticed that a real challenge for excellent managers
• 24:00 - 24:30 is to recognize that they to do their job they've developed a very high sense of the importance of control that's just a part the nature of the work and that if they allow that that need to control control control flow over into the network side they will inadvertently kill it off it
• 24:30 - 25:00 can't be it's a more organic thing it's not it's mechanistic it can't be controlled it's not a management thing it's a leadership thing so one thing they can do is to act you know think a little bit about what kind of actions from me do you use your your word and it's a good one bobby will nourish this this section of the organization that is essential
• 25:00 - 25:30 if we're going to be able to adapt get a head of the curve and win and one thing that will not help is my normal kind of metrics metrics metrics review review review meeting meeting meeting control control control it'll just turn people off pour water on the passion and kill off the the uh whole initiative
• 25:30 - 26:00 yeah i i've totally seen that and um this might be a very uncomfortable place for a leader to be who is very focused on metrics and used to having those kinds of uh you know those those dashboards to run their organization and inform their decisions so how how can a leader assess and uh sort of monitor the health and performance of the network side of the organization no that's that's a great question uh because the answer is not
• 26:00 - 26:30 uh that he or she shouldn't that he or she should just say okay do your thing and i'll worry about the uh you know weekly monthly quarterly uh running of the business no um he or she should stop and encourage them to set targets that are logical in light of whatever the vision is and the initiative is and the change that's needed
• 26:30 - 27:00 and to achieve those short-term wins and find ways to measure so you are confident you really are on track and you're not just fooling yourself with a lot of exuberance and excitement uh the the the worst way to run these by far is you've got an incredibly excited group of people who basically
• 27:00 - 27:30 say go away come back in two years and we'll have this all settled no doesn't work um it but if you do it right um and you allow them to figure out what those short-term wins should be you allow them to be creative and coming up with solid logical metrics for tracking progress and you allow them
• 27:30 - 28:00 to report back to you not with you kind of walking into their meetings so to speak with a whip then you will get reassurance that things are on track and uh when they're not the group itself will self-adjust because they're the evidence is there
• 28:00 - 28:30 and they don't want to fail i mean as a matter of fact the more passionate they are about something the more they will react to wanting to self-correct to get things back on track yeah so it sounds like it um it relies a lot on the autonomy which is it's probably linked to the the volunteering nature uh you know we inspire people to join these initiatives to join the network and
• 28:30 - 29:00 put in the extra time and uh we have to give them autonomy otherwise if we try to control it too much then and then we'll uh we'll crush it yeah so uh just uh flipping from from the leader perspective but uh so from an individual contributor perspective um if you're if you're listening to this as a as somebody who is not in a leadership position you don't have a job title of authority or anything like that and how and your cup your organization
• 29:00 - 29:30 doesn't have a uh you know a specific program around managing the network it's all kind of happening naturally right now what sort of level of executive buy-in is required to get something like this started like could i as an individual contributor just decide that i'm going to start nurturing the network or do i need some level of leadership buy-in to to get it running what we found is that without as you say some minimum level of executive
• 29:30 - 30:00 understanding and buy-in um what will happen is they will misinterpret at some point your actions wonder why you're not doing your job and shut the thing down so it is essential that the top of the house on the hierarchy side understands the logic of this understands the the science behind it ideally
• 30:00 - 30:30 and understands how it works in a best-case scenario situation and how it connects to what they care about and their own uh feelings about building the organization over time um and if that is absent your challenge is to figure out how you could uh
• 30:30 - 31:00 build it i mean one way it happens uh for i'm thinking i'm trying to think off the top of my head how often and the numbers are too large even count is books and now increasingly things like this that connect to executives who somebody
• 31:00 - 31:30 reads or hears and who says this makes sense he starts or she starts to talk to a colleague and um it begins to grow that a understanding and be buying uh so you know get people to attend a podcast send them books and the like i mean that is one way to do it
• 31:30 - 32:00 but going out and trying to do it yourself uh without the support of the top of the hierarchy um it's not just a a mission that's going to fail uh it's it's it can be painful don't do it okay i won't be rushing out to do that any time soon thank you so i want to just drop back to a comment you made earlier about uh we
• 32:00 - 32:30 can i i've seen this myself uh we so often get lots and lots of people volunteering for new initiatives to be a part of the of the network and then they all attend the first meeting and then after the first meeting half those people disappear they don't they don't follow through on the action items and then the numbers can drop off very very quickly um and then as as the initiative goes on sometimes we see more and more people dropping out and before you know it there's only a couple of people of
• 32:30 - 33:00 people left uh compared to when you had maybe 30 or 40 volunteers at the beginning so how do we maintain that enthusiasm from when we've that we had when we started a project we got everyone excited by an idea how do we maintain that infusion so that we really drive through to delivering something that is valuable to the business this is where the short-term wins not only created but then communicated and celebrated
• 33:00 - 33:30 become so important and not just occasionally but a continuing series nothing if we go back to what we learned from brain science again you've got the kind of core element in all of us that survive oriented but in the last 10 to 20 000 years we've got this secondary element that's more centered on helping us
• 33:30 - 34:00 thrive if you will it's opportunity centered not threat centered it's positive emotions like passion and excitement as opposed to anxiety and and anger and it can it doesn't produce peak energy like a survive uh fighter fight or flight response can uh produce human beings but if it
• 34:00 - 34:30 gets feedback on a regular basis that what it is doing is actually moving the organization and the person him or herself toward the opportunity that energy will sustain itself for significant periods of time it's built into human nature organizationally that means as i said before these short-term wins
• 34:30 - 35:00 are really important getting them celebrating them patting people on the back communicating around do that well and people don't drop off or for the most part there are always going to be people that have to drop off because their regular job becomes overwhelming because of a crisis or because of
• 35:00 - 35:30 a family situation but you won't get the massive drop off and therefore the failure of the initiative never underestimate the power of short-term wins uh made to happen celebrated and communicated to solve the problem they're talking about okay great that's good advice and i will do my best to implement it um
• 35:30 - 36:00 so sounds like there's a lot to do in terms of getting the network up and running could you give an example of an organization you've worked with that has successfully implemented the network side of what manages it well and maybe you know what their leaders did to make that uh successful yeah the the the fundamental pattern um and i just literally got a email uh last night
• 36:00 - 36:30 uh that if uh about what it can produce and if i think about it in a minute i'll come back to that so the typical pattern starts with senior management clarifying for themselves and getting alignment around what are the really big opportunities facing the organization
• 36:30 - 37:00 and then uh inviting others to help them in not a just a traditional project uh kind of centered cascading of a message down but a lot of communication about that the privilege is to create a sense of urgency which allows you then to get these volunteers that want to create a networked organization and work on it
• 37:00 - 37:30 and when they do and when they clarify not only the opportunity but their vision of how they could take advantage of it and they begin to pick some strategic initiatives to make progress on that vision and they're tied in close enough with the hierarchy so the hierarchy knows what's going on and says okay give it a shot then
• 37:30 - 38:00 they tend to go on a massive communications campaign through word and deed um to help as many people as possible understand what they're doing what the opportunity is what the initiative is to get the kind of buy-in you need so that people are at a minimum cooperating and certainly not being barriers
• 38:00 - 38:30 to and then at a certain point you'll start launching um some initiatives if you will that start getting those short-term wins you communicate that out that tends to bring more attention to what you're doing positive attention and more people who want to help you and you get the cycle going up more
• 38:30 - 39:00 communication more people in more short-term wins progress along the uh the line of sight to the opportunity you keep the sense of urgency up which can easily go down after a few wins people have a tendency to say well look at what we've achieved you know victory and
• 39:00 - 39:30 finally um making sure that anything they do that really works better is a better way to operate is institutionalized on the hierarchy side so it's going to be stable and sustainable and in doing that you can not only achieve some adaptive useful sometimes incredibly powerful result but you're starting to learn
• 39:30 - 40:00 how to build this network side and if you don't stop at the end and say okay that's done with instead you say look at the world is forever changing we need to have this all of these pieces in a sense operating all the time not just this one flow through with this wonderful end result then you're well on your way to creating that dual system
• 40:00 - 40:30 uh and have it something that is sustainable that's the basic pattern and what that can't achieve uh on a one-time basis i mean now i i'm well i turned this off so but i can still remember we did we didn't want uh the telephone going off in the middle of the show
• 40:30 - 41:00 um this is a very very large uh investment centered organization and they um set a target for 15 years out so it's kind of like the people today who were saying in 2035 were going to be carbon neutral they set a target for what they wanted in terms of the
• 41:00 - 41:30 size of the organization and the kind of returns that couldn't possibly be achieved by just small incremental adjustments over time and they did over the last two years or a year and a half actually what i just described and the email i got last night says that uh even though their
• 41:30 - 42:00 time frame was this incredibly ambitious 15-year goal they got the results in from this year in terms of the returns they're getting through quote a focus on culture and how we work and if you look at their original plan
• 42:00 - 42:30 for how they thought this would play itself out over 15 years they are seven years ahead of schedule wow now let that sink in for a second months into a pr 15-year project you you discovered you're eight years out that's what's possible um and that is what is needed uh desperately in a lot of places
• 42:30 - 43:00 with our world having so many precarious problems and so many organizations um having their uh challenges uh and missing opportunities wow that that really is amazing um really cool so uh we have a couple of questions lined up uh from the audience uh before we do that though i just want to quickly note you you mentioned um
• 43:00 - 43:30 you mentioned sending books to leaders is a good way to encourage them to look into your research and building the network and you also mentioned a uh the process or the cycle and so one of your previous books accelerate describes your eight step process for change leadership uh in great detail so i thoroughly recommend that if anyone wants to get really into the weeds of of how to do all this kind of thing then accelerate is a fantastic book and i believe you've just written a new book and you're about to release it yes and i
• 43:30 - 44:00 just got my copy literally on sunday it's called as you can see change its subtitle is how organizations achieve hard to imagine results in uncertain involved times it was great fun to research and to write and its publication date is june 2nd so it's coming up in a couple of weeks and amazon is taking pre-orders of course
• 44:00 - 44:30 okay fantastic well i will definitely be uh be jumping on on uh on my local book retailer to uh to pick up my copy as soon as it's available so let's switch gears i know we've got uh we've got quite a few people uh watching and we have uh we have a bunch of questions coming in so we have uh tim karima says some change initiatives fizzle out once the change movers are out of the scene how can good change
• 44:30 - 45:00 be reinforced and institutionalized for the organization to reap the benefits long term i think again this comes back largely to the points of actually having short-term wins that are recognized and celebrated that that does as much as anything to maintain momentum to keep people on
• 45:00 - 45:30 board to convince senior management that this is a smart thing to do and a better way to operate i think the other piece of this which we haven't spoken much about yet bobby is ultimately what the network side does is it gets a lot more leadership from a lot more people focused on something and it is leadership that drives change
• 45:30 - 46:00 not management and um once you get that into the system and people begin to appreciate the connection between more leadership for more people and these kind of astonishing results because you are maneuvering in this uh volatile fast-changing world it can in a sense sink into the culture
• 46:00 - 46:30 and if it sinks into the culture then then it sustains itself for sure uh it won't go away it becomes just the way we do things around here um uh that single observation which is the power of more leadership for more people in a rapidly changing world is um as much as anything i've learned over the last 20 years or so
• 46:30 - 47:00 really really really important thank you and just a quick follow-up for me because i have this debate with people at google regularly um how important is it when you start a change initiative to identify a uh a business owner on the hierarchy side early on and work with them as part of it versus just starting on your own uh wherever you happen to be in the organization starting small sort of a build it and
• 47:00 - 47:30 they will come kind of approach oh i think there's there's no from from the research again and from our consulting experiences when you're able to find now it's a it's that connection between the hierarchy side and the network side if you can find somebody on the hierarchy side that can understand what you think is important
• 47:30 - 48:00 and why a certain kind of initiative could really be pay off in helping you innovate adapt etc and have him or her on board and interested and helping in a sense block and tackle for you occasionally when you run into barriers it can make a huge difference
• 48:00 - 48:30 uh the problem the problem with going off and kind of doing it on your own i mean one of the theories that comes from a well-known company that is based in minneapolis whose name i won't mention right now but that has talked historically about uh how people can produce innovation by
• 48:30 - 49:00 kind of sneaking off into the night and hiding in a basement and doing it and then springing it on the organization is that their own track record doesn't show that that works particularly well um again you you don't want two separate organizations one that's focused on innovation and change and one that's focused on doing what we know how to do and being reliable and efficient
• 49:00 - 49:30 you'll want that connection and one way you can get it is by at the beginning seeing if you can find an executive who can understand and get excited about what you're doing and becomes a part of the collaboration okay gotcha thank you very much that will uh that will help me settle some debates inside google here so thank you do we have another question from the
• 49:30 - 50:00 audience okay great stuart ambrose asks of all the change drivers that lie ahead for us climate change machine learning political instability etc what has the majority of your focus been on as a leader of change my focus personally is kind of one level up from that list i think
• 50:00 - 50:30 i am trying to in a sense create a social movement around leadership a social movement that will see that it is the right and the certainly the ability for many many many many more people on earth than we currently see
• 50:30 - 51:00 to step forward under the right circumstances provide leadership in the public square and in the private company that when we get more people stepping forward seeing that that is something that is relevant to their lives that they can get not only help with crucial social problems but in the process get something back that is very personal
• 51:00 - 51:30 a sense of real meaning that they're doing something that um it's not trivial it's not just making money for somebody else it's not just grinding out a you know a nice but the world could do without it product um when you can feel that it really can make a difference and that can come through um
• 51:30 - 52:00 you trying to help provide leadership even if you're not in a leadership job on whichever of those social challenges that speak most to you and to your heart cool thank you have another question from the audience so luke maris asks what incentive structures
• 52:00 - 52:30 can leaders put in place to ensure organic adaptability in an organization one of the questions that i remember being asked by the cv ceo of a bank probably 10 years ago when i was beginning to describe my understanding as of 10 years ago of of the of these things we we've been talking
• 52:30 - 53:00 about for the last half an hour or so his question was yeah but how do i pay these people that is to save the volunteers what's the formula you know and he asked all kinds of practical brought up all kinds of practical problems and i remember sitting there thinking okay how can i explain to this very bright
• 53:00 - 53:30 obviously very accomplished man that um you don't create a social movement which is really needed in his firm so to speak a social movement toward um creating a level and that and availability of a product to a broader customer base
• 53:30 - 54:00 um you don't create a social movement by paying people you create it by appealing to something inside them um that wants to work on something important that wants to have a meaningful job um and so the incentive is you
• 54:00 - 54:30 give them space and the right structure in which they can kind of put themselves in and do something have an achievement and get the psychological rewards of that achievement of that achievement inevitably we have found that people who do this uh often
• 54:30 - 55:00 get a career boost because somebody notices them for the first time um but that and and that's good but that isn't the central mechanism that motivates um people that's not the central incentive the incentive is human beings want to do something that they feel is worthwhile important meaningful and too many organizations
• 55:00 - 55:30 and their mechanistic just do what we know how to do uh ignore the world you know grind away don't provide jobs with any meaning at all yep i i wholeheartedly agree yes and uh this this topic of uh how do we inspire people is uh something we could probably spend hours talking about um but uh yeah unfortunately we don't have time for that today
• 55:30 - 56:00 i think we have one more audience question before we close out and this comes from kelly marshall how do we bring people back to work successfully knowing how much change has been experienced in the last year or so okay excellent question first of all the objective should not be to bring people back to work the objective should be to bring people back to work better
• 56:00 - 56:30 this is an opportunity that we face now because people are going to have to make decisions and are going to have to change things think think opportunity think broadly don't think of this as just a really question you know do we have harry or harriet sit at home or sit in the office
• 56:30 - 57:00 think about what they're going to do and how they're going to do it think about how we relate to each other and how how good we are at we're really uh dealing with change itself and use that mindset to answer the question
• 57:00 - 57:30 of how do we go back to work and involve as many people in a way that we've been talking about now for the last hour as possible in helping you think it through there is no way that one or two smart people or one or two smart consultants sitting in a sitting in some conference room are going to come up with the plan for how to come back to work the more
• 57:30 - 58:00 that you can get your own people involved in the way that we've been talking the more that you think opportunity not just solving the short-term problem the more something special can happen and that's what we need thank you thank you i'm told by uh by our facilitators that we have time for one more question and this comes from ally mcdonough hi professor do you have any recommendations on how
• 58:00 - 58:30 to figure out which leaders in your company are best positioned to help you in your change initiatives i think you need to just ask around uh just ask that question to people that you feel comfortable asking it to and ask it to more people rather than less and until you begin to focus on
• 58:30 - 59:00 some names and then go from there um there is no secret formula you want people who obviously understand leadership and uh and that you think could relate to the kind of initiatives that you feel strongly about but you need data and the best source of data is chatting with as many people
• 59:00 - 59:30 as you can feel comfortable chatting with got it thank you very much dr cotter it's been an absolute pleasure to host you and thank you very much for your time today and also for um you know all your teachings uh it's had a huge impact for me i've used what you've taught to drive change at google and my previous employers so i'm very very grateful for everything that you and your uh your consulting organization has done for us that's terrific bobby and thank you for
• 59:30 - 60:00 being a uh a generous uh host uh today my pleasure thank you everyone for watching it's been a pleasure hosting you [Music] you