1.

Establishing a Sense of Urgency

There is nothing permanent except
change
-Heraclitus
The first step Mr. Kotter talks about in his book is establishing a sense of
urgency to drive change. It is imperative to note that before creating a
sense of urgency, we should thoroughly evaluate our current situation and
think over as to why we require change. The drivers of the change are
typically curious and are good observant of the present circumstances. We
can also refer about this from the book which described about Freddy as
unusually curious and observant.
A change is desired when there is a gap between the current situation and
the way the current situation should be.
Chang
e
Current
Situation

GAP

Expected
Outcome/Need

We can leverage various fact-finding quantitative and functional data of the

current situation that forms our primary analysis for the reasons for the
change. As referred from the book that Fred has a briefcase stuffed full of
observations, ideas and conclusion. This data will be important while
communicating the need for change to leaders and other members of the
society or company.
Once the reasons for the change are identified, leaders must be intimated
about this variance. It is important to communicate what is urgent to
leaders as different type of leaders may have different metric to evaluate the
urgency of the tasks.
We use various tools available to establish sense of urgency. Some of them
are performing competitive analysis, performing industry analysis, consulting
subject matter experts or political/environmental/technical/economical

assessment to name a few. The research findings from the tools help us in
convincing and building consensus among the stakeholders.
Next step is to communicate the sense of urgency. It is quintessential to have
a communication strategy ready for driving the sense of urgency. Corporates
leverage community town halls to communicate change. Project team can
utilize daily-standup meeting (very common in Agile environment in IT
sectors) to achieve this purpose.

2. Create a guiding coalition

The second step Mr. Kotter talks about in the book is creation of a powerful
guiding coalition that will facilitate the change management process.
It is imperative to form a guiding coalition as a next step to proceed with the
change management process. It is important to identify leaders of the
organization who will play an active role in the change management. The
leaders can be identified from various departments, stakeholder
communities, focus groups, which represent their partisan well. It is
important to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of these leaders to
understand the dynamics of the group.
These leaders should walk the talk i.e. they should lead by example. These
leaders should value the importance of change and be committed to drive it
and foster building of the team. It is worthy to note that members involved
in change management should be given due support. Also, these members
should be encouraged and their work should be well appreciated.
Coalition is an important activity which requires synergy among the
members involved and cannot happen in isolation. To facilitate smooth
functioning, a member can identified who can assist in coordinating the
objectives of coalition and the activities in the order of priorities. Attention to
coalition will ensure that we are focusing on quality of the overall execution
of project.
Another aspect of coalition is the recruitment/selection of the team
members. A good way to recruit members is to invite them through personal
invitation from senior executives. This method also recognizes their
contribution for their organization and also motivates them for their new
assignment. During the selection process one should strive to have a healthy
balance of members with good experience and new joiners or freshers as
they bring new perspectives.

Once a coalition team is finalized, the goals, tenure and scope of the project
should be documented. The leader for the group should be identified while
the roles and responsibilities of team members should also be well defined.
After the finalization of the coalition team, the members of the team should
be well supported at every level to facilitate this change management
process. To foster the team bonding, the team can also engage in teambuilding activities as it boosts the productivity.
On final note, the coalition should involve stakeholders in key decision
making process and also keep them updated with progress of the project.