h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I was discussing on someone's journal earlier about their forthcoming office reorganisation. In fact, the media client I work for is also about to go through a similar exercise - they seem to come around every 18 months or so.

It's difficult to predict exactly what's going to happen - people will move jobs; some will leave. Others will move to new desks, perhaps into other offices. Teams may merge or split. We may see external service providers come in and run parts of it. If there's one thing I can predict, it's that the people organising the change will use the method known as 'Kotter's 8 Steps'.

http://www.kotterinternational.com/the-8-step-process-for-leading-change/

John Kotter is a Professor of Leadership at the Harvard Business School, the institution from which many trendy management methods originate. In particular, he's probably the world's leading authority on strategic change in organisations. His seminal work on the subject, 'Leading Change' was published in 1996. The method that Kotter describes has defined the way people manage reorganisations. If you've ever been through one of these at work, you may find some of this familiar.

Step 1 is "Create a Sense of Urgency"

Before you do anything else, the managers have to whip people up in a frenzy that this *has* to happen, and that there are really important deadlines.

Step 2: Build a Guiding Coalition

There will be a small team of senior managers, all of whom are absolutely dedicated to this change. Any dissenting voices at the senior level will be very promptly removed. No-one will entertain any ideas of an alternative strategy, so don't waste your breath.

Step 3: Form a Strategic Vision and Initiatives

It's at this point that you'll start to see posters going up with messages about how wonderful it's going to be when we're working in a different way. They'll be illustrated with those awful stock photos of people in meeting rooms in glass-walled offices.

Step 4: Enlist a Volunteer Army

This is where they start to coerce some of the more gullible of your brown-nosed colleagues to help them. They'll be told that they may be recognised at the end of the year. They may wear printed t-shirts and hand out propaganda from a table in the staff canteen.

Step 5: Enable Action by Removing Barriers

This is where they start to get nasty by sweeping aside anyone who gets in their way. You may have to grit your teeth and weather the storm.

Step 6: Generate Short-Term Wins

You'll get lots of communications and newsletters from the ruling clique saying how wonderfully the reorganisation project is going. These newsletters are notoriously difficult to fill, so they'll probably end up desperate for people to take photos or write pen pictures of each other.

Step 7: Sustain Acceleration

Everybody will get thoroughly bored with the reorganisation, especially as the results begin to dawn on them - maybe they haven't had that new office they were promised, or maybe they've ended up with extra responsibilities they weren't expecting. The managers will have to remain wary of those who could cause dissent, even to the extent of removing them and hiring people more pliable.

Step 8: Instute Change

Institutionalise change, they mean. If they kept on a senior manager to oversee the transition, now would be the time to get rid of them and install one of their own to run the operation on an ongoing basis.


So, those are Kotter's 8 Steps. If you don't recognise them, then you may well in the future. Knowledge of them may help you judge when and how to resist.

[Amy P]

*takes notes *

Hmmm.... sounds like a load of troddle to me.... made up.... nonsense... to justify what they're doing... and more to the point, to justify no doubt, the blokes huge book sales at convincing everyone his eight step program wasn't made up over a drunken lunchhour in the angel Islington....

Yep - I've been through an office restructure and recognise those steps...

I got the impression that resistance is futile, so any tips would be of interest... I got my new job after the restructure in my new organisation, so I should be spared another one for a while, but it isn't easy fitting in now that the organisation is so much flatter as a result...