Urgency or Methodology?

Suppose you work in an organization where some people feel like change and innovation are mandatory, and you are one of those people, but others lack your sense of urgency. What would you do?

Maybe John Kotter's new book would help you. (It's called "A Sense of Urgency.)

I found it, well, scary, that he describes a general sense of complacency as a common attitude across corporate America, and the book is filled with stories about people and organizations that are clueless when it comes to the need for innovation. Are things really that bad?

Kotter's stories are interesting, and the tactics he describes for dealing with complacency are helpful, but there is an underlying assumption in the book that I found lacking. He presents a series of tactics for dealing with the urgency question without articulating the need to find a better way of working.

In our experience, the existence or non-existence of urgency is a consequence of how people work, how they organize their time, how they think, and how they make decisions.

Hence, the real underlying issue is not (only) how to cultivate a sense of urgency as a matter of leadership, but rather how to structure a way of working such that an appropriate sense of urgency is inherent in how the organization functions on a day-to-day, minute-to-minute basis.

It's a question of methodology.

(To some degree it is also a matter of point of view: Kotter is a professor of leadership, so his book is written from the perspective of that lens; we're into innovation methodology, of which leadership is one critical component, so my comments on the book come from a methodological viewpoint.)

When people work in artificially sterile environments, when they are thoroughly disconnected from the realities of innovation and competition, when they deal almost entirely with abstractions, then it's no wonder they have no sense of urgency. It's like working in a protected bubble.

A design solution is to take away the bubble and create a day-to-day working atmosphere where people see, hear, touch, and smell the real world of the marketplace, and engage with all the many players in the marketplace in such a way that they are attuned to reality.

(Kotter also includes many references to the importance of teams, but again, he doesn't engage with the reader in making the distinctions between effective teams and than time-wasters, and he doesn't discuss the methods that differentiate them. The foundation of success is here, at the nitty-gritty level, and it is again the systematic pursuit of the best methods that makes the difference between success and failure.)

The book is due out September 3.