The Harvard Business Review (HBR) weekly poll cites John Kotter’s definitive work on leading change featured in the well known HBR article, Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail.
“Although Kotter’s advice for leading change is well-known, successful organizational change is still notoriously elusive.”
I have written before about the missing results from the field of change management and how change leaders are saddled by surface level change management best practices. This is why I write about why change management needs a big dose of design thinking — a problem solving methodology to design successful change.
Change is filled with challenges, problems, the unanticipated. Leading change without a problem solving methodology is similar to getting your car stuck in the snow without a shovel. No problem solving tools, no shovel, and you’re stuck. If there’s any blip in your plan, which there will be, you have a problem to solve. Change management training that doesn’t teach you how to solve problems is… well, failing to give you shovel when you get stuck.
I welcome your thoughts. Do you use a problem solving methodology along with your change management methodology?
