Then another guy gets up, and he uses one-tenth as many slides, choosing only the slides that were more dramatic in their implications. He spends a lot of time telling stories about the company, about what it was like when he first joined, about what’s changed. And I remember being blown away by his presentation, and then noticing other people talking about it. The first guy just disappears, and the second guy is the one who has the powerful impact on the meeting, in that very emotional dimension we’re talking about.
S+B: How difficult is it to maintain that level of emotional commitment?
KOTTER: It’s very difficult, and it’s a real balancing act. The other side of the complacency coin is what I call “false urgency,” and it’s just as counterproductive as complacency. Often, when I ask people about their sense of urgency, they’ll tell me, “Are you kidding? People are running around like crazy, working as hard as they can.” But what they’re really saying is that they’re scared to death or mad as can be, so they’re running from meeting to meeting, doing all kinds of useless stuff. It’s all activity, not productivity, and they look at it and think it’s urgency. They see all of the frenetic activity, and they say to themselves, “A lack of urgency isn’t the problem. Look, everybody’s running.” In many ways false urgency can be more insidious and more dangerous even than complacency.
I use the term urgent patience to describe what that balance point is. People have to understand that to make anything big happen, it’s going to take a while. It might take one year, two years, three years, five years. But there’s no reason you can’t understand the patience true change requires and at the same time think, “I’m going to get up today, and I’m going to accomplish something that contributes to that change effort. I don’t have to spend all day on it. But even if I succeed in redirecting one meeting for 10 minutes in a way that starts pushing on this issue, then OK, I’ve accomplished something.”
Edward Baker, former editor of CIO Insight magazine, is a contributing editor at strategy+business.
