Do we really want to change things? About Kotter’s 8 steps

Jordi Varela
Editor

 

Our iceberg is Melting is a fable that illustrates very well that detecting problems is not the same as wanting to fix them. Fred, an observant penguin, realizes that his iceberg is cracking, a matter that will be catastrophic for the entire colony living obliviously to the problem. The author, John Kotter uses the fable to unravel the 8 steps that any individual, in Fred's circumstances, should follow if they want to save the penguin colony:

1. Get the collective to perceive the sense of urgency that until then only he had detected.
2. Select an enthusiastic group of penguins, respected by the colony, to take charge of the process that will lead them to salvation.
3. Put the concerned group to work, and there's a lot of work since they must analyze the nature and severity of the problem, trace possible solutions, and must choose one.
4. The next step is to socialize the project: explain the chosen solution to the group and allow them to debate it and make it their own.
5. Next, the enthusiastic group must foresee what will be the obstacles of the operation and combat them in the most efficient way possible.
6. Then they must think of some action (in the appropriate line) that can show some quick success, to increase the credibility of the project.
7. Halfway there, avoid a hasty embrace of the new model, at least until it’s consistent enough.
8. Once the objective is achieved, the experience must be strengthened to avoid a setback, especially at the beginning, when changes are most vulnerable to opposing forces.

The fable, of course, ends well. The penguins come up with a good project, despite the discordant voices, that allows them to migrate to a new, more solid iceberg. Kotter's lesson is that the process of change must not only end well but must develop well enough to gain new followers. The groups promoting changes must know how to create a collective feeling of illusion, which makes the projects more participatory.

Imagine that Fred works in a primary care team and realizes that while their patients age, they accumulate, in addition to ailments, the burden caused by an overly fragmented healthcare system; or, for example, that he works in an emergency service and observes, with displeasure, that there are people who come repeatedly for decompensation of their chronic pathologies.

The fragmentation of the healthcare system is equivalent to the cracks in Fred's iceberg and, since the problem is very evident, the movements in favour of the integration of services have already reached the first step of Kotter, that is, there is awareness of the problem, although they have partially done it because today there is no sense of urgency. The second and third steps are going quite well since everywhere there are groups of experts who do not stop analyzing and proposing solutions.

The problem lies in the path between the third and fourth steps, because, according to Kotter, if integration is chosen, fragmentation should be abandoned and, therefore, this should be well explained to those affected who should listen and adjust their projects accordingly, with the clear intention of getting the more followers on the bandwagon the better. The problem is that there is no real will to change (lack of urgency), therefore all the following steps that follow are merely theory.

To truly integrate, you have to defragment. It’s not worth playing a new world on a theoretical level while fragmentation is being financed. When the Kotter penguins decide to migrate to another iceberg, they must abandon the old one.