Manufactured Urgency
Why "create a sense of urgency" is terrible advice when leading change
John Kotter is the reason I do the work I do. Many years ago, a colleague made note of what she and I were doing at our company together and asked if I knew of a field called change management. I didn’t, and she referred me to Leading Change, a book that sparked so many thoughts for me (positive and provocative) that I pretty quickly found myself getting a Prosci certification and then a Master’s degree in OD shortly thereafter. While I still believe Kotter’s ideas in Leading Change and A Sense of Urgency are good to know from a foundational perspective, after working in dozens of organizations of all sizes, it’s fair to say I now have a pretty big problem with a lot of them. I think the most egregious of them is the whole idea of creating a sense of urgency.
Part of what I love about this field is that, like the organizations we support, it’s constantly changing. The practices, techniques, and principles we hold dear must change in order to keep up with the environment and adapt to the different kinds of changes organizations are going through. That’s why I have become increasingly skeptical about different change models, particularly those that use rigid templates. Unfortunately, not all change leaders and practitioners are doing the work to question the methods they have used in the past. Don’t even get me started on personality tests. Actually, I’ll write about that later. ;) Moving on…
In A Sense of Urgency, Kotter advocated for beginning change by helping people feel the need for change, specifically by making it seem urgent. In an age where there was one big priority at a time or leaders were trying to mobilize their entire employee base around one change, this can make sense. But I will argue that in today’s landscape, where most companies are going through multiple transformations at once, they need to pre-emptively respond to market forces, and employees are increasingly skeptical of change initiatives (with good reason), trying to create urgency is a pathway to disengagement. I call it “manufactured urgency.”
Manufactured urgency is rampant because as change leaders, we have this idea in our head that we need change to feel dire, so we (often inadvertently) use artificial methods to simulate that sense of urgency. This can look like exaggerated crisis narratives, arbitrary deadlines (this one’s fun), and fear-based tactics, among many other things.
While these tactics may yield short-term compliance in some situations, they rarely engender sustainable change or foster genuine buy-in from employees. At their worst, they create an even deeper environment of distrust — because let’s be real, employees see through that shit. If they do, then you’re dealing with an employee population who no longer believes leadership or management has any real meaning or intention behind their changes. And if they don’t, they will be living in a constant state of crisis mode that can lead to burnout and attrition very quickly.
The two most common examples of this from my work over the past few years have been:
Most companies I have worked with are running multiple transformations on top of each other. And while they are sometimes spun up by different departments who believe they are distinct enough to not intersect, the truth is that any one group of people in companies today is likely being targeted with between 5 and 10 different changes. For engineering departments especially, it’s bad. I once did an exercise with a technology leadership team to determine how many changes each of them was sponsoring. One of them was the executive sponsor for 14 different changes.
I’ve encountered several situations where a change is pre-emptive. Strategically, this is super smart. A good leadership team can look ahead in the market and determine what they need to do to stay competitive or gain an advantage. But where this gets squishy is when they frame it to their employees as something different (i.e. more urgent) because they don’t trust their employees to understand the strategic move well enough. This is a prime example of how change work can infantilize employees, which is something else I’ll write more about soon.
So what do we do instead?
Well first of all, just don’t pretend something is urgent if it’s not. I know we’d like to think that all change is urgent, but these days, it just isn’t.
Start with prioritizing. Most companies are terrible at this. It’s understandable, especially when organizations get so complex that there is no way to create one singular list of initiatives because the work is split up into so many different dependent and independent functions and teams. But if I could die on any hill, it would be: Change leadership should start with prioritizing.
If prioritizing is too hard because the changes are all too disparate, disconnected, poorly defined, etc. then take the time to understand your change landscape. This is work my firm NOBL has been doing a lot of lately. With the volume of changes and transformations in most modern workplaces, it is irresponsible to operate each of these changes as if they are in isolation. Bring all leaders of change together and map out the outcomes, timelines, and audiences for each of the changes. Keep it simple - it doesn’t have to be a complex exercise. Then, have a real and transparent discussion about what that landscape means for employees and where you need to sequence and prioritize more effectively.
If it turns out something actually is urgent, great! But even then, take a moment. Is it urgent to you because you know the whole story? Will others in your organization think this is urgent? Show people why it’s urgent, and then ask them if they understand.
In general, creating change messaging that is transparent and truthful is a service to your employees. They will tell you if they understand or not, and if they feel any urgency for the change. If they aren’t feeling it and you are, then you’ve got work to do alongside them to determine if this change is really needed. Lean toward creating a shared understanding of the reasons for change, and cultivate a vision and a plan together. Yes, it’s more work up front, but it’s proven time and time again to take significantly less time in the long run.
Finally, there’s a lot of talk in the change space about building resilience, agility, and adaptability in organizations. There’s some nuance to this. Yes, I wholeheartedly believe that in order to arm your organization for the future, you need to invest in building a collective ability to navigate change, complexity, and ambiguity. But don’t for a moment think that this can be done with a series of trainings. Everything discussed above (primarily transparency and co-creation) represents an organizational muscle that you need to build and encourage all employees to build. Every person needs opportunities to flex their ability to adapt, experiment, and disagree in order to understand how change succeeds. If we all build these muscles together, and change leaders are more transparent and truthful about why changes are done, we’ve got a fighting chance at creating real change.