What a Physicist Taught Me About Leading Change

John Kotter
On: Leadership, Managing People, Change Management

What a Physicist Taught Me About Leading Change

What do leading change and doing physics have in common? Good question. I have no idea. I do know that for my new book, Buy-In I have a co-author, Lorne Whitehead, who is a physicist.

You don't normally think of a physicist writing books about human interaction, but as it turns out, Lorne has also helped run a university, he's been an entrepreneur, and he's a terrific guy whose experience is very different from mine.

I think our differences have helped the book not only because Lorne has some real experience in dealing with ideas being shot down, but also because there is something about a physicist's brain that's a little bit different than mine. (I am sure of this because as a senior in high school I thought I might become a physicist, but it only took two weeks as a freshman at MIT to dissuade me.)

Whenever you get people with diverse backgrounds looking at the same thing you can come up with ideas that might not have developed otherwise. That is hardly news. But I've learned in studying large-scale change that if the people are very different, in relevant ways, and want to work together (not appointed to be on one more task force), the possibilities are great.

That's why, when I am helping organizations put together a team to guide a change, I advise that people who really want to help make the change happen are included in the group that guides the effort, and that they have relevant diversity on many dimensions: education, functional background, leadership or managerial skills, credibility in different parts of the organization, relationships with people at the top and bottom, access to data at the top and bottom, age, tenure in the organization (old-timers and new). This can work if the people want to be part of the group and if the meetings are competently facilitated.

I think of all the relevant dimensions of diversity in these cases, the one that is often the most difficult for senior executives (maybe everyone) to grasp is level in the hierarchy. This even trumps the idea of an organizational behavior professor working with a physicist.

We have grown up in a world in which "committees" and teams often have people who are more or less peers in the hierarchy. You don't find a 55-year-old senior vice president and a 25-year-old customer service rep on the same team, unless the focus is rather trivial and the time span of the group is short. Yet the benefits of this sort of diversity can be amazing in many ways: the two people will have vastly different sources of information, vastly different sets of relationships, and vastly different perspectives on any issue. In an effort to find and implement a whole new strategy, or find and implement a whole new IT system — big changes affecting lots of people — the benefits of putting together a broader group of people than usual to effect change can be amazing.

You may be thinking, "Nice idea, but not practical." It does take more thought and care to create a diverse team to guide major change in an organization, but when done correctly it creates a team more open to ideas and more capable of successfully implementing those that fit its mission. I've seen it work multiple times and with astounding results.

http://blogs.hbr.org/kotter/2010/10/what-a-physicist-taught-me-abo.html