As I was telling you last week, our KM forum has decided to reinvent itself and the deliberations now among those who are more active in the process, are about the character it should have as it emerges from this transformation. Three things come to my mind for discussion on this topic:

• What creates the situation that makes an organization decide to change?
• How does the organization decide to what does it want to change?
• How the organization does implements the change it has decided for?

The first question has been answered extensively by researchers who have inquired the change process in organizations. Regarding "saving the organization", Change Management has already established that one of the first things to be done in order to motivate an organization to change is to convince it that a major crisis is occurring - establishing a sense of urgency; (see also the Change Management page of my website at www.knowandmanage.com). See also Hugo (2005), in Building the real-time enterprise: "It often takes a crisis to get peoples’ attention or to get them to take their situation seriously. Good leaders find ways to raise the urgency level. They can let a small crisis happen by not fixing something and letting it fail" (Hugo, M. (2005), 'Embracing change', in Hugo, M. Building the real-time enterprise, Vol. Chapter 4).

Yet Senge, P. (1999), in The lost chapters of The Dance of Change reminds us that "... find it easy to recruit members by playing on fear and anxiety. These tactics are so ingrained that they unwittingly use them in contact with other organizations, particularly corporations. “There’s a crisis coming, and you’ve got to do something about it because you helped create the crisis!” This may be true, but it leads to disheartening anxiety, and deadens inspiration because it represents a short-term focus. It’s far more effective to present an image of a long-term future in which corporations, as well as other entities, have a significant and beneficial role to play, and to help corporate leaders see that role." (Senge, P.M. (1999), 'Leadership in living organizations', in Senge, P.M. Leading beyond the walls, The Drucker Foundation).

The third question is also pretty well documented in the literature, and much has been written and said about enabling change. In his book Leading Change, John Kotter lays out what he calls the “Eight-stage change process”. This process has come to be recognized as a standard by many people (John Kotter, 1996, Leading Change, Harvard Business School Press: pg. 33). The eight stages are:

• Establishing a sense of urgency
• Creating the guiding coalition
• Developing a vision and strategy
• Communicating the change vision
• Empowering a broad base of people to take action
• Generating short-term wins
• Consolidating gains and producing even more change
• Institutionalizing new approaches in the culture.

In the change process, people may be operating in many of these stages at the same time but each stage needs to occur to make it possible for the next one to happen.

To these I would add a recommendation to put in place at least for the first period a monitoring procedure to follow up on the change implementation as for instance:

• Results so far (what percentage of target group has been converted to the new method?
• What are the changes to basic operational practice?)
• Results so far: change in mindsets (mental models)
• Difficulties found in implementing the change?
• What could we learn from the implementation process?

The second question is much less documented as the assumption is that the organization contemplating a change has an established mission, and change considered is only on how to achieve this mission. Nevertheless, as we are experiencing in our own organization, we are not sure we know what is our mission and that makes the change process very complex because its basis remains to be defined as much as its end state. What could maybe help are a few directions I'm borrowing from the SoL Research Guide (2003):

• What were/are the objectives of the change initiative?
• Scope / boundaries of the change initiative?
• Context, background to the change initiative, what was the imperative "case for change?