Once again, you’ve struck a positive nerve. As I read Kotter’s eight steps: create urgency, build coalition, share vision, mobilize champions, remove barriers, celebrate wins, sustain momentum, embed change, I found myself reflecting on decades of building businesses, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. The steps align almost perfectly with the successes. What strikes me more are the failures. In those cases, it was often the sense of urgency that failed first. Team members could not fully coalesce around the need to act. Without urgency, there is no compelling reason to mobilize, no incentive to remove barriers, nothing to celebrate, and no momentum to sustain. The neutral zone becomes the death zone. So the tension becomes: how long do we allow people to exist within the transitional phase and, importantly, how does the organization survive within that phase? Products still need to be created, services still provided, competition still answered, payroll still met. Often there is little appreciation for the organizational stability, if it exists at all, that allows people the time and space to remain in the neutral zone long enough for something healthy to emerge. Thanks for starting my day with thoughts worth pondering.
Kevin, I love this, especially because we have lived these questions together while building small businesses, where day-to-day activities never stay abstract. Your phrase “the neutral zone becomes the death zone” definitely identifies the risk. People need time to metabolize change, but the business still has to keep breathing. Maybe the real leadership work lies in knowing when to give space, when to create urgency, and how to make the next step clear enough that people can move without pretending the transition has already resolved. Thank you for living these questions with me.
In my psychology practice, this transition is called ‘liminal space’, the uncomfortable time between what is known and not yet known. It is the place where the deep, internal transformations occur, where we find so much juice! In keeping with looking to the natural world to inform our understanding of this process, a chrysalis holds the caterpillar, which dissolves into primordial goo in order to make the butterfly. Metamorphosis!
So much wisdom in your words, Brooke. I’m remembering back to our Radio Maine conversation so many years ago. I agree that the chrysalis goo is the part most people (myself included) hope to skip past. We do the real work when we stay inside the dissolution rather than push through it. Thank you for sharing your thoughts!
Once again, you’ve struck a positive nerve. As I read Kotter’s eight steps: create urgency, build coalition, share vision, mobilize champions, remove barriers, celebrate wins, sustain momentum, embed change, I found myself reflecting on decades of building businesses, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. The steps align almost perfectly with the successes. What strikes me more are the failures. In those cases, it was often the sense of urgency that failed first. Team members could not fully coalesce around the need to act. Without urgency, there is no compelling reason to mobilize, no incentive to remove barriers, nothing to celebrate, and no momentum to sustain. The neutral zone becomes the death zone. So the tension becomes: how long do we allow people to exist within the transitional phase and, importantly, how does the organization survive within that phase? Products still need to be created, services still provided, competition still answered, payroll still met. Often there is little appreciation for the organizational stability, if it exists at all, that allows people the time and space to remain in the neutral zone long enough for something healthy to emerge. Thanks for starting my day with thoughts worth pondering.
Kevin, I love this, especially because we have lived these questions together while building small businesses, where day-to-day activities never stay abstract. Your phrase “the neutral zone becomes the death zone” definitely identifies the risk. People need time to metabolize change, but the business still has to keep breathing. Maybe the real leadership work lies in knowing when to give space, when to create urgency, and how to make the next step clear enough that people can move without pretending the transition has already resolved. Thank you for living these questions with me.
In my psychology practice, this transition is called ‘liminal space’, the uncomfortable time between what is known and not yet known. It is the place where the deep, internal transformations occur, where we find so much juice! In keeping with looking to the natural world to inform our understanding of this process, a chrysalis holds the caterpillar, which dissolves into primordial goo in order to make the butterfly. Metamorphosis!
So much wisdom in your words, Brooke. I’m remembering back to our Radio Maine conversation so many years ago. I agree that the chrysalis goo is the part most people (myself included) hope to skip past. We do the real work when we stay inside the dissolution rather than push through it. Thank you for sharing your thoughts!