Our iceberg is melting!

Have you read ‘Our iceberg is melting’ by John KOTTER & Holger RATHGEBER

Here is a short fable (120 pages, illustrations included) that we encourage you all to read.
At AC Mentoring we love fables, because we believe that thousands of years of community history cannot be wrong: fables are a great way to convey important lessons and messages.

John Kotter has written beforehand an excellent book of management called “Leading Change”, and you can read it, of course.
But this fable also illustrates the 8-step method of implementing change that he has developed and in a truly practical way. It is so much easier to understand, and in my opinion more relevant in the corporate world than Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s 5 stages of mourning, which is used and abused as a reference for all the courses on change management I attended or reviewed!!

The two authors tell us about the captivating and touching story of a colony of penguins who have lived for immemorial times on the same iceberg. They create a portrait gallery that will probably lead you to draw parallels with your colleagues and/or wonder about yourself. (Confiding a bit here: I found myself 45% Buddy, 40% Alice, and 15% NoNo).

In the end, this tale makes us understand, in practice, how to define and implement, more than change projects, a true culture of change. And it’s blatantly useful in our increasingly Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous world (VUCA).

Guaranteed spoiler-free about your future reading (and re-readings, and working group using the book…), I will give you here the 8 steps to make the change according to this method:
1. Create a Sense of Urgency.
2. Establish a guiding team.
3. Develop a change vision.
4. Communicate the vision.
5. Empower others to act.
6. Short-term wins.
7. Maintain momentum.
8. Embed the new culture.

Along with Spencer Johnson’s ‘Who Moved My Cheese?’ (see below), this is a fundamental read, if you want to avoid, professionally, the same destiny as the dinosaurs, Kodak or the USSR!