Examples of unanticipated urgencies in the recent past
Submitted by Brieuc Corlay
One of main takeaways from the Organizational Change course was the necessity to create a sense of urgency to initiate the change movement. Executives, managers will tend to create some sense of opposition to the status quo in order to rally their troops. We have discussed different methods to reach this goal. A preferred one in the corporate world seems to be the email/memo to the employees depicting how difficult the situation is, Nokia being one of the most recent and publicized example.
Sometimes urgency is not created by any leader or is not even forecasted or planned. In the Harvard Business Review’s article “Leadership in a permanent crisis”, authors compare a heart attack with an unanticipated crisis which leads to change (in diet, in life on the long run and so on). I was inspired to use this idea to examine recent global events, how they create urgency and what lessons may be learned.
I am going to start with the tsunami in Japan. It is worth noticing that the tsunami killed thousands of people but did not generate any urgency. On the other hand, the Fukushima plant generated a large international reaction though “only” twenty people died there. First lesson: urgency is not necessarily rational or, at least, rationally scalable. In less than a month, there have been many reactions regarding the nuclear sector: some projects have been frozen, the WSJ reports that EDF, the company operating the most nuclear reactors, has changed is risk assessment to include two simultaneous disasters instead of one and so on. How much of the reaction is based on facts, how much is based on public pressure, it is hard to say. However, we have our second lesson: change can happen fast when the right urgency trigger is pulled.
Let us move to the political unrest in Africa and Middle-East. Many countries have experienced the ‘Arab Spring’ but few of them have an exit plan. Oman experienced some unrest in February. Sultan Qaboos offered a minimum wage policy and the creation of public jobs. The protest dimmed rapidly. On the other hand, many countries are still facing post-crisis dilemma: Egypt sees the growing pressure of Salafis, Bahrain is torn between the Sunni and Shiite influences and Tunisia is still trying to build a democracy. Third lesson: urgency can be used as an ignition for change but the underlying problem still has to be addressed. Oman did it, or seems to have done so, because the Sultan understood the problem behind the protest. It is not easy to identify the true problem when urgency is “created” and planned, let alone when the crisis leading to change was unforeseen.
Last, let us examine the financial crisis in 2008. Private banks have been bailed out with taxpayers money; Did this unpredicted urgency change anything in Wall Street? As far as I know, not really. 2010 bonuses are back at their pre-crisis level, banks continue trading and selling products only Ph.D. in Mathematics can understand. Yes, regulators have designed stress-test for the banks and both Europe and the US have passed laws that increase transparency. Nonetheless, it is a miss: the opportunity to change the system in a better way was not seized. Nobody had the audacity to ask the right questions and demand the answers. Lesson: urgency can induce the change but, to be sustained, the change needs leaders with courage.
Managing change when everything is planned is not only a quasi oxymoron, it is a daunting task. When the urgency is unpredicted, change is driven differently but some key lessons can be learned. First, the sense of urgency is a feeling and, hence, is not rational. Second, urgency is a powerful starter for change, especially if the right channels to maintain the crisis are used. Third, urgency is only the symptom of the underlying problems, which must be addressed even though the crisis was unpredicted. Last, urgency does not lead the change. Only leaders do and crisis will remain just that if nobody takes ownership of the momentum generated.
