Guest post by: Alvin Schexnider, director, Planning, Administration and Human Resources, Urban Ministries

The session I attended Sunday morning was titled “Leading Change.” The session’s title and content come directly from John Kotter’s Leading Change book, which has become a key resource for anyone thinking about organizational transformations. Our facilitators were Julie Benesh and James Sibley—both from Rush University Medical Center—and honestly this session was very impactful, both for its content as well as its format.

This session was in a format called “café,” where there were multiple tables set up corresponding to each of Kotter's eight stages, and every 15 minutes the audience was expected to sit down at a table and have dialogue/discussion on one of the eight stages. Everything was led by premade questions and prompts given to us by Benesh and Sibley, corresponding to each table/change stage. I have to say, this was an incredible learning exercise—it really allowed for all of the attendees to speak to their own experiences in their respective organizations and then to try to make sense of how Kotter’s various stages of change related to their own experiences in organizational change.

Once we rotated three times, participants came back together as a large group and debriefed on key takeaways that stood out for us, with Sibley giving us guidance on what he thought would be the appropriate approaches to scenarios involving change according to the Leading Change method. Everyone was highly engaged at this point, and I really came out of the session with a more meaningful and organic understanding of the Leading Change method. Sibley and Benesh score extra points for waiting until the end of the session to handout a meaty packet that actually summarized each of the eight stages of change so that we could all go home with something to study further. Great session!!!

To close, for anyone looking to learn more about Leading Change, I would definitely give the book a look. Also, Kotter partnered with Dan Cohen, a Deloitte Consultant with expertise in organization change, to write two follow-ups to Leading Change, called Heart of Change and the Heart of Change Field Guide.