Our Iceberg Is Melting: Changing & Succeeding Under Any Condition

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E-books have been my preferred book format since I got my first Kindle a few years ago. However, I still have many unread paperbacks at home, and I randomly choose a title to read inside a sauna. One title intrigued me not because of its title but because of its material–it’s glossy and could be water-resistant, perfect for probable wet conditions inside a humid place. Little did I know that I already encountered the author in one of my courses back in graduate school: John Kotter. Our Iceberg Is Melting: Changing and Succeeding Under Any Conditions (2006) is a book by management gurus Holger Rathgeber and John Kotter that transforms Kotter’s Eight Step Process of Successful Change into a visual, compelling, and engaging fable. According to the authors, fables can be powerful because they can take intimidating subjects to more discussable and memorable formats. True enough, the book did not contain any frameworks you can find in business school case rooms. Instead, you can find highly visual and entertaining illustrations of the characters in the fable: penguins. 

Choosing the penguin’s habitat (the icebergs) as a setting and its state of melting as a plot dilemma felt timely in our society’s fight to stop or reverse climate change. This led me to consider how Kotter’s classic framework can be contextualized in sustainability change management. I found a framework by Bob Willard in his book The Sustainability Champions Guidebook (2009). Let’s compare it to Kotter’s model.

• Creating a Sense of Urgency (Kotter) and Wake-up Calls (Willard) are the first steps to creating change.
• Creating a Vision for Change (Kotter) and Inspiring Shared Visions (Willard) can also be found in the early phases of both frameworks.
• However, Forming a Powerful Coalition (Kotter) comes earlier than Mobilizing Commitment (Willard). It seems that Willard emphasized preparation and desk work before acting.
• “Preparation” for Willard includes assessing current realities, developing strategies, and building business cases. These phases are embedded in Kotter’s “powerful coalition.”
• Empowering Actions and Creating Quick Qins (Kotter) are embedded in Mobilizing Commitment and Embedding and aligning (Willard).
• Embedding and Aligning is Willard’s final phase, which could be Kotter’s penultimate phase: Building On The Change. Willard did not offer a strict Making It Stick (Kotter) equivalent.

I feel that Willard’s framework is heavily inspired by Kotter’s. While Kotter’s is more widely used and scalable, Willard offers a function-specific framework for Sustainability champions. Change, like what the penguins have been experiencing, is constant, and frameworks are not immune to it. Frameworks provide structure but not solutions; they provide guidance but not grit; they can trigger creativity and context-creation but not absolute clarity. Frameworks are a good start; we must start now, as our iceberg is melting.