Urgency Is the Absence of Complacency, Not Panic

From John Kotter’s Leading Change (Harvard Business Review Press; 2012 reissue with a new preface by the author, 208 pp.), the book in which he laid out the eight-step framework for organizational transformation whose first step is “establishing a sense of urgency.” Kotter had previewed the framework in his Harvard Business Review article “Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail” (March-April 1995), but the article itself does not contain this exact line. The wording above appears later in the book. The sentence is reproduced verbatim across multiple secondary summaries of the book; the specific print page has not been independently verified here.

The sentence corrects a predictable misreading. When managers hear “raise the urgency level,” many reach for the levers they know: tighter deadlines, dramatic warnings, signals that heads will roll. Kotter is saying that picture is wrong. He is not asking for more alarm; he is asking for less complacency, which in his usage is the felt belief that current performance is fine and the environment is stable. Complacency is not a thought but a feeling, and it survives quietly inside busy organizations because the people there read their own busyness as evidence that the company is fine. A team can be loudly panicked and still complacent on the things that count, because panic does not by itself produce sustained focus on the real problems.