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Change Management
Applying a YEP Master Class to ‘Roads for Water Culture’
Luwieke Bosma
Luwieke Bosma (alumna batch 6) is still working at her YEP employer MetaMeta in Kenya. At the end of 2017 she participated in the YEP online Master Class on Change Management. “Kotter developed 8 steps in his book ‘Our Iceberg is melting’. I was triggered by the method and the fresh start of the new year was a great moment to put the method into action! I decided to introduce it as a team exercise with my colleagues, to see how well we are functioning as ‘change agents’. The exercise was useful and made us conscious of what we have to focus on for this year.”
“The change we want to see through our work, is the systemic implementation of multi-functional roads to cater for water management for increased resilience.
In Kenya, local/regional governments, road authorities and farmers are responsible
for its implementation. Thereby creating a triple-win of:
1 reduced road damage and costs
2 improved environment conservation
3 increased water availability to increase
agricultural production
We started our team exercise by assessing our approach in being change agents, whereby we scored it against Kotter’s eight step change model. This provided us an interesting first insight in where we stand and triggered some discussion. It came out
that we have a strong and wide community base and the foundation is solid. After this scoring exercise, we discussed the outcome for each of the steps and noted down their strengths and weaknesses. We envisioned
road water management to become a movement, but movements need to be kick-started. Even small changes need to be given the necessary attention and be followed through in order for it to achieve their goal.”
Kotter’s eight step change model
1 Create a sense of urgency 5 Remove obstacles
2 Create a guiding coalition
3 Create a vision for change
4 Communicate the vision
6 Create short term wins
7 Consolidateimprovement
8 Anchor the changes
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