Our Iceberg Is Melting is a fable about a colony of penguins who realize that their home might be destroyed soon, and that they need to move the entire colony to a new iceberg. However, despite the looming threat, making such a big change isn’t easy.
This book by Dr. John Kotter and Holger Rathgeber will teach you, through the penguin fable, the necessary steps in making major changes to your company or your personal life.
In this guide, we’ll explore some of the topics in greater detail and present alternative theories or points of view; we’ll provide the kind of in-depth study that a short story like Our Iceberg Is Melting has to forego in favor of simplicity and clarity in its lessons.
The first problem the characters needed to overcome was their colony’s false sense of security. They did this by convincing the others that there was an immediate, dire threat, and that they had to do something about it. In short, they created a sense of urgency to motivate the colony.
The penguins had lived on the same Antarctic iceberg as far back as any of them could remember, and they saw no reason why that should ever change.
Some argue that people are hard-wired to resist change; that millions of years of evolution have ingrained the instinct to accept “good enough” (which is to say, survival), rather than risk that stability to pursue something better. Furthermore, change is risky—the outcome is uncertain, and people don’t like uncertainty.
To sum it up using a common idiom: People prefer the devil they know (the current situation) to the devil they don’t (change).
However, a penguin named Fred made an alarming discovery: The iceberg was riddled with deep cracks due to Earth’s warming climate, and those cracks were filled with water. When winter came, that water would freeze and expand, which could shatter the whole iceberg.
Fred took his findings to Alice, one of the leaders of the penguin colony. Alice took Fred seriously, and arranged for him to present what he’d learned to the Leadership Council—including the Council head, a penguin named Louis.
It took some convincing, but eventually most of the Council members agreed that there was a dire threat to the colony, and that something had to be done. They began spreading the word to the other penguins.
What Fred and the Council accomplished here was replacing complacency with urgency. In other words, they convinced the colony that things were not normal, that they were in serious danger, and that they needed to take action to protect themselves from it.
In order to make it clear why the penguins need to take action, the authors created a situation that was both extremely dangerous and easy to see: Namely, that the place the penguins lived was falling apart beneath their feet.
Unfortunately, problems in real life aren’t always so visible or so immediate—you might have trouble convincing others that there even is a problem. Creativity, Inc. offers some suggestions on how to make your coworkers see the need for change, including:
Discuss why you need to change (this is what Fred did in the penguin fable).
Examine your current processes honestly, and look for problems.
Accept—even embrace—the fact that the change may not go smoothly at first. Promise yourself and your coworkers that nobody will be punished for mistakes.
The next hurdle the penguins needed to face was figuring out who would actually solve the problem of the melting iceberg. Louis—the head of the Leadership Council—knew that protecting the colony was his responsibility, but he couldn’t possibly save the penguins on his own. Therefore, he assembled a skilled and qualified team to help him make the necessary changes.
(Shortform note: When you need to solve major problems, working with others is crucial. So why do so many people try to go it alone? It may be due to a lack of trust: One study suggests that only 32% of leaders worldwide believe their teams have the ability to meet their goals. We’ll discuss how to develop trusting teams below.)
Besides himself, he chose four other penguins for the team, each with a unique personality and skill set. The final team was:
It would take all of them working together to make the kinds of changes that could save the colony.
How to Choose the Right Team Members
Louis assembled a skilled and qualified team, but qualifications weren’t the only factors he took into account. While skills and qualifications matter, team members’ personalities, values, and diverse experiences contribute to team success as well, and these can be hard to evaluate.
One CEO recommends starting the search by focusing on three essential factors: humility, experience, and the “then vs. now” factor:
Humility. Humility is crucial to the teamwork mentality—someone who thinks he’s better or more important than everyone else isn’t going to be an effective team player.
Experience. You’ll need a mixture of experienced team members who can guide the organization through its change, and younger, less experienced team members who will be more flexible and open to new ideas.
Adaptability. Your needs will change as your organization does. At first, you’ll need motivated and free-spirited people who can work well without strict guidelines. Then, as your changes solidify and become a permanent part of company culture, you’ll need people who can set down appropriate rules and abide by them.
- You can do this either by recruiting people who are willing and able to change their approach as time goes on, or by recruiting people with the understanding that they may be replaced as the project and the organization evolve.
The next problem the penguins ran into was the lack of a clear vision for the colony’s future. They knew that they needed to do something, but they didn’t yet know what they wanted to do. Therefore, their next step was to brainstorm solutions and pick the one that seemed most likely to work. In short, they needed a concrete plan before they started making any changes.
(Shortform note: The Leadership Challenge combines this step and the next (Spread the Word) into a single principle: Be Inspirational. In other words, both your vision and the way you communicate it are part of inspiring your colleagues to make the change that your organization needs.)
The team of penguins started thinking about possible solutions to the expanding water inside the iceberg, and also asked other penguins in the colony for suggestions. However, none of the ideas they came up with were practical.
Eventually, a passing seagull landed on the iceberg, and Buddy and the Professor went to speak to it. They learned that the gull was a scout for a nomadic flock—the seagulls lived by constantly moving from one place to another, and this particular bird helped find places for the flock to go.
The visiting seagull gave the penguins an idea for a simple, practical solution: They would leave the iceberg.
Seeking wisdom from unfamiliar sources, as the penguins did by befriending the seagull, does more than just give you new ideas—it boosts your ability to think creatively and improves your mood as well.
In The Magic of Thinking Big, author and life strategist David J. Schwartz suggests finding friends and social groups with diverse backgrounds, religions, and political views. He describes such connections as “psychological sunshine”—both enlightening and enjoyable—and says that they’re part of building an ideal environment for yourself.
The next challenge for the team was getting the rest of the colony onboard with their plan. The penguins all knew that there was a problem (remember step 1), but now they had to agree to the team’s solution. In short, the team needed to spread the word.
Louis’s first step in spreading the word about their new vision was to call all of the penguins together for an announcement.
After Louis got the penguins’ attention with a dramatic opening speech, Buddy stepped forward to share what the team had learned from the seagull and their vision for the future.
By the end of the presentation, about a third of the colony was enthusiastic about the team’s vision for the future, while roughly 10% were completely opposed to it. The rest ranged from open-minded to skeptical about the plan.
As far as Louis was concerned, that was an excellent outcome for their first presentation.
Ideas tend to spread through populations in a bell curve, sometimes known as the Idea Diffusion Curve.
The theory behind the Curve is that a small percentage of the population—the Innovators and the Early Adopters—should be the actual target of any marketing that you do, because they’ll be the ones to spread your new idea or product to everyone else through word of mouth and social media.
Therefore, having a third of the colony buying into their plan to migrate is a great start for the team. Presumably those penguins are the Innovators and Early Adopters; the ones who will (with a bit of help from the team) get the rest of the colony onboard.
Things had seemed to be going well for the penguins’ vision of a new, nomadic lifestyle, but unexpected problems started cropping up. The problems took a toll on the penguins’ energy and enthusiasm; many of them stopped attending meetings or working to get the colony ready. The plan, which had been going so well, now seemed doomed to fail.
As it turned out, the solution to almost all of the team’s problems was simply to make the other penguins feel involved.
For example, the colony’s schoolteacher had been telling her students horrific stories about penguins being eaten by whales or getting lost in the ocean. The team eventually discovered that she’d been doing so because she was afraid that she wouldn’t have a place in the colony after the move. The solution was to have Buddy talk to the teacher and reassure her that she’d still be needed in the new colony—if anything, she’d be even more important, as the young penguins tried to keep up with all the changes.
Once the schoolteacher felt important and empowered, she went on to solve the challenge of how to feed the scouts sent out to find a new home (they wouldn’t have time to hunt while scouting). In the process, she also made her students feel empowered. With the teacher’s guidance, the students put together a “Heroes Day celebration” in honor of the scouts, and charged each penguin two fish as the price of admission. Since most of the colony attended the celebration, they ended up with more than enough fish to feed all of the scouts.
In this section, the penguin colony displays what author and mathematician Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls antifragility: becoming stronger after being damaged. The basis of antifragility is that people and (effective) systems overreact to hardship, and are thus better able to handle future hardships. Perhaps the simplest example is a weightlifter—he damages his muscles by lifting heavy objects, but once he recovers he’ll be able to lift even heavier ones.
In a similar fashion, once the colony recovered from its problem with the schoolteacher, it became better than it was before; the newly empowered teacher went on to solve their other major problem of feeding the scouts.
From this example, we can see how minor setbacks can lead you to major improvements. Therefore, don’t fear such setbacks or failures; instead, welcome them as chances to grow stronger.
The last issue the team had to overcome was planning for the future. They’d successfully moved the colony to a new iceberg, and the penguins were safe—for the moment. However, there was always a chance that this iceberg would eventually be threatened too, or simply that another iceberg might be even better than the one they’d found.
Therefore, instead of deciding that their jobs were done, the team took steps to make sure the colony was always ready to move again if needed.
Looking to the future and identifying potential threats is part of the commonly used SWOT analysis: Before making any major change at your company, evaluate its Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.
Blockbuster Video is a prime example of the dangers of complacency and underestimating potential threats. In 2000, the video rental giant had a chance to buy Netflix for only $50 million. However, Blockbuster’s CEO was complacent—he thought that Netflix was a harmless novelty, rather than the future of the industry. He turned down the offer.
In 2010, just 10 years later, Blockbuster declared bankruptcy. They’d been forced out of the market by delivery and streaming services, most notably Netflix itself.
Instead of just settling in on their new iceberg to continue life as usual, the penguins fully embraced their new, nomadic lifestyle—the scouts went out again and found an even bigger, better iceberg. The colony didn’t have nearly as much trouble moving a second time, because they’d grown used to change.
In the long run, the colony worked their new nomadic lifestyle into every aspect of their society. For example, the school started teaching scouting as a subject. Furthermore, the penguins decided that scouts should get extra fish as a sign of appreciation for their hard work—and, as a result, they had more volunteers than they knew what to do with.
However, as far as Louis was concerned, the single most remarkable change was how much the penguins had embraced the idea of change—they all understood that change was sometimes necessary, and they knew how to make it happen.
The lesson from this final section is simple: Your job isn’t done just because you accomplished your goal. You have two things left to do:
Make sure that the changes you’ve made are going to stick, like how the penguins reworked their society to include scouting education and incentives for future generations.
Be ready to undergo this whole process again.
The world is constantly changing; you must be ready to change along with it.
Our Iceberg Is Melting is a fable about a colony of penguins who realize that their home might be destroyed soon, and that they need to move the entire colony to a new iceberg. However, despite the looming threat, making such a big change isn’t easy.
This book by Dr. John Kotter and Holger Rathgeber will teach you, through the penguin fable, the necessary steps in making major changes to your company or your personal life.
In this guide, we’ll explore some of the topics in greater detail and present alternative theories or points of view; we’ll provide the kind of in-depth study that a short story like Our Iceberg Is Melting has to forego in favor of simplicity and clarity in its lessons.
Dr. John Kotter is a professor emeritus at the Harvard Business School and the founder of the management consulting firm Kotter International. He’s widely regarded as one of the world’s top authorities on effective leadership and driving change.
Holger Rathgeber is an affiliate of Kotter International. He’s spent over 15 years working as a facilitator, helping companies to develop and implement effective business strategies. Rathgeber has an economics degree from the University of Stuttgart-Hohenheim.
Connect with John Kotter:
Connect with Holger Rathgeber:
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Imprint: Portfolio / Penguin
The original edition of Our Iceberg Is Melting was published in 2006. The 10th anniversary edition—published in 2016—adds new illustrations, an updated afterword, and a Q&A from Kotter and Rathgeber. (This guide references the 2016 edition.)
The original edition of Our Iceberg Is Melting came out in 2006, around the time of the U.S. housing market crash and just before the Great Recession. It was a time of major changes in the economic world, so the lessons in this fable were especially important.
Our Iceberg Is Melting is a spiritual successor to Who Moved My Cheese, another animal-centric fable about making necessary changes. However, while Who Moved My Cheese? focused on making changes at the personal level (a mouse finding a new food source), Our Iceberg Is Melting expands those ideas to the organizational level (moving an entire penguin colony to a new location).
| Who Moved My Cheese?:
7 steps for personal change |
Our Iceberg Is Melting:
8 steps for organizational change |
| Step 1: Be prepared for change | Step 1: Create urgency |
| Step 2: Let go of the past | Step 2: Assemble a team |
| Step 3: Adapt—be open to new things | Step 3: Create a vision |
| Step 4: Imagine success | Step 4: Enlist volunteers |
| Step 5: Handle your fears | Step 5: Remove barriers |
| Step 6: Learn to enjoy change | Step 6: Win small victories |
| Step 7: Be prepared for continuous change | Step 7: Accelerate change |
| Step 8: Cement the changes |
There are distinct parallels between the two processes:
Fables are generally seen as learning tools for children (Aesop’s Fables are the most famous examples). Fables for adults, including business fables like Who Moved My Cheese? and Our Iceberg Is Melting, are quite recent by comparison. However, increasing numbers of people are finding that stories are more engaging and memorable—even for adults—than dry lectures or purely informational books.
Our Iceberg Is Melting has become a go-to book for organizations who are looking to make major changes. Amazon reviews, as well as the quotes at the beginning of the book itself, show that organizations ranging from local church groups to major multinational corporations have used the lessons in Our Iceberg Is Melting to drive positive internal change.
The publisher’s page for Our Iceberg Is Melting states that it has “...changed millions of lives in organizations around the world.”
Our Iceberg Is Melting is a New York Times bestseller, and high-ranking executives from many different corporations have praised the book for its simple, clear approach to the difficult topic of driving change.
For example, Tom Curley, President and CEO of the Associated Press, said that they’d “moved quickly on several fronts,” thanks to the lessons in this book. Richard Kosinski, a category development officer at Yahoo, said that it’s a “must-read” for anyone in charge of a major change at a company.
However, some reviews on Amazon, Goodreads, and other sites argue that the book’s approach was too simple to be useful—that it glosses over all the actual work of driving change with a cute story. Others felt that the authors were talking down to them by writing Our Iceberg Is Melting in the style of a children’s book.
The information in Our Iceberg Is Melting is presented as a fable, to show why each step of driving change is important, and how each step plays out in practice. This approach is intended to be more engaging and more helpful than a simple list of steps to follow.
Our Iceberg Is Melting is well organized—each action the characters take logically leads to the next, and you can see how those actions drive the necessary changes to save the penguin colony. The authors also include a simple list of their eight steps for change at the end of the book, which is a helpful reference after you’ve read the penguin fable.
Since each of Kotter’s eight steps relies upon the steps before it, and the penguin story follows those eight steps, this is the best way to organize the information that Kotter and Rathgeber present within this book.
In this guide, we look beyond the penguin fable in order to highlight the actionable lessons within it. We also explore certain topics in greater detail, such as the difficulties that you’re likely to encounter at each step and how leadership experts suggest that you tackle those problems.
The original text of Our Iceberg Is Melting includes a somewhat modified version of Kotter’s eight-step process:
As some of the steps are naturally included in others, we’ve reworked Kotter’s eight steps down to six.
Finally, since pitching a new company culture to your employees is a lot like advertising a new product to your customers, we’ve included connections to helpful marketing tips and insights that will help you to do so.
This guide corresponds to the original book as follows:
| Our guide | Our Iceberg Is Melting |
| Step 1: Replace complacency with urgency. | Chapters 1-4 |
| Step 2: Make a team | Chapter 5 |
| Step 3: Develop a vision | Chapter 6 |
| Step 4: Spread the word | Chapter 7 |
| Step 5: Get others involved | Chapters 8-9 |
| Step 6: Don’t get complacent | Chapters 10-11 |
Our Iceberg is Melting is a fable that teaches us how to make major, frightening—but necessary—changes within an organization, and how to get others to go along with those changes.
Dr. John Kotter and Holger Rathgeber wrote Our Iceberg Is Melting to teach people how to adapt their organizations to a rapidly changing world. Though the authors’ backgrounds are in business, the lessons from Iceberg are applicable in practically any setting.
There are a few reasons why people handle change poorly:
Some argue that people are hard-wired to resist change; that millions of years of evolution have ingrained the instinct to accept “good enough” (which is to say, survival), rather than risk that stability to pursue something better. Furthermore, change is risky—the outcome is uncertain, and people don’t like uncertainty.
To sum it up using a common idiom: People prefer the devil they know (the current situation) to the devil they don’t (change).
A colony of emperor penguins lived on an iceberg in the Antarctic. They’d lived on that iceberg as far back as any of them could remember, and they saw no reason why that should ever change.
However, a penguin named Fred made an alarming discovery: The iceberg was riddled with deep cracks due to Earth’s warming climate, and those cracks were filled with water. When winter came, that water would freeze and expand, which could shatter the whole iceberg.
Fred took his findings to Alice, one of the leaders of the penguin colony. Alice took Fred seriously, and arranged for him to present what he’d learned to the Leadership Council—including the Council head, a penguin named Louis.
Fred was grateful for the opportunity that Alice was giving him, but he knew that some of the other Council members would be harder to convince than she’d been. He considered what he knew about the penguins on the Council, and concluded that simply stating the facts wouldn’t be enough to win most of them over.
In order to make it clear why the penguins need to take action, the authors created a situation that was both extremely dangerous and easy to see: Namely, that the place the penguins lived was falling apart beneath their feet.
Unfortunately, problems in real life aren’t always so visible or so immediate—you might have trouble convincing others that there even is a problem. Creativity, Inc. offers some suggestions on how to make your coworkers see the need for change, including:
Discuss why you need to change (this is what Fred did in the penguin fable).
Examine your current processes honestly, and look for problems.
Accept—even embrace—the fact that the change may not go smoothly at first. Promise yourself and your coworkers that nobody will be punished for mistakes.
Fred decided to create urgency with a dramatic presentation: He brought a glass bottle that had washed up on the iceberg, filled the bottle with water and capped it. When the water inside froze, it expanded and shattered the bottle—the same thing that he was worried would happen to their iceberg. The shattered bottle was clear evidence that Fred’s theory held water (so to speak).
One Council member, an older bird aptly named NoNo, still wasn’t convinced. NoNo argued that the iceberg had existed for as far back as the colony’s history remembered. Furthermore, some melting during the summer months was perfectly normal.
However, the other Council members decided that they couldn’t risk the colony on the chance that Fred might be wrong. They began spreading word of the problem to the other penguins. They invited reluctant penguins like NoNo to see Fred’s shattered bottle, which convinced most of them that something had to be done.
Strategies for Effective Communication
Effective communication is a recurring theme in this story. Change requires communication—first to convince people that you need to make a change, like Fred convinced the Council in this section. Then you’ll have to communicate with your team and, later, with the organization as a whole. At each step of the process, you have to make sure that you’re getting your message across in ways that catch your audience’s interest and approval.
The Harvard Business Review explains three strategies for effective communication during a major organizational change, as well as why people often fail to use those strategies:
1. Explain what you want. Don’t just hand out lists of tasks for your employees to do; make sure they understand what the end goal is, and how their jobs contribute to that goal.
- Managers and team leaders often miss this step because they’re too eager to start doing something, or because they think it’s helpful to hand out specific tasks and not “burden” others with the details. As a result, they don’t spend enough time on the unglamorous work of making sure everyone understands why the organization needs to change, how it needs to change, and why it needs to change now.
2. Show that you’re living up to what you’re asking for. This doesn’t just mean embodying your organization’s new values or processes while you’re out in public—it also means making sure that your day-to-day management decisions support the change, and that you’re leaving time in your personal schedule to discuss the ongoing change with your employees and adjust your approach as needed.
- Leaders often miss this step because they don’t prioritize the organizational change; they get caught up in the “regular” day-to-day issues of the company and don’t leave themselves enough time. Managing a major change—and managing your own decisions in light of that change—is time-consuming and difficult, and many leaders simply aren’t prepared for it.
3. Track resources and progress. Major changes require a lot of resources; not just money, but also people’s time and skills. Furthermore, the effects of major changes often aren’t fully measurable by the company’s existing metrics, since those metrics are usually calibrated to the company’s pre-change practices. Therefore, make sure that you’re committing all of the necessary resources to your organizational change, and that you’re prepared in advance to measure the full effects of that change.
- Much like the first point, leaders often miss or underperform on this point because it’s dull and tedious. People want major changes to be exciting, so they don’t commit the necessary time and energy to the “boring” work of resource allocation, or developing and testing new metrics for the company’s new direction.
Next, the Leadership Council forms a team because nobody can solve this problem on their own.
(Shortform note: When you need to solve major problems, working with others is crucial. So why do so many people try to go it alone? It may be due to a lack of trust: One study suggests that only 32% of leaders worldwide believe their teams have the ability to meet their goals. We’ll discuss how to develop trusting teams below.)
Once the Council had convinced most of the other penguins that something was wrong, Louis—as head of the Council—assembled a skilled and qualified team. Although every team member has weaknesses (such as a lack of knowledge or social skills), they all bring specific strengths to the team: One penguin has experience, one’s a good project manager, one’s particularly curious, one’s highly knowledgeable, and one has exceptional people skills. It would take all of them working together to find the answer to the colony’s problem.
How to Choose the Right Team Members
Louis assembled a skilled and qualified team, but qualifications weren’t the only factors he took into account. While skills and qualifications matter, team members’ personalities, values, and diverse experiences contribute to team success as well, and these can be hard to evaluate.
One CEO recommends starting the search by focusing on three essential factors: humility, experience, and the “then vs. now” factor:
First, identify the people with humility. Humility is crucial to the teamwork mentality and prevents many problems common in teams:
Thinking more about your own goals than those of the group.
Infighting that results from the clashing egos of people who aren’t willing to prioritize the group’s needs.
The next step is trickier: Do you hire people with a lot of experience or less experienced people who are driven and may view problems from a fresh perspective? You need both:
At the beginning of a major change, prioritize hiring team members who are driven— you need them when the pace is fast and there’s a lot to get done.
After the dust has settled, you need a balance of both experienced members and less experienced members. Experienced members have likely guided organizations through change before and can competently direct growth; inexperienced members think outside the box and can keep the organization from settling into a rut.
Finally, you need people who can adapt over time to meet your team’s changing needs.
In the early days of a major project, you need people who can stay flexible and work within changing guidelines—or no guidelines.
As your project evolves and grows, you’ll naturally establish rules and best practices for your team. Therefore, you’ll need people who can accept those guidelines and work within them.
- The other option is to put people on your team who understand that they may be swapped out as the project proceeds and the team’s needs change.
After choosing who he wanted on the team, Louis announced that he hoped that they’d all choose to help, but he wasn’t ordering them to work on the project. That was the first step toward turning this group of penguins into a real team—letting them all decide that they wanted to be there.
Employee freedom and flexibility—such as the ability to choose whether or not to join a particular team—has a strong correlation with employee morale and job satisfaction, as well as company growth.
For example, Valve (the company behind the online gaming platform Steam) credits much of its success to the autonomy that its workers enjoy.
However, even once they’d all agreed to help, they found that they were having trouble working together. Each of them had a different vision, and different ideas of how to realize that vision. Therefore, the next step was a team-building exercise: a squid hunt.
Team-building exercises can be valuable because they help team members learn each others’ strengths and weaknesses, and how to communicate effectively with one another.
By giving a group an enjoyable and rewarding experience together, you can mold very different people into an effective team.
How to Create Effective Team-Building Exercises
Many employees mock team-building activities as “forced fun” and a waste of time, but Louis shows that team building can be an important factor in getting individuals to work as one. Louis isn’t alone: According to some entrepreneurs, team building is one of the most important investments you can make as a leader.
Louis knew exactly what activity would engage his team, but where do you start if you’re not sure? Forbes contributor Brian Scudamore shares these four tips:
Leave work at the office. In other words, just let people enjoy themselves and bond; don’t try to force lessons about leadership or work ethic into the experience.
Try something new. An exciting new experience will create stronger memories—and stronger bonds—than a typical company retreat. For example, perhaps you could take your team to an escape room, or a Renaissance Faire.
Invest in your team. A team-building activity isn’t just a gift; it’s an investment in your team’s future performance. Therefore, make sure to pick something that people will really enjoy, rather than just going for the cheapest option.
Keep up the enthusiasm. If your team-building activity is a one-time event that people forget about as soon as it’s over, then it won’t be very effective. Make sure to keep people’s energy high and their bonds strong while at work—for example, with a message board where people can share their goals and accomplishments (whether job-related or not).
Think about the five penguins on Louis’s team. Each of them has a different personality and skill set, and therefore a different role to play in tackling the problem.
Which of the penguins do you most identify with and why? You don’t have to identify completely with any one of them—for example, you could say that you’re 60% Buddy and 40% Fred.
Which of the penguins are you the least like? In other words, which of these penguins would you most need on your team?
Now that Louis has assembled the right penguins and turned them into a real team, they need to figure out what to do about the danger that the melting iceberg poses. In this part we’ll see how the team brainstorms solutions, and then comes up with short- and long-term plans.
(Shortform note: The Leadership Challenge combines this step and the next (Spread the Word) into a single principle: Be Inspirational. In other words, both your vision and the way you communicate it are part of inspiring your colleagues to make the change that your organization needs.)
The team of penguins started thinking about possible solutions to the expanding water inside the iceberg and also asked other penguins in the colony for suggestions. However, none of the ideas they came up with were practical.
Eventually, a passing seagull landed on the iceberg, and Buddy and the Professor went to speak to it. They learned that the gull was a scout for a nomadic flock—the seagulls lived by constantly moving from one place to another, and this particular bird helped find places for the flock to go.
The penguins’ traditional ways of thinking couldn’t adapt to this new situation, so none of them could come up with a solution to the iceberg melting. Like the penguins, it’s important to realize when old practices and thought patterns can’t handle a changing world.
For example, marketing guru Seth Godin wrote Purple Cow because he believed that traditional marketing methods weren’t effective anymore. Godin goes on to say that, even though conventional mass-marketing is expensive and ineffective, countless companies rely on it to sell their products, because they’re stuck in traditional ways of thinking.
Had the penguins remained stuck like those companies, they’d have stayed on the iceberg until it shattered, and the colony would have been wiped out.
The visiting seagull gave the penguins an idea for a simple, practical solution: They would leave the iceberg.
The Professor wondered why nobody had thought of that as soon as they realized that the iceberg was in danger. Louis responded that it wasn’t so surprising—they’d only ever known life on the iceberg, so leaving would be completely outside of their experience. They’d needed inspiration from an outside source in order to think of it.
Seeking wisdom from unfamiliar sources, as the penguins did by befriending the seagull, does more than just give you new ideas—it boosts your ability to think creatively and improves your mood as well.
In The Magic of Thinking Big, author and life strategist David J. Schwartz suggests finding friends and social groups with diverse backgrounds, religions, and political views. He describes such connections as “psychological sunshine”—both enlightening and enjoyable—and says that they’re part of building an ideal environment for yourself.
Now that the team has an idea for how to save the colony, they need to get the other penguins onboard. In this chapter, we’ll see how Fred, Louis, and the others spread the word to the rest of the colony and build support for their vision.
The book The Leadership Challenge gives a seven-step process for getting others onboard with an idea. Let’s look at how these principles apply to the steps the colony leadership team takes to win the support of the other penguins:
| Step | How the penguins use it |
|
This happened in Step 3 of Iceberg, when the team worked together to create their vision of moving the colony to a safer place. |
|
The team is doing something that the colony’s never done before. It’s exciting and attention-grabbing.
A small part of that attention ends up being negative, which is almost inevitable when you’re trying something new. |
|
Starting with Fred’s first presentation to the Council, he and the team have been clear about the danger to the colony and used it as the driving force for the migration. |
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Fred’s bottle demonstration from Step 1 gave a clear picture of what could happen to their iceberg, and it’s an image that the team will repeatedly come back to as they spread the word about their plan. |
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The team harnesses both the fear of what will happen if they don’t leave, and excitement about the opportunities that await them in their new home. |
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This step is a large part of why Buddy is the team’s people-penguin. He has a natural energy and enthusiasm that gets other penguins to like him, and listen to what he’s saying. |
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Louis’s opening speech to the rest of the colony emphasises two things:
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Louis’s first step in spreading the word about their new vision was to call all of the penguins together for an announcement.
After Louis got the penguins’ attention with a dramatic opening speech, Buddy stepped forward to share what the team had learned from the seagull and their vision for the future.
By the end of the presentation, about a third of the colony was enthusiastic about the team’s vision for the future, while roughly 10% were completely opposed to it. The rest ranged from open-minded to skeptical about the plan.
As far as Louis was concerned, that was an excellent outcome for their first presentation.
Ideas tend to spread through populations in a bell curve, sometimes known as the Idea Diffusion Curve.
The theory behind the Curve is that a small percentage of the population—the Innovators and the Early Adopters—should be the actual target of any marketing that you do, because they’ll be the ones to spread your new idea or product to everyone else through word of mouth and social media.
Therefore, having a third of the colony buying into their plan to migrate is a great start for the team. Presumably, those penguins are the Innovators and Early Adopters; the ones who will (with a bit of help from the team) get the rest of the colony onboard.
After the big speech, the team’s next step was to increase support and excitement for their vision by having conversations with those penguins who were confused or skeptical about it.
They used two different strategies to keep spreading the word:
The Rule of 7 is a marketing theory stating that a customer has to see ads for your business an average of seven times before buying your product.
The team’s posters—and, to a lesser extent, their conversation circles—ensure that the other penguins are seeing their “product” (in other words, the plan to move to a new iceberg) frequently enough that many of them will start buying into it.
In this part of Our Iceberg Is Melting, we’ll see how the team deals with unexpected problems cropping up: everything from penguins losing their enthusiasm for a new lifestyle, to children having nightmares about moving.
They deal with these problems by making sure that everyone feels useful and important.
How to Show Employees You Value Them
If your employees feel like you value and respect them, they’ll be more likely to continue working for you and giving their best. They may even go out of their way to help solve problems within the organization, as the penguins do for their colony.
Four ways you can show your employees that you truly value them are:
Personalize your conversations
- Rather than just giving dry instructions and assessments in your day-to-day talks with your employees, let each one know why you value his or her work in your company. For example, if you have someone who’s exceptionally good at handling difficult clients, make sure to let her know that you’ve noticed that skill and that you appreciate it.
Demonstrate that other people value them, too
- Praise from supervisors and managers, no matter how sincere, can come off sounding routine or obligatory. Therefore, make sure to let your team members know when clients or coworkers compliment their work—hearing praise from a different source may have a much greater impact on their morale.
Give them interesting challenges
- Harder work might seem more like a punishment than a reward; however, giving an employee a challenging assignment that plays to his strengths shows that you recognize his abilities and trust him to handle more difficult tasks. A good challenge can also help keep an employee engaged, especially if his job is normally tedious grunt work.
Recognize individual accomplishments
- It’s often tempting to give all of your employees the same rewards and incentives so that nobody feels left out. However, doing so tells your best employees that you don’t really value their hard work or their accomplishments. Therefore, it’s helpful to reward those people with something that your other employees don’t get. Even a small gesture, like an extra-long lunch break one day, goes a long way toward letting people know that you appreciate them.
Things had seemed to be going well for the penguins’ vision of a new, nomadic lifestyle, but unexpected problems started cropping up.
For example, penguins need to eat a lot of fish to survive, and the scouts wouldn’t have time to find food while they were exploring. Also, some of the younger penguins had started having horrible nightmares about leaving the iceberg; Alice eventually learned that the kids’ teacher had been telling them horrific stories about killer whales attacking and eating penguins while they swam.
These issues and others took a toll on the penguins’ energy and enthusiasm. Many of them stopped attending meetings or working to get the colony ready. The plan, which had been going so well, now seemed doomed to fail.
One thing that the team didn’t do was develop failure resilience—the skills and confidence to recover from setbacks, instead of getting frustrated and disheartened by them. As a result, the problems they encountered along the way almost caused their whole plan to break down.
In Dare to Lead, author and professor Brené Brown offers two suggestions for how you can build failure resilience for yourself and your team:
Recognize your emotions, and question them.
- Failure is frustrating, and it can cause you to feel like your job is impossible, or that you’re not capable of doing it. It’s important to recognize your feelings for what they are—just feelings, not the truth—and to ask yourself what triggered those feelings. By thinking through your emotions and the underlying problems, you’ll be able to respond effectively, instead of just reacting.
Figure out what really happened.
- It’s tempting to use incomplete information to piece together a story that explains your situation. Such stories are rarely accurate and tend to jump to worst-case scenarios (for example, you might think that a friend is mad at you, when in reality he’s preoccupied with something unrelated). Therefore, just like you examine and question your emotional responses to failures, examine and question the stories your brain creates about them.
As it turned out, the solution to almost all of the team’s problems was simply to make the other penguins feel involved.
The teacher had been telling her students those horrifying stories because she was afraid that she wouldn’t have a place in the new colony—that she was too old to adapt to a new lifestyle, or that her lessons would be outdated after everything changed. Therefore, the solution was to have Buddy talk to the teacher and reassure her that she’d still be needed in the new colony—if anything, she’d be even more important, as the young penguins tried to keep up with all the changes.
Once the schoolteacher felt important and empowered, she went on to solve the problem of feeding the scouts by making her students feel empowered. With the teacher’s guidance, the students put together a “Heroes Day celebration” in honor of the scouts, and charged each penguin two fish as the price of admission. Since most of the colony attended the celebration, they ended up with more than enough fish to feed all of the scouts.
In short, the team made every penguin feel involved and empowered. That alone was enough to solve most of their problems.
In this section, the penguin colony displays what author and mathematician Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls antifragility: becoming stronger after being damaged. The basis of antifragility is that people and (effective) systems overreact to hardship, and are thus better able to handle future hardships. Perhaps the simplest example is a weightlifter—he damages his muscles by lifting heavy objects, but once he recovers he’ll be able to lift even heavier ones.
In a similar fashion, once the colony recovered from its problem with the schoolteacher, it became better than it was before; the newly empowered teacher went on to solve their other major problem of feeding the scouts.
From this example, we can see how minor setbacks can lead you to major improvements. Therefore, don’t fear such setbacks or failures; instead, welcome them as chances to grow stronger.
Furthermore, solving these smaller problems gave the penguins some small victories that they could celebrate as they worked toward the main goal of moving the colony to a new iceberg. Those small successes kept them enthusiastic about the larger project.
(Shortform note: According to the Harvard Business Review, making noticeable progress is the single best way to boost employee morale—which, in turn, leads to improved performance. Even small wins can make a huge difference in employee attitude and confidence, so it’s important to recognize and celebrate those wins.)
With the last problems ironed out, the colony was finally ready to realize its new vision. The scouts departed the iceberg to find the penguins a new home.
Tying It Together
This section shows that getting other people involved can fix several issues at once:
They’ll be happy to feel included and important in the project
They can help you to solve minor problems that are getting in the way of the main goal. Those small victories will give them something to celebrate, and help maintain enthusiasm for the main project
In the last two chapters of the fable, we’ll see both the short-term and long-term outcomes of the penguin colony’s vision. In the short term, the colony successfully moves to a new iceberg and settles on it, which could have been the end of the story.
However, we’ll also see that the colony doesn’t settle back into its old way of life. Scouts keep exploring, looking for new icebergs, and the penguins make sure they’re always ready to move again. In other words, the colony doesn’t slip back into dangerous complacency.
Looking to the future and identifying potential threats is part of the commonly used SWOT analysis: Before making any major change at your company, evaluate its Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.
Blockbuster Video is a prime example of the dangers of complacency and underestimating potential threats. In 2000, the video rental giant had a chance to buy Netflix for only $50 million. However, Blockbuster’s CEO was complacent—he thought that Netflix was a harmless novelty, rather than the future of the industry. He turned down the offer.
In 2010, just 10 years later, Blockbuster declared bankruptcy. They’d been forced out of the market by delivery and streaming services, most notably Netflix itself.
The scouts found a new iceberg that would be suitable for the colony and, with winter just starting to set in, the penguins finally made their move.
There were some issues with the new iceberg: The fishing grounds were unfamiliar, and the wind in some places was colder than expected. However, those problems weren’t as terrible as some of the penguins—particularly the older ones—had feared. The difficulties were completely manageable; and, more importantly, this new iceberg wasn’t in danger of breaking up.
The penguins had realized their vision.
Manage Your Fear Response
For people (and penguins), fear is a survival instinct—it’s hardwired into us because it saved our ancestors from deadly dangers. Even though most situations we face nowadays probably aren’t matters of life and death, the fear response doesn’t know that. That’s why we tend to jump to worst-case scenarios and blow our worries out of proportion; because we’re trying to protect ourselves from dangers that don’t exist anymore.
Jack Canfield’s book The Success Principles suggests a two-step process to examine your fears, and recognize that they’re coming from you, rather than any external danger:
Write down your fear. Be sure to focus on what you’re afraid of doing, rather than just what you’re afraid of.
For example, instead of saying “I’m afraid of phone calls,” write “I’m afraid of talking on the phone.”
Reframe your fear. Complete the following sentence using the fear that you wrote down in step 1: I want to __, but I scare myself by imagining __._ The wording is important, because it emphasizes that you’re the one stopping yourself.
Continuing the previous example, you might write, “I want to call my friend, but I scare myself by imagining an awkward conversation.”
That could be the end of the story, but the penguins have one more important lesson to teach: Don’t get complacent.
Instead of just settling in on their new iceberg to continue life as usual, the penguins fully embraced their new, nomadic lifestyle—the scouts went out again and found an even bigger, better iceberg. The colony didn’t have nearly as much trouble moving a second time, because they’d grown used to change.
In the long run, the colony worked their new nomadic lifestyle into every aspect of their society. For example, the school started teaching scouting as a subject. Furthermore, the penguins decided that scouts should get extra fish as a sign of appreciation for their hard work—and, as a result, they had more volunteers than they knew what to do with.
However, as far as Louis was concerned, the single most remarkable change was how much the penguins had embraced the idea of change—they all understood that change was sometimes necessary, and they knew how to make it happen.
The lesson from this final section is simple: Your job isn’t done just because you accomplished your goal. You have two things left to do:
Make sure that the changes you’ve made are going to stick, like how the penguins reworked their society to include scouting education and incentives for future generations.
Be ready to undergo this whole process again.
The world is constantly changing; you must be ready to change along with it.
Our Iceberg is Melting is a fable—a story designed to teach the reader how to implement change. Now that you’ve finished reading it, consider how you can apply the lessons from this fable to your own life.
Can you identify a looming threat in your personal or professional life? In other words, what’s one “melting iceberg” that you’re currently facing?
In a sentence or two, how can you use the lessons from Our Iceberg Is Melting to start making the necessary changes to protect yourself from that “iceberg?”
What lesson do you think will be most difficult to implement and why?