I said yesterday that for large scale mobilization of people (AKA social movements, AKA company culture), it needs a platform. They don’t need a ‘change management method’ . Viral Change™ is our mobilizing platform.
So what is a platform? An ecosystem of rules of the game, social algorithms (logic, as in idea-logic or ideology) and communication mechanisms that all together form an operating system. A mobilizing platform is an operating system.
It contains (or hosts) at least 10 components
- An overall compelling narrative that glues the whole thing and that it’s also divided into several narratives all relevant to different segments of the population (e.g, don’t talk to the 25 year old about pensions and 60 year old about unemployment. Believe it or not this is precisely what we do in corporate life; we have close to zero segmentation)
- Behaviours: Translate as much as you can into them. No behaviours, no currency
- Peer-to-peer networks: the most powerful form of teaming up. Forget teams, we have enough of them
- No multiplication, no social movement. It’s about how many people you engage and how many in turn do engage with others.
- Focus on the highly connected people in the network (yes, you need to find them)
- Clarity of roles: an advocate is not an activist; an activist is not an ambassador; a volunteer may or may not be either. Champions may be anything until you define them.This area is conceptually messy, and it should not be
- A healthy 24/7 storytelling system must dominate the airtime
- Leadership support, including Backstage Leadership (tip: how to lead people do no report to you and without powerpoints)
- Metrics and Insights (AKA knowing what the hell is going on)
- A strong core team orchestrating all from the back, no apologies for the words.
Now you can test your ‘change management methods’ and your eight steps against this.