- Leandro Herrero - https://leandroherrero.com -

A Cheat Sheet To Create A Social Movement Tip = to shape organizational culture since both are the same.

Mobilizing people. This is another of the Holy Grails (how many have I said we have?) in management. Whether you look at this from the angle of productivity, employee engagement, or any other, the key is ‘Mobilizing People’. Actually, I propose to change the word ‘leaders’ to ‘mobilizers’. Mmm, I won’t win this one.

How do you create a social movement? Perhaps a good start is to look at – well, social movements. OK, you don’t see this as a ‘standard management practice’. I do. The answers to better management, exciting management, and new, innovative management in 2023 are at their best when distant from ‘management science’. Old toolkits are gone! Where are the new toolkits? They need to be reinvented.

Culture shaping (forming, changing, transforming, growing…) is the development and management of an internal social movement. Yes, a la ‘social movement’, as read in Sociology, Anthropology, Political Science, and Political Marketing and very little, if not zero, in MBA curricula.

I could go on for hours on this topic. It’s one of my favourites, full of hope and expectations, but I said this is a Cheat Sheet, so I will have to send the Bullet Points Brigade.

1. (Re)frame the narrative. Acknowledge a spectrum of motives. Example: Take Obama to the White House (2008, 2012 movements), Fix health care, Decrease Inequality, better Human Rights and Justice, for example, were co-existing narratives. Not one. Corporate listen to the one, single, overriding, all-singing-the-same-song narrative. Have different frames, no one. ‘One only’ is a mistake.

2. Acknowledge the above differences, so accept also different, co-existing types of fellow travellers and frames.  However, agree on non-negotiable behaviours. This is the universal bit. Don’t compromise with it. Get it wrong, no glue, no movement, all in different directions.

3. Define the tribes. Peer-to-peer, bottom-up, self-organizing- whatever you want to call it in the organization, is tribal. Influence is horizontal. I did not say teams, divisions, functions or Task Forces. I said, tribes. If you don’t know your tribe, hire an anthropologist. Or us.

4. Fix coexisting expectations. Get them in the open. Brief and debrief. Define the rules. Activism is to act. Clicktivism is to click and say ‘like’. Donate is to donate. Advocacy is to say ‘I endorse, this is good’. Corporations are notorious for mixing up concepts and pretending that they are all equal. Nope. If you like clicking and we are here all for acting, this is not your social movement, sorry.

5. Engage the hyper-connected. If you want to infect (behaviours, values, ways), you’d better find the nodes of high connectivity. It can be done. We do this in our organizational work. You miss the hyper-connected, but you have a bunch of passion, forget it. I know it is not much of a PC statement, but it’s true. (Please don’t ignore ‘passion’, but between a bunch of poorly connected passionate people and a group of highly connected and influent dispassionate, I choose the latter for the work and the former for the bar)

“Backstage Leadership™ is the art of giving the stage to those with high capacity of multiplication and amplification, the hyper-connected.”

6. Focus on grassroots. Organise grassroots. Learn about grassroots. Became a Grassroots Master. The Obama campaigns focused on ‘it’s all about you, guys, not the one with the speeches’. It is grassroots, or it isn’t. Many Corporate/Organizational development groups haven’t got a clue about grassroots. They think it has something to do with the gardens.

7. Practice Backstage Leadership™. The key type of leadership in social movement making/organizational culture shaping is Backstage Leadership™, not Front Running Leadership with PowerPoint. Backstage Leadership™ is the art of giving the stage to those with high capacity of multiplication and amplification, the hyper-connected from grassroots, very often a rather invisible and not very noisy bunch, as compared with the ones with the Communications Drums.

8. Track progress. Set indicators. But these are not the traditional KPIs. Before creating measurements, ask yourself a simple question: what do I want to measure? What do I want to see? Which is different from ‘what I can measure’, and ‘what everybody measures. In Viral Change™ for example, we measure the progression of behaviours and stories, quantity and quality.

9. Master a fantastic Storytelling System that has two opposite origins meeting in the middle: top-down from the formal leaders (yes, we have formal leaders, you have formal leaders as well) and bottom-up from the grassroots. In the job structure, make sure that whoever is in charge of Storytelling’, is ‘the best paid’. It pays off to pay him/her well. Storytelling is the glue of change.

10. Go back to number one and down again.

Learn more about Viral Change™ and its applications here [1].

Reach out to my team to learn more via [email protected]

Empowerment is an output. If you can visualize it, you can craft it.

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Accountability,Activism,Behavioural Change,Building Remarkable Organizations,Change, Leadership and Society,Communication,Critical Thinking,culture and behaviours,Disruptive Ideas,Leadership,Management Thinking and Innovation,Viral Change | No Comments

The real question is, what do you want to see happening so that you can say ‘people are empowered’?

Employee empowerment is an output, an outcome. If you start thinking of employee empowerment as an input, something you are supposed to give, you’re looking at it from the wrong angle. As an input, all the airtime will be allocated to how much to give, when, and in which circumstances. Sure, you need to think about that, but the real question is, what do you want to see happening so that you can say ‘people are empowered’? What kind of state of mind and behaviours? And why? What benefits? If there are any.

The why is obviously important. Why is empowerment good? Because it is? What would happen to an organization with high levels of employee empowerment? Can you visualize it? If it is not clear, stop thinking about what to give away to empower.

In this path to uncover the benefits, the argument is going to take you to the territory of ‘autonomy’, whether you call it this or not. Autonomy means a degree of control that has been gained (so yes, you now need to imagine what you will need to give away, to let go). Autonomy means self-determination, self-help, ability to conduct independently.

If you had that, people in the organization will probably also gain a lot of self-esteem and confidence. Trust levels will go up. Autonomy means increased efficiency and efficacy. Usually, it also means faster reactions: markets, environment, crisis. The ‘business case’ is strong.

There are five ingredients that need to be cooked to achieve this.

  • Explicit ‘permission’ from leaders. There is something, perhaps in people’s upbringing, that makes us very dependent on ‘permissions’. Don’t underestimate the need to stress and repeat this to people. Don’t take for granted that this has been heard.
  • Trust. Call it how you like, but you need a good dose of this for autonomy and empowerment to be real. Are you prepared?
  • Resources. If people don’t have them, there is no point trumpeting empowerment. You can’t empower people to do the impossible.
  • Skills and competencies. Equally, you can’t empower people to do something if they don’t know how to.
  • A safety net of some sort. Within the compliance parameters that you may have, people need to be able to fail and not only survive but spread the learning.

A working definition of empowerment from the leader’s perspective may sound like this: To give control to people who don’t have it so that you can free yourself for things only you, as the leader, can do, and, in doing so, you are creating an efficient system with high levels of trust and self-esteem. All this provided that people have the skills and resources.

But the trick is to start by visualizing the kind of organization you want to see, not the theoretical view of empowerment or the things you would give away (decision rights, for example). Then you need to work backwards to see what needs to happen. If you can’t visualize the benefits in the first instance, or not yet, don’t go that route. Stop talking about it.

Learn more about Viral Change™ and its applications here [1].

Reach out to my team to learn more via [email protected].

Some companies are run as a Permanent Focus Group

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Activism,Building Remarkable Organizations | No Comments

In some organizations, daily life and the day to day meetings feel like a Permanent Focus Group. People spend their time advising each other on what should be done, could be done, ought to be done or somebody needs to know, or tell somebody who, quite frankly, ought to do something.

Punctuated by the recurrent noise of the coffee machine, advice and opinion flow from corner to corner, never quite settling in, perhaps in the quest for some owners and doers in the next meeting room.

In my terminology of Viral Change, in this situation, Advocacy is high, Activism is low. The beauty of the word activism is that it has an ACT inside. Actually, act. Not pretending.

We have glorified the Advocate and the Ambassador too much. I want less ambassadors (who after all don’t represent themselves) and more activists. Less advocates, who advocate and go, and more activists as well.

What I am describing is very different from the company that runs on good conversation flow, good and healthy informal organization, fluid pipes full of meaningful shared insights.

Conversational flow is needed. It is the oxygen of the organization. The healthy company has plenty of oxygen but also a quest for the (re) solution. It’s not a 24/7 Focus Group.

I think we talk too much.

Wait a minute. I am doing it!

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CULTURE IS THE NEW WORKPLACE!

If you want to have a conversation about the future of work, don’t start with hybrid vs. non-hybrid, flexible vs. non-flexible, work from home vs. work from anywhere.

It’s the wrong start!

The real conversation is about the culture you want or need. Company culture is the petri dish where everything grows. The culture has workplaces. Focus on culture. This is the real driver. This is the true conversation.

 

 

 

 

Start your conversation with us today. We can support you and your organization on your cultural journey.  Contact us today: email at [email protected]  [2] or visit. [3]

A mobilizing platform is the human operating system of the company. You need to install your HOS.

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Activism,Backstage Leadership,Behavioural Change,Building Remarkable Organizations,Change, Leadership and Society,culture and behaviours,Management of Change,Storytelling,Viral Change | No Comments

I said previously [4] that large scale mobilization of people (AKA social movements, AKA company culture) needs a platform. They don’t need a ‘change management method’ . Viral Change™ [5] 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 together form an operating system. A mobilizing platform is an operating system.

It contains (or hosts) at least 10 components

  1. An overall compelling narrative that glues the whole thing and that is 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).
  2. Behaviours: Translate as much as you can into them. No behaviours, no currency.
  3. Peer-to-peer networks: the most powerful form of teaming up. Forget teams, we have enough of them.
  4. No multiplication, no social movement. It’s about how many people you engage and how many of then in turn engage with others.
  5. Focus on the highly connected people in the network (yes, you need to find them).
  6. 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.
  7. A healthy 24/7 storytelling system must dominate the airtime.
  8. Leadership support, including Backstage Leadership™ (tip: how to lead people who do not report to you and without PowerPoints).
  9. Metrics and Insights (AKA knowing what the hell is going on).
  10. 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.

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Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project [6], an international firm of organizational architects, and the pioneer of Viral Change™ [5], a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers sustainable, large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations, which creates lasting capacity for changeability.

Dr Herrero is also an Executive Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Organization, Drucker School of Management.

An international speaker, Dr Herrero is regularly invited to speak at global conferences and corporate events. To invite Leandro to speak at your conference or business event contact: The Chalfont Project [7] or email: [email protected]. [8]

4 types of generosity in the workplace. 2 with epidemic potential.

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Activism,Backstage Leadership,Collective action,Corporate pathologies,culture and behaviours,Peer to peer infuence | No Comments

Four types:

  1. The generosity of the traffic light. Every fixed interval, it lets you get through. It even changes colour for you. This is the generosity of the organization that generously rewards people for what they do. No more. It’s a clear transaction, no fuss. As predictable as the green light.
  1. The 1/365 policy generosity. One day you agree a generous policy for employees (extra holiday, extended leave, subsidised meals…). You expect 365 days of gratitude. You don’t have to think about generosity for 364 days.
  1. The I am making myself available generosity. It may be a pain, an inconvenience at the very least, but you make yourself available to others, all the time. (My experience? People don’t abuse this).
  1. The I give more than I am asked generosity. You don’t have to. You do it intuitively. There is something inside you that tells you that this is right, that keeping more for yourself is wrong. (But you may not be sure if it’s sensible, after all).

How generous is the organization you work for, or that you lead? Traffic light generosity? Giving more than asked? People make themselves available (and this is not in the job description)? One off generosity policy? Other?

How do you spread generosity? In behavioural terms, I can tell you: 3 is first, 4 is second, 1 is effective in fooling everybody, 2 looks good in the annual report but, once in place, people will take for granted and will ask for more.

There are choices. A generous workplace is not a question of employee-employer dynamics, it’s a ‘culture of’, or it isn’t . It’s a Viral ChangeTM epidemic of generosity type 3 and type 2 combined.

Studies in altruism has shown (I hate this kind of sentence) that altruism spreads via social copying (homo imitans). In a neighbourhood some people start doing ‘altruistic things’ and soon the neighbourhood does. No training, no Declaration of Altruism is Good for You.

Generosity in the organization follows the same (scale up, Viral ChangeTM) rules. Master a critical mass, going that way you can start a little revolution.

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Extract taken from my book The Flipping Point. [9] A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. The Flipping Point [9] contains 200 short vignettes exploring what ’deprogramming management’ may look like.

 

Behaviours create culture, not the other way around.

Behaviours create culture, not the other way around. Change behaviours get culture. Behaviours are copied (homo imitans) and scaled up peer-to-peer. Culture is not trainable in classrooms. Everybody copies everybody but some people are more copy-able than others. It turns out that 5 – 10% have very high (non-hierarchical) influence. Find them, ask for help and give them support. Tell stories of success all the time. Make sure leaders do support the peer-to-peer work, but don’t interfere. This is the ‘what’ of Viral Change™ in a box. The ‘how’ is what I do for a living.

 

This book asks you to use more rigour and critical thinking in how you use assumptions and management practices that were created many years ago. Our real and present danger is not a future of robots and AI, but of current established BS. In this book, you are invited to the Mother of All Call Outs!
Available from major online bookstores [10].

How do people change their mind?

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Activism,Behavioural Change,Behavioural Economics,Change, Leadership and Society,Corporate pathologies,Grassroots | No Comments

How do people change their mind? How can we influence people to change their minds? Well, any of us will bring ideas such as persuasion, manipulation, rational convincing, emotional appeal, and just about any other mechanism described in the influencing theory. In the absence of a magic bullet, it is legitimate to try anything. Then, there you are, yourself and your ethics. For some people there are no boundaries; others, at the other end, may also be too shy to push, even for a good cause. Behavioural economics will ‘nudge’ you by changing your behaviour.  And so on.

I was struck by decade old data from the pro-life movement in the US, which found that as much as 47% of activists at the frontline of the pro-life movement, had before been either pro-choice or indifferent to issues of abortion when they joined.

According to Ziad W. Munson, the author, their experiences in the community and working with other activists day-to-day, transformed their views. Interestingly, it wasn’t just a transformation ‘of the point of view’ but included a strong sense of duty and activism. In other words, they became ‘more Catholic than the Pope’, which is a poor translation of the expression we use in Spanish, ‘mas papista que el Papa’.

Some behavioural economists such as the prolific Cass Sunstein [11] have argued that people who are polarised, when discussing in a group situation end up being even more polarised. Those experimental social studies do not sync too well with the reality, a fact very common in social science unfortunately. The reality is that people can change their minds even if they were polarised on one side of the argument. The pro-life study that I mentioned above is a good reminder of our human flexibility (or the power of homo imitans [12]as I have described in my book).

Maybe the old common wisdom is still a good one: see it for yourself, experience it yourself, don’t listen to me, see what I do, not what I say, go to the field, get up from your desk and experience the realities of the streets, the fields, the workplaces, the neighbourhoods, the shops, the markets, the offices, etc, everywhere where ‘the real-real’ lives every day.

There are people who will change their mind by reading a book on the topic, or by listening to a charismatic person. But if you want culture change of some sort, which is change at scale, you won’t have people (at scale) changing their minds by reading lots of books.

John le Carré [13] said that ‘a desk is a dangerous place from where to see the world’. Probably we could say that a desk is a dangerous place from where to expect people to change their minds or anything.

To change people’s minds, provide ‘experience’ and ‘place’, not just a convincing argument and logic. If you want some continuity, and scale, that is.

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‘Change is social, doing it together, a praxis.’

 

‘More Confucius and Tao than Aristotle. More Roman than Greek. Individual change happens by ‘doing it in a group’ and experiencing it. It’s not conceptual. It’s not simply contractual either: lose 5 kilos in 3 months. It’s ‘collapsing the distinction between knowing and doing’.’

 

Change is social, doing it together, a praxis. The modern Kyoto Zen school is truly rich in observations. The Roman vs Greek comparison is very present in recent Taleb [14] writings. The ‘collapsing the distinction between knowing and doing’ is of course on the Zen side.

 

Extract from my book: The Flipping point – Deprogramming Management. [9]

A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. Management needs deprogramming. This book of 200, tweet-sized, vignettes, looks at the other side of things – flipping the coin. It asks us to use more rigour and critical thinking in how we use assumptions and management practices that were created many years ago.

Our real and present danger is not a future of robots and AI, but of current established BS. In this book, you are invited to the Mother of All Call Outs!

My top 5 Leadership questions at the top of the agenda

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Accountability,Activism,Building Remarkable Organizations,Change, Leadership and Society,Culture,culture and behaviours,Leadership | No Comments

Here are my top five from my organizational consulting work. The paraphrasing is mine, the ownership is shared with my best clients (In fact, I could categorise my clients by the types of questions on the table).

 

1. How can we mobilize people?

Mobilize is a better term than engage. Engage is too passive. I can engage in a great conversation leading to nothing. Leadership of people inside the company (and outside the tent) is people mobilization. We need to think in these terms. Leading companies are/will be people mobilizing companies. The model is the social movement, not Harvard Business School (have I said this before?).

 

2.How to (re) shape a company operating system? AKA culture.

Yes, that is what it is. This is different from ‘achieving an X culture’. You never achieve a culture, as you never hold water with your hands. Well, not all. ‘Achieve’ as a destination is old linear stuff. Reality is continuous reshaping and moving forward. So, it’s a journey model [15], not a destination model.

 

3.How do I scale?

If I want a culture of safety? ownership? accountability? agility? customer-centrism? all of the above?, how can I inject these, at scale?

Many initiatives, good ones, Organizational Development ones, Coaching, team buildings, Leadership Developments, do not scale well. That does not make them useless. Don’t stop them. But things that don’t scale, or scale only by addition (a bit of this plus a bit of that, one team, next team) are weak when trying to shape an entire culture. If you want scale, it’s social movement [16].

 

4.How to create a behavioural DNA that ensures success and, in particular, strategy execution?

This is the key question. It starts by trying to figure out what that DNA looks like. Not a back of an envelop affair. Values, beliefs, words, need to be translated into behaviours. Once this is done, behaviours will scale via social copying [17], not teaching and presentations (Viral Change™ [18] Mobilizing Platform).

 

5. How to make change sustainable? (but not too much) I have dealt with this [19] in a little more detail in the past.

 

These are fundamental questions, category 1! Don’t spare effort.

Many questions occupy airtime. But some are a serious source of restlessness, of the healthy type. These are Top Restlessness potential. If you are very relaxed about them, I am so sorry.

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Feed Forward Webinar Series – the organization now, under new management

Register Here! [20]Next webinar: The Myths of Company Culture on 16th July. Learn how to successfully mobilize your people for a purpose and change culture. Culture is the key to the complex post Covid-19 future in front of us.

To change to ‘the new normal’ we must think and act differently in the management of our organizations. Bring your critical thinking brain, switched on. It’s a serious business. It may also be fun.

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Don’t miss my new book: The Flipping Point – Deprogramming Management [9] – available now!

10 reasons why leaders need to focus on the (unmanaging of the) informal organization

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Activism,Behavioural Economics,Collaboration,Communication,Communications,Social network,Social Network Analysis | No Comments

Our traditional management education has almost 100% focused on the formal organization, the structural fabric of teams, divisions, groups, committees and reporting lines. The informal organization, often also called the ‘invisible organization’, has always been a ghost: you know it’s there but can’t see, can’t manage, can’t measure, so I don’t do anything about it. Not many years ago many leaders considered the informality side as a waste, a detractor from the core and formal, that is, doing your job. It seems yesterday when a friend of mine, a very successful business owner, spent a lot of time writing (hand writing for his secretary to type) memos to staff about how not use email for personal reasons, or the internet for that matter. Forget that online shopping and Ticketmaster deal. Not in his company.

Today, the role of the informal organization is more recognised. But still it is important to remind ourselves of what the informal social networks inside the organization, the web of connections, the largely (but not totally) invisible side does, and why it is inexcusable for leaders today to ignore it, or even treat it as an anecdote.

  1. Connectedness (= network) Obviously! The issue here is fluidity. Informal social networks inside the organization could become non fluid if you attempt to formalise them, ‘convert them into a team’ or corporatize them. They then become clubs (women in leadership, expats) which have their own utility, but they are not strictly speaking an informal network. The real connectedness dwells in the informal organization, well above the ‘forced connectedness’ of teams and task forces.
  2. Information traffic and communication. The travel, the social life of information, uses two highways: the top down hierarchical system of communication (the pipes) and the informal network (chatter, rumours and all versions of Chinese whispering). You can’t exercise a role, or example, as Internal Communications without mastering the social life of the rumour. So you need to know how the invisible organization works.
  3. Clustering. In the internal social network, people who know/does/did X, also know/do/did Y. There is an entire social cartography that can be considered. The informal organization loves clustering. Find an element, chances are you’ll fine the others. It’s ‘people like me do this’.
  4. Listening. Receiving feedback. The informal organization/internal social networks are very good at listening and closing the loop with people. If you see the organization as a listening organism, then you need to focus on the informal organization, not the structural and formal of teams and committees. What the formal organization hears is then listened to in the informal one.
  5. 24/7 Q&A. The informal organization is a 24/7 Q&A system you can tap into. The 24/7 Q&A knows no boundaries. The fluidity and use of the informal organization and its clusters of (informal) social networks allows for the bypass of a formal ‘expert system’. It is literally a ‘can anybody tell me about X?’, assuming that everybody is a possible ‘expert’. You don’t need to catalogue them anymore.
  6. Ideas generation/crowdsourcing. Tapping into intellectual capital, idea generation and fast idea qualification requires the entire network. Internal crowdsourcing is only possible if the fluidity of the social networks is respected.
  7. Ties. The social network is the generator of ties, strong or weak. The more weak ties, the greater the potential for innovation. Strong ties are more predictable (you already guess what your team members John and Peter and Mary are going to say) and less good for innovation. The informal network hosts the weak ties, which are often the most powerful ones.
  8. Social capital. The network is a constant creator of relationships, a self-configuring one. It is therefore the strongest social capital builder; social capital defined as the sum of qualitative and quantitative relationships.
  9. Host of conversations. The true conversations take place outside the straitjacket of the team meeting.
  10. Stories. The informal organization is a big campfire for stories to be told. Their nodes in the informal organization (you and me) are raconteurs. The employees in the formal structures are more on the information traffic side.

Leaders should be curators of the informal organization, masters of the invisible world and keepers of the fluidity, avoiding any attempt, from anybody, to corporatize or formalise it. It is the art of unmanaging to reach full potential.

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THE COMPANY IN AN MRI [20]

Can we have a sense of the reality of communication, connectivity, and collaboration inside the company, a real sense, without simply using assumptions, or taking for granted what we see at face value?

Maybe get confirmation bias out of the window and have a good diagnosis of what is going on, whether we like the outcomes or not. It can be done. And it may save you millions in reorganizations or reshuffling that may not be needed. Or, yes, it validates your intentions.

Let’s put the company in an MRI and find out so that any course of action is informed. (Would you have an operation without X-rays and perhaps MRI?).

Join Leandro and his team on July 2nd, at 18:00 GMT, 19:00 CET for the second Webinar in the Feed Forward series (back to normal may be tricky, normal is not waiting for us). Register now! [20]

 

 

Each participant who attends any of the live webinars of the Feed Forward series will be eligible for one copy of Leandro Herrero’s new book: The Flipping Point [9].  Read a recent review [21].

Navel-gazing (Nombrilisme in French, sounds much better) is constant in the organization. The issue is not to deny it, but to fight it.

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Accountability,Activism,Behavioural Economics,Change, Leadership and Society,Critical Thinking,culture and behaviours,Leadership,Viral Change | No Comments

There is so much to fix and manage inside the organization that the task could be never ending. Soon, and easily, one could find oneself 90% or 100% focused on the inside. Inwards management, or whatever you want to call it. It’s a big risk and one almost inevitable.

That is why a constant reminder of the purpose of the organization is needed. Without that, the customer-centrism stuff would be lip service, pharmaceuticals would be run with nobody pronouncing the words health, or patient, or, say, transportation with no mention of customers, other than the numbers in the spreadsheet. Exaggerating? Perhaps. But the risks of collective ego-centrism are always there.

It’s not enough to bring the customer language in, but it’s a starting point. It’s also about having the ‘but what is the purpose?’ question very clearly upfront.

In our Viral Change™ Platforms we often have simple behaviours such as asking ‘what would the customer think of this?” or even ‘wait a minute, why exactly are we doing this?’, looking at purpose, high or low. These (disruptive, often in all senses of the word) questions are powerful to redirect the focus from the inside (the navel-gazing/nombrilisme) to the outside.

I am not a fan of Time Management techniques. It’s personal! But very often the breakthrough in this switch of thinking has come when I have asked the client to record what he or she does (or collectively as a leadership team) for a week, and then realized that close to zero time was dedicated to ‘the outside’, whether the client or the higher purpose. Although intuitively people tend to know that, being confronted with the ‘recorded reality’ is always shocking.

If the inside competes with the outside, don’t let the self-absorption/nombrilisme win. It’s a battle for which you need to be prepared.

Tribal brands that teach us a lesson

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Activism,Building Remarkable Organizations,Change, Leadership and Society,Corporate anthropology,culture and behaviours,Mobiliztion,Social Movements,Social network,Social Network Analysis,Viral Change | No Comments

This is an anthropology report. We’ve found this tribe: the people all wear the same multi-coloured clothes. They paint their faces with symbolic colours before going to the battlefield. They sing war songs. They shout. The cheer on their warriors. Animal instincts are high. The sense of identification with the tribe is enormous, practically above everything else in their lives. When successful in the battlefield, the indigenous people get inebriated on mass and often lose control. When the battlefield expedition does not go well, there may be thousands of natives crying, men, women and children. In these circumstances, the tribe leaders are blamed even beyond the confines of the tribe.  This all works through a strict tribal, prime-animal, collective code. And the natives pay a monthly fee to belong to the tribe. This tribe also has a curious ritual: they sell their warriors to other tribes for astronomical quantities.

It’s a football club! (AKA soccer in parts of the world with less tribal traditions of this type).

Are football club brands the prototype of brands? The Mother Of All Brands? Judging by the emotions and the almost blind stickiness of belonging to a cause, surely they must rank pretty high in the Brand Cult System.

A few years ago, a Spanish club, not in the premier league, was going through a tribal bad patch, it applied modern social network analytical tools to master massive support across the tribe and beyond. It had the full components of a social movement, with the identification of influencers, their networks, their pull effect, etc. I know this, because the masters of the tribe contacted me after being told by external advisers that what they were doing was pure Viral Change TM [22]in action.

In my discussions with them, I found a level of understanding of ‘people mobilization rules’, knowledge of tools and network strategies, and clarity of purpose, which I wish I could find in the average business organization. Of course they are a business as well! But they are genuinely and seriously looking at the business as a social movement, tribal, mass mobilization and with full mastery of social network sciences. So far they are the best business anthropologists I have come across.

Organizational Decluttering: A crusade in waiting that may need you as leader

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Einstein said, “I soon learned to scent out what was able to lead to fundamentals and to turn aside from everything else, from the multitude of things that clutter up the mind.”

Many corporate initiatives compete for airtime in the employees’ hearts and minds. Unnecessary organisational complexity and its associated terminology is a significant feature of modern corporate life. You don’t need re-engineering, but simple, ruthless and urgent un-cluttering. Clean up, do less.

Organisational life is cluttered. There are calendars full of activities and meetings fill the day. The internal cycles (strategic plan, business plan, next year’s budget) sometimes seem to have a life of their own. People exclaim, “I am doing the planning, the budget, the presentations… When am I going to do my actual job?”

People also need to attend training courses, professional development programmes, maybe even a leadership initiative or a work-life balance programme. And perhaps they also need to be part of a Task Force addressing the latest not-so-good results from an Employee Satisfaction survey.

And this is just daily life; just an average random Wednesday in the life of the company. On top of all this, ‘higher level’ corporate frameworks do exist: there is a set of values, a set of leadership behaviours, a credo, etc. Operationally, the CEO has set the six key objectives for the year and everybody is re-drafting their goals and objectives to fit in with those. Many companies seem to be run on the basis that 90% of the focus is on managing internally/inwards and only 10% on the customer side/outwards.

All those initiatives create a corporate ‘mille-feuille’ with layers that don’t usually talk to each other. Sometimes their only commonality is the fact they all compete for airtime. Confronted with this often overwhelming richness of corporate life, the average employee throws in the towel and switches off, unwilling to put some effort in trying to understand the connection between all the different things.

When I look through my client portfolio of the last five years, I could say that the average client has at least five or six major competing initiatives running ‘in parallel’, cluttering the airtime (not to mention an additional dozen or so minor, local or functional ones).

Decluttering is a truly disruptive ‘anti-initiative’ initiative that shouts “Time out!” and forces you to review what’s going on and to make sense of it all.

Decluttering can be done now. If you are in a senior management position, you could declare yourself to be the Chief Decluttering Officer and you would do your organisation a big favour. It doesn’t cost much and the sky won’t fall down. Sure, you might upset some people with a vested interest in the cluttering, but that’s a small price to pay.

This contrarian do-less will pay off.

If this could be copied by others and if each department or group had a decluttering objective in their goals, the business transformation would be truly significant.

 

(from Disruptive Ideas [23])

Disruptive innovation, like charity, starts at home. Your mind and your people, that is. The rest is the easy part.

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Accelerators,Activism,Backstage Leadership,Building Remarkable Organizations,Change, Leadership and Society,Creativity and Innovation,Critical Thinking,Disruptive Ideas,Work design | No Comments

The concept of disruption in management has been applied to innovation before. A disruptive innovation is a technology, process or business model that introduces a much more affordable product or service (that is also much simpler to use) into a market.

‘It enables more consumers in that market to afford and/or have the skill to use the product or service. The change caused by such an innovation is so big that it eventually replaces, or disrupts, the established approach to providing that product or service’

Clayton Christensen [24], author of The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution, created disruptive Innovation as a concept.

All very well, but before looking for the big product disruptors with the potential to disrupt and create entire markets, disruption, like charity, needs to start ‘at home’.

Before creating the equivalent of cloud computing, and the new wearables, and driverless vehicles, here is the challenge: what are the small disruptions that you can implement tomorrow in your thinking, in your teams, in your environment?

Here is a guide on what to look for, my definition of Disruptive ideas:

Disruptive [management] ideas are those that have the capacity to create significant impact on the organisation by challenging standard management practices. They share the following characteristics:

  1. They are simple.
  2. There is a total disproportion between their simplicity and their potential to impact on and transform the life of organisations.
  3. They can be implemented now.
  4. You can implement them at little or no cost.
  5. They are most likely to be contrarian.
  6. They are also most likely to be counterintuitive.
  7. They pose a high risk of being trivialised or dismissed.
  8. They can spread virally within the organisation very easily.

You only need a few disruptive ideas to create big transformation without the need for a Big Change Management Programme. The impact of a combination of a few is just like dynamite.

This is what I said in the book: Disruptive ideas [25]provide management alternatives that, if spread, can completely transform the way the organisation works without the need to execute a massive ‘change management programme’. Each of them, in its own right, has the potential to create significant change. The compound benefit of a few of them is a real engine of change and business transformation.’

So here we are, disruptive ideas transcend innovation or technology and go back to the fundamental roots of day-to-day management in any kind of organisation, challenging conventional wisdom.

I wrote the book with some suggestions, but there is a much better way. What about this disruptive idea? Ask your team for disruptive ideas, brainstorm, get crazy, retreat, have more. See what impact they may have. Try hard to kill them. See the resistance, if any.

So if somebody says, for example, no meetings for a whole week, does this meet the criteria? If so, what would be the benefits? Why would this be crazy? What may the organization look like?

If you get into the habit, you won’t stop. I don’t believe in ‘disruption’ for the sake of it, but I know that not doing exercise will get you into trouble. The exercise is the relentless questioning: what if we did?

And this is very healthy. Disruptively healthy.

Permission to be human

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Activism,Behavioural Change,Building Remarkable Organizations,Communication,Communications,Corporate anthropology,culture and behaviours,Employee Engagement,Talent, Skills, Human Capital,Workplaces Of The Future | No Comments

One aspect of my work with organizations that I truly enjoy is to help craft the ‘Behavioural DNA’ that shapes the culture of the company. This is a set of actionable behaviours that must be universal, from the CEO to the MRO (Mail Room Officer). They also need to pass the ‘new hire test’: would you put that list in front of a prospect employee and say ‘This is us’?

There was one ‘aspirational’ sentence that I put to the test in one of my client sessions: ‘Working here makes us better human beings’.

It was met with scepticism by the large group in the meeting, initially mainly manifested through body language including the, difficult to describe, cynical smiles. The rationalists in the group jumped in hard to ‘corporatize’ the sentence.  ‘Do you mean better professionals?’ The long discussion had started. Or, perhaps, ‘do you mean…’ – and here the full blown corporate Academy of Language – from anything to do with skills, talent management, empowerment to being better managers, being better leaders, and so on.

‘No, I mean better human beings.  Period!’- I pushed back. Silence.

Next stage was the litany of adjectives coming from the collective mental thesaurus: fluffy, fuzzy, soft, vague…

I felt compelled to reframe the question: ‘OK, so who is against working in a place that makes you inhuman? Everybody. OK, So who is against working in a place that makes you more human? Nobody’. But still the defensive smiling.

It went on for a while until the group, ‘organically’, by the collective hearing of pros and cons, turned 180 degrees until everybody agreed that ‘Working in a place that makes you a better human being’ was actually very neat. But – there was a but – ‘Our leadership team won’t like it. They will say that its fluffy, fuzzy, soft etc… In the words of the group, it was not ‘them’ anymore who had a problem, it was the infamous ‘they’.

I then continued to push back: ‘Lets test it’. There was a joint meeting with the top leadership team scheduled for later. The statement ‘Working here makes us better human beings’ was, amongst others, for discussion. The leadership team loved it, each and all of them.  Permission granted. Now we could say that ‘Working here makes us better human beings.’ Safely.

Its funny how our corporate uniforms make us feel uncomfortable with humanity as if this is beyond the scope of work, outside the job description, in need of top approval. ‘Excuse me, can we say ‘human’ here?’ Yes you can.  Thanks!

Surprise!

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Surprise is a powerful strategy in its own right. Surprise means being ahead of the game, being further ahead than others thought you would be, being able to pull out an organizational solution, disclose the next new idea when nobody was expecting one, take a rabbit out of the hat, bring to the market something that nobody has asked for.

Surprise the market, surprise your boss, surprise yourself, surprise your followers, surprise your teams, surprise the guys in corporate. All of them.

I know what you are thinking. Your boss does not like surprises. In fact, there are two types of bosses who don’t want surprises. Type one is the one who does not want bad surprises. Type two, the one who does not want any surprise at all, good or bad. Type one is understood; nobody wants bad news. You would not set out to surprise with bad news. Not on purpose!  The latter is a tricky one, because there are many people who, in fact, hate unpredictability. For them ‘meeting the budget’ is better than being surprised with savings. In other words, predictable numbers are better than unpredictable ones, even if these are better numbers. If you head a cost centre, such as R&D, spending every penny or cent may be ‘better’ than producing ‘an under-spend’. I’ve seen people labelled as bad managers by not spending what they said they would. If you don’t understand this, you may not have run one of these. Markets also like predictability. Investors like your accuracy. The whole industry of ‘fixed mortgages’ is based on the beauty and comfort of predictability. Surprising needs guts.

I hear all that. Yet, I will repeat myself. Surprise the market, surprise your boss, surprise yourself, surprise your followers, surprise your teams, surprise the guys in corporate. I am confident that you know what I mean.

The trade offs are: predictability and safe journey, or surprise and leadership. Nobody can argue against safe journeys, so you will be forgiven for ‘meeting expectations’. I personally dislike the ‘exceeding expectations’ expression. It sounds like heavy rain.  I prefer surprise, regardless of expectations.

The hour of Radical Management Thinking. The lines are open.

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The hour has come. Radical is the word. From the Latin, radix, it means root.

We need to get to the root of things, to the root of practice, to the root of managing organizations.

Radical is a fantastic word, unfortunately contaminated by its cousin radicalization, which has a connotation of extremism, which, in turn has a connotation of violence. Both, extremism and radicalization have been taken hostage. Neither of them is intrinsically negative.

So, back to radical management. From the dozens of synonymous or conceptual triggers of this word, imagine these as applied to management:

uncompromising, profound, rigorous, essential, affecting the fundamental nature of something, far-reaching or thorough, departing from tradition, innovative or progressive.

Radical management, radical people, radical leadership. Do we need these?

Interesting, the Chemistry version of a radical, also applies: ‘group of atoms behaving as a unit in a number of compounds’. So radical management seems to induce alignment, one team, union of hearts and minds.

Radical management thinking would mean a rigorous clean up of false assumptions and pseudo-scientific management pontificating. Radical Leadership would be uncompromising leadership rooted in integrity, authenticity and the ability to create (chemistry type) ‘radicals’ of commitment.

The radicals as employees would also be uncompromising travellers in search of the truth, with high levels of antibodies to bullshit, and determined to make a difference.

The hour of Radical Management and the management of radicals has come. Since we can’t simply carry on applying 20th Century exhausted management to 21st Century vibrant enterprises.

The formula about what to do when ‘leadership does not get it’, finally revealed.

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Accountability,Activism,Behavioural Economics,Change, Leadership and Society,Communication,Communications,Critical Thinking,culture and behaviours,Digital transformation,Disruptive Ideas,Management of Change,Peer to peer infuence | No Comments

There are always people who ‘don’t get it’, are against cultural change efforts, do not support a programme, torpedo it, or are simply a toxic of some sort. Some of them may be senior people with senior bonuses, or at the very top, or a bit below, or combinations.

The traditional thinking says: time out! There is nothing I can do because if the top doesn’t get it, nobody will. Let’s spend the time trying to convince the top, and the next down top, and the next next, that this is good. Only then, we can change … the company/the world/anything. Which is a good explanation of why we are not that good at changing …the company/the world/anything.

Rational PowerPoint presentations to the top, led by well intentioned champions of the idea, internal and external consultants, trying to explain why ‘this is what we need’. The tribunal (there is no other way to describe that Executive Committee) pushes back with things such as: give us examples, tell us something concrete, concrete, concrete, very concrete, and what exactly is going to happen on Wednesday 23rd in the afternoon.

Let’s assume here that you have the extraordinary luck of a visionary leader who says: let’s do it! When can we start?! So you do. But you still have the problem of many others who ‘don’t get it’.

If revolutions were to start when everybody is convinced that the revolution is needed, including the ones who could, or should, start a revolution or could torpedo it, no revolution would have ever taken place.

The aim of a large scale behavioural and cultural change (as we do in Viral Change™) is not to fight these people, disable them, argue with them, convince them, detoxify them or have a long and rational discussion to rehabilitate them. The goal is to reach a threshold of critical mass of engaged, committed, positive and forward looking people, who are actively making changes, that makes the other irrelevant.

It’s a question of critical mass, not seniority or hierarchical power. When things are moving, changes take place, differences are noticed, the Opposition starts to fragment into different groups. One, the ones who continue to oppose and can’t handle it. They either leave or have gastric ulcers. Two, the ones who can see and hear and become supporters. Three, the chronically neutral. By the way, a subgroup of Two are the ones who say, ‘I have always believed that this was the right thing to do’, even if they were the ones ready to kill you. This beautiful tribe deserves a big, big, big smile, followed by a ‘thanks for your continuous support, sir’.

What if there is still a fierce opposition at the top? Many years of organizational consulting with companies across the world, many, many Viral Change™ programmes later, many years of living on both sides of the fence of leadership, have found me the perfect formula, which I am happy to share with you. Here it is. If you are in a company, as an employee, manager, external consultant of an organizational type of some sort, where the top, or quasi top ‘don’t get it’, are against cultural change efforts, do not support a programme, torpedo it, or are simply a toxic of some sort, with some of them being senior people with senior bonuses, at the very top, or a bit below, or combinations, there is one clear and powerful, strategy: leave.

PS. If you are a consultant, don’t forget to give them the telephone number of your competitors.

Could the ‘global teenager’ teach us about ‘global leadership’?

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Today, there are more similarities between a teenager in Shanghai and a teenager in Rome, or Singapore and Madrid, or London and Paris, than you might expect, given the transcultural differences between China, Italy, Singapore, Spain, UK, France etc.  In our traditional thinking about geographical cultures, the focus is on differences. The reality of the age-related tribes such as the Global Teenager is commonalities. How can we reconcile both?

In the world of organizations, the issue of ‘global leaders’ comes up all the time. What are they? What are their competences? What does one have to ‘have’ to be, or to become a global leader? There are indeed some answers, not surprisingly mainly from the field of intercultural studies led by consultants or academics. But most of these views are based on fairly retrospective data. Many times the answers feel a bit old and suspiciously predictable. For example, we are told that global leaders must have ‘cultural sensitivity’, which is the equivalent of saying that an airplane must have wings.

I am caricaturing this a bit – at the risk of annoying a great group of expert colleagues in this area – there is something about the set of competences  of ‘global leadership’ that make me feel slightly uncomfortable. The competences are sometimes a sort of mental ‘deja vu’. Have I seen them before? Which ones are specific, if any?

I wonder if instead of looking backwards with analytical tools (as is usual in academic research), we would gain far more by looking forward in time and observing the emergent characteristics of any ‘global phenomenom’. I suspect, teenagers are a good start. They did not receive training on how to be global. How did that happen?

Just wondering, if instead of focusing on developing global leaders we could focus on developing good leaders. If we drop the ‘global’, will the sky fall down? Will new generations of leaders be global if they are good leaders?

When the organization goes into permanent rehearsal mode, learns to rehearse, not to perform.

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We spend more time on preparing for doing than in doing. That would be good if we were just talking about preparing for action. Preparatory work is the key to a successful action. Ask lawyers, architects or the military.

But we in the organization may have elevated this to the highest level of sophistication. We spend a lot of time thinking of doing, preparing for doing, presenting what we are planning to do, reviewing the plans for doing, obtaining the permission for doing and, who knows, presenting again a Strategic Plan for Doing (which when approved at the highest level, will descend back to the troops)

The entire system and sequence of events looks like a massive rehearsal exercise. The organization literally goes into rehearsal mode for the majority of time.

You may argue that in a ‘doer organization’ populated by doers and run by doers (and a great percentage of my clients could fall into this category), this is not the case and the problem, if any, may be just the opposite: not much critical thinking and action, 1,2,3, results. But in reality, the same sequence takes place, just very fast. Or faster.

The issue is simply one of airtime. If we spend most of the time thinking of doing and preparing for doing, our competences will grow and grow in the area of thinking of doing and preparing for doing. We will become proficient in Rehearsal Management, not on outcomes. When an organization reaches this strategic capability, Rehearsal Management, people apply the full system to anything, small problem, big problem, small action, big action. They are so good at preparing, that preparing is what they do best.

Again, this is not an argument against good preparation. But the Thorough Preparation Argument, often hides over-analysis, and over-analysis often hides risk aversion. Risk aversion in turn may hide lack of confidence, or fear of failure, or avoiding mistakes.  Carry on? Avoiding mistakes may hide preventing getting your fingers burnt and end up like Peter, ‘leaving the company to spend more time with his family’.

A super-prepared organization that thrives on rehearsal may not be a thorough and solid thinking organization, but a dysfunctional one. Maybe.

The healthiest thing to do is to literally map the activities and sequences that took you from A to B, and attach time to them. It may be revealing.

Defenders of ‘the logic of things’ will argue that everything has a process that needs to be followed if one wants to be efficient. This is not against any logic. On the contrary. However, I will bring in Mr Einstein once more. Recently whilst in Berlin, I came across a greeting card in a bookshop. Under a silhouette of Albert, it reads: ‘Logic will get you from A-Z; imagination will get you everywhere’.

I am in favour of consultants entering the temple of the Social Sciences provided they take off their shoes

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Accountability,Activism,Agency,Behavioural Economics,Building Remarkable Organizations,Change, Leadership and Society,Corporate pathologies,Critical Thinking,Decision making,Leadership,Transformation | No Comments

I am paraphrasing British philosopher Simon Blackburn [26] who said the same about scientists entering the temple of philosophy.

There is a cheap, cut and paste, flow of psychological concepts translated into consulting frames, offerings and tools, that appear legitimised by their origin, whether the Psychology laboratory or ‘social research’. People accept these at face value.

Business Consulting has grown via the multiplication of ‘how to’ at the expense of ‘why’ or even ‘what’. See my notes on this: The great ‘How To’ takeover [27] and The Corrosion of Logic [28]. In this quest for the ‘how to’, ‘consulting’ has often done a poor job in critical thinking.

Similar exodus of ideas in search of ‘an application’ can be found in Neurosciences. And similarly, I’d like to say that I am in favour of neurologists entering the temple of the Social Sciences provided they take off their shoes.

That’s a lot of shoes at the door.

The House of Ideas has many rooms and many doors. Actually each room has more than one door. I am all in favour of having all the doors open, all the rooms connected, all in one single space, provided that (a) we don’t tear up the walls, (b) the doors, that can be left open, are still there as doors, and (c) there are little mats all over to leave the shoes when moving from one room to another.

I repeat, the doors open is vital. For business, we have had enough of closed doors: the traditional management, the standard HR practices, Benchmarking, the re-engineering and quality cults, etc.

We need to open the doors and open windows to social sciences, behavioural sciences, network theory, old social anthropology etc. In this transition, popular potpourris have a role. For example, Malcolm Gladwell’ [29]s The Tipping Point and the Freakonomics franchise. There is good stuff there. But this is Gladwell and Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt [30] going into the rooms with their shoes on.

In the Battle for Ideas, the only one worth fighting in the business organization of the 21sr Century, we need to look outside the ‘organization business frame’.

All the rooms of the House of Ideas are open, inviting, welcoming, promising new possibilities, a joy for the imagination and a solution for the dull historical management, represented by what the (anti) psychiatrist Ronald Laing [31] once called called ‘the language of the boardroom’.

‘To save everything, click here’, and its version inside the company

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Accountability,Activism,Behavioural Economics,Communication,Communications,Critical Thinking,culture and behaviours,Employee Engagement,Leadership,Talent, Skills, Human Capital,Workplaces Of The Future | No Comments

Clicktivism is the term used to describe the type of pseudo-activism that consists in clicking the ‘Like’ button (Facebook mainly) and feel that you are done with your contributions. It is usually an unkind (pejorative vs activism) term that describes how easy it is to ‘click’ and forget about doing something concrete as real support. It’s a known fact that many societal cause websites, which, for example, are also fundraising, can get ‘Like(s)’ in the hundreds of thousands but sometimes manage to raise very little money. Clicking is fast and easy, donating is another matter.

‘To save everything, click here’’ is the title of a book by Evgeny Morozov [32], a fierce critic of the ‘internet-centrism’ and author of other books such as ‘The Net Delusion’. The book is a brilliant, polemical and passionate, critical account of  ‘dangers’ such as the above mentioned clicktivism.

With my organizational architect hat, I see parallels inside the organization. We don’t have the equivalent of the ‘Like’ button for engagement, ideas, projects etc. Just as well! But we have equivalents of clicktivism in the occasional internal epidemic of overinclusiveness: ‘I agree’ and ‘Fine with me’, are email ‘contributions’ that we could do without. ‘Fine with me’ is particularly pervasive. It often means, that’s my contribution, done, I don’t really have to do anything else. It’s the ‘Like’ Facebook button in the company’s information flow.

I don’t need to say that there are many instances when this is legitimate. We all have used this before. But I always suspect ‘internal clicktivism’ when I see reams of my clients’ emails with lots of well-intentioned people replying ‘Fine with me’ (or equivalent) to a colossal distribution list.

To agree with everything, send the email. Yestivism?