But ‘small scale things’ repeated is a simple accumulation, or a mountain of… small scale things. Sure, there may be merit in it, but it’s unlikely to create systemic change.  You can throw more Lego pieces to the pile, but it won’t look like a castle unless you organize them.

Small scale/small wins/one thing at a time/start small, will get bigger, cascade/repeat etc, follows the laws of addition (more workshops, more bodies, more layers of managers). It may work in a relatively small organization but, in a large one, one runs out of bodies to engage very soon and usually never gets to the ‘bottom’, whether machine operators, operational staff or even front line and client facing individuals.
 

In fact, small wins, which undoubtedly create a sense of advancement and are gratifying in their own right (something is happening) may be counterproductive by creating an illusion of progress. It feels good and busy but may end in busyness.
 

Many medium and large corporates seem absurdly content with the deployment (usually the military term widely used) of communication-cum-workshop from the top to their direct reports, maybe all directors, or to the top 200, 300 etc. incomprehensibly ignoring the other 4500 people in the payroll. In fact, they are perpetuating an idea of leadership-at-the-top of the pyramid.  Get the top layers enlightened and it will magically percolate to all. Even when they speak a (learned) language of ‘bottom up’, for those companies, ‘bottom up’ is the same workshopsterone but at the bottom. The only change is geographical.

If you take the view, as I do, that culture change and transformation (by definition at scale) closely follows the model of a social movement (inside the firm), then, the appropriate maths is multiplication, not addition: you engage 4, each engage 3, then they engage 3 each etc. This is not a corporate-friendly mental model (you attend meetings ‘as yourself’… you are not supposed to invite others who invite others, who bring others, unless this is done on purpose).

Corporate loves the maths of addition (number of workshops, number of packages, number of people, layers of them) but does not usually understand multiplication. Unfortunately, as we say in Viral Change™ as one of our mantras, ‘no multiplication, no social movement’.
 

Many top down interventions fail because they rely on cascades of information, which is a logical way to ‘communicate’ but a notoriously bad system to change behaviours (and there is no change unless there is behavioural change).
 

Those ‘messages’, perhaps beautifully packaged, compete on corporate airtime with a myriad of other, also beautifully packaged messages. Unless you like the contest ‘my PowerPoints are better than yours’, the whole affair becomes futile, but noisy. Corporate fireworks.

Worse, you can’t repeat it because people will then switch off and will see you coming from a distance. ‘Here we go again, another new initiative, and its only Wednesday’.

The multiplication effect (for us in Viral Change™ is of a small set of non negotiable behaviours) won’t miraculously happen without a proper orchestration of 5 components: concrete behaviours (not high level concepts such as accountability, ownership or trust…), peer-to-peer influence (with recruited frontrunners), informal networks, storytelling system and Backstage Leadership™. I am describing the ABC of the Viral Change™ Mobilizing Platform.

I wish I could say ‘follow these 8 steps’ but it doesn’t work. As a social movement, people mobilization and engagement need to be orchestrated to activate all the above components at the right time, often not in sequence. A small project team, which we tend to call ‘The Engine Room’ is in the background organizing, mostly in an invisible way. We coach and co-work with our clients for them to do it for themselves and by themselves, with ourselves in the back room. We are the invisible chefs.

Some people equate ‘viral’ to unmanageable, close your eyes and pray. But Viral Change™ is far from it. It’s well orchestrated but from a rather backstage position. In fact, the players are so close to the ground in real time that they are more aware of realities than those in the traditional model where once the communication kicks off you quickly lose track of its effects.

Many CEOs and top leaders I know react with ‘can we really do this here?’, ‘can this happen inside an organization?’.

Because it’s so obvious that it works ‘in the outside world’ (look around), that realizing that the laws of people mobilization and change apply equally to the corporation is often liberating. ‘Can we have one of these?’ Yes, you can. It’s a non-mainstream practice that has been in place for many years and worked in a plethora of industries and geographies.

‘So, how long?’ is usually next. I wish we could say we’ll fix culture with a few fireworks. But it takes time and expertise to upskill an Engine Team, find the frontrunners with influence and orchestrate everything across the organization. However, initial change results can be observed and measured within months.  It’s an intense and fascinating journey.  It always works when properly resourced and structured.

There is a very strong preconceived idea in the area of change (culture change for example) in organizations that all will be slow and rather painful: culture change will take years, one needs to start with small wins, the individual needs to change first etc. This idea of the inevitability of the painful journey is at odds with the speed often seen in social mobilization and change ‘outside the firm’ (social, political). Unless we want to believe that the corporation is a different beast populated by masochists, we are simply out of touch with reality.

If you wanted to discuss how this approach can benefit your organization please contact my team at [email protected]

But creating value and providing utility are two things. It just happens that business has conveniently married them. 

We hear a lot these days about ‘value missions’. Progressive and popular economist Mariana Mazzucato is talking ‘value’ all of the time, but I hear utility. Many times, ‘the value of’ seems to mean ‘the utility of’.

We have reduced most of our business universe (only business?) to a utilitarian world where all that happens needs to be useful and, preferably useful now. It’s hard to disagree with this (utilitarian) version of business and organization reality, we are all sucked in. We have been brainwashed, from kindergarten to business school. But it’s hardly the only reality. It’s simple the only accepted reality.

In this utility-reality, efficacy and predictability are key. No waste, to the point, deliver what you promised, no more, no less, in the shortest route, no room for the extra-ordinary. Effectiveness, however, needs some inefficacy, some element of waste, some unpredictability. Using their own language, the language of the Utility Warriors, that is, ‘useless’ is often ‘very useful’ because it would allow one to see things that otherwise would be invisible or hidden under the obvious utility. What is apparently useless may contain gems not yet discovered.

Even preachers of meditation or stillness fall into the trap of having to explain why these would be useful (for your mind, or calmness or to clear your head).

So here the ‘value’ of meditation becomes meditation being very ‘useful’ to calm you down.

Our organizational/business reality has no time for these philosophical nuances. It does not understand them, so it dismisses them as, err, not useful. Our organizational/business world prefers a reality that is mechanical, or mechanistic, because this world can be broken into pieces that ‘can be managed’. It’s very good at dividing, less good at uniting. The pieces have utility in themselves, can be replaced, can be paid for (a consulting programme is usually paid for by its pieces, that is, number of days, number of consultants, daily rates, etc, translating value into the aggregation of pieces and banking on the collective collusion with this absurd model), but, the worst thing you could do as a consultant is to sell your time.

Here is the paradox. Most of the great things in life that have great universal value have no utility. They are pretty useless in the managerial sense.

Try love, truth, beauty, and wonder (without their ‘utility’) and see how it feels. Stressful, isn’t it? Oh well, let’s escort them off the business premises. Problem solved.

Language is a beautiful trap.

Here are three baskets full of concepts:

Basket 1: Working conditions, flexibility at work, pay and perks, reward and recognition, empowerment, good communication, people development plans, talent management, a clear vision and purpose, internal digital connections, gamification, and health & well-being programmes.

Here is basket 2: Satisfaction, happiness, engagement, fun, self-belief, realization, enhancement, fulfilment, and motivation.

And basket 3: Profitability, higher EPS, retention, reputation, customer satisfaction, loyalty, employer of choice, low absenteeism, safety, high quality, and resilience in adversity.

Pick one from basket 1, and say that it produces something from basket 2 (pick one concept ), which, in turn, delivers something from basket 3 (pick one or two). You can’t go wrong. I bet you will always find some data with correlations between the items in each basket. Flexibility at work (basket one) creates high motivation (basket two), which leads to low absenteeism. Come on, give it a try. The combinations are great.

Constructing Employee Engagement arguments is not difficult at all. There are always correlations between items from baskets 1 and 3, or 1 and 2, or 2 and 3 etc. The problem is these are correlations, not causality. Most Employee Engagement arguments that we use in organizations are semi-rich in correlations and very weak in causality. The truth is that it is hard to tell, for example, whether satisfaction delivers profitability or profitability delivers satisfaction. The fact that we may see both going together does not make the casual argument in one direction true.

“Most Employee Engagement arguments that we use in organizations are semi-rich in correlations and very weak in causality.”

Many Employee Engagement systems and questionnaires are based upon the assumption of something from conceptual basket 1, delivering something from basket 2 and/or 3. We have taken the argument at face value. We have converted correlation into causality. But, as the Spurious Correlations website reminds us, there is also a strong correlation between the per capita consumption of mozzarella cheese in the USA and the number of civil engineering doctorates awarded. Or the divorce rate in the state of Maine, correlating highly with the per capita consumption of margarine.

“Many Employee Engagement systems and questionnaires are based upon the assumption of something from conceptual basket 1, delivering something from basket 2 and/or 3. We have converted correlation into causality.”

Whilst most sensible people would not infer that feeding your son with mozzarella cheese will make it highly probable that he will get a Civil Engineering doctorate or that decrease in divorce requires banning margarine, many managers would be very happy with declaring a true causality chain the correlation between anything in basket 1 with anything in basket 2 and/or 3. The whole industry of Employee Engagement is based upon this.

When I show these arguments, sometimes to large audiences in my Speaking Engagements, I get the whole spectrum of reactions. The data fundamentalists get very irritated, despite the fact that they can’t really show serious causality data. The ‘Employee Engagement people’, furnished with all their questionnaires, get even more irritated. The Cynical contingency says that what I am inferring is that we should not do anything, not bother at all about Employee Engagement initiatives because all data is flawed.

But the latter is far from my position. I think we should do anything we believe will improve the company, period. It’s called Good Management, and I am all for it. But managers need to use their critical thinking more. Do as much as needed for good management, and avoid the simplistic causality interpretation of input-output: if we do more Town Hall meetings with all employees, it will give them more ‘voice’ and air time, it will improve their morale, and that will increase performance. The company is not an input-output machine. Let’s do what we believe we need to do without the constant need to justify the output! Maybe it is morally good, managerially sound and probably beneficial for the mental health of all to give employees more airtime, more voice, more saying and a more proactive role. Do you need a score in a questionnaire to tell you that you should do that?

“I think we should do anything we believe will improve the company, period. It’s called Good Management, and I am all for it. But managers need to use their critical thinking more”.

By the way, here is another one: the number of films Nicolas Cage appeared in correlated highly with the number of people who drowned by falling into a swimming pool. He should really stop his movie career, or else we will need to have compulsory fences around pools.

Learn more here. ^[2]

In the past, it used to be considered rude to have your laptop on during meetings and answer emails whilst somebody was presenting. It was rude but tolerated. Now there are fewer laptops on the table, but people are looking down at their phones. ‘Homo Erectus’ is being replaced by ‘Homo Thumbing ‘, which is an illuminated Homo-Looking-Down.

I have run client meetings with apocalyptic warnings against doing this and descriptions upfront of the consequences (from being put on the spot by me, including CEOs, to paying a nominal fine to buy the beers in the evening). Everybody complies at the beginning. By the end of the first day, trespassers are apparent. By the second day, everybody ignores the warning and looks down again, thumbing with an apparent vengeance.

There is an issue here of etiquette, politeness and respect that is big enough. But even more significant is the issue of busyness and the apparent inevitability of answering a trivial message on the spot. Our hyper-connected world has given us enormous possibilities but also a new Ego Archetype that reads like this: ‘What we say, surely, must be incredibly important for many people; to say it immediately is paramount, and if we don’t live in an instant reaction mode, instant thinking, instant presence, instant action, (perhaps not instant coffee), there is something wrong with us’. Why do we react and reply to the command of a beep of the smartphone? Because we can.

“The big issue is the busyness and the apparent inevitability of answering a trivial message on the spot.” 

Human interaction is being digitally re-defined every single day in millions of places. I don’t have a good answer, but what are we, human beings, losing? I know it may be a naïve question but the way ‘business’ dictates our everyday lives bothers me.

Or reach out to my team with specific questions via [email protected].

The ideogram of the old city is the enclosure; the ideogram of the old organization is the organization chart. The ideogram of the new city is the underground map, the rail network or the highway chart; the ideogram of the new organization is the network.

The citizen of the old organization lives in a box on the organization chart, only occasionally getting out of the box to talk to another resident in a bigger box called ‘team’. The citizen of the new organization is a rider of the network, moving around and talking to other loose connections, some with stronger ties than others. Three ‘B’s reign in the old organization: boss, boundaries and bonuses. Three ‘Is’ reign in the new organization: influence, inter-dependence and innovation.

Having acknowledged that the hierarchical organization with its functional silos (which can be visible in companies of 5 million or 50 employees) had a bit of a problem in cross-communication, but not willing to kill the power silos altogether, the invention of the matrix as a cross-functional way of working was inevitable. It became a language key (we have a matrix system) and a clever hierarchical plot (I have two bosses: one local and the other global). And the matrix became a very, very large petri dish for team meetings.

It was invented as a way to force people out of their dwellings to work together with other people (who were also forced out of their dwellings). It sometimes seemed that the conversation between them was temporary and long enough for somebody to look at his watch and exclaim: “Oh, my God, so late already! I need to get back; bye!” And back to their boxes, they went…

“We don’t need more team players. We need riders and navigators. Big time!”

What does this mean? Well, riders of the network navigate through connections inside and outside the organization. They lead from their own connectivity and ability to imagine their world as a vast, mostly undiscovered space. They are relationship builders, not team builders. They may not have a problem with teams and may even belong to some. But they tend to regard teams as the new silos.

Riders have meetings as well: 365/24/7 meetings. They are ‘meeting up’ all the time. It is their very ‘raison d’être’. Riders want networkracy, not teamocracy. These new leaders will take the organization to territories where ‘the answers’ might be found and will do so via relationships, not through processes and systems. They are social-intelligent: a rare characteristic, often invisible in many layers of management or even in top leadership.

This is how you advertise for Riders:

“We’ve done the team stuff. We have lots of it, and it works well, thank you.

We are looking for (social-intelligent) people who can establish a web of internal and external relationships. Management has promised to keep a relatively low profile and let them roam freely.

We acknowledge that, occasionally, we will have the temptation to declare some of them ’a team’, but we promise we will refrain.

We are particularly interested in people who founded a club at 11 or created a football team at 17.” 

Or something like that.

Or reach out to my team with specific questions via [email protected].

Way number 2: I need you to approve A. We also have options B and C but would not recommend them.

Way number 3: Just to let you know that we are doing A. We explored B and C, but they did not rank as high as A.

These 3 ways describe 3 different concepts of empowerment, 3 different styles of leadership, also, 3 different organizations. The 3 are legitimate, but they are very different. Please don’t kid yourself; they are not simple variations.

Many people still ask for permission for things that the leadership does not expect to have to approve. But they may do so because it’s now on their plate, in front of them. Many boards complain that decisions are ‘pushed up’ too much but do very little to change the situation. On the other hand, many leadership structures expect to be presented with options for the latter to make a final decision.

Knowing whether ‘you are’ 1, 2 or 3, and, more importantly, whether you’d like to be 1 or 2 or 3, and which one of them your senior leadership team expects, is fundamental. These questions are, more often than not, simply not posed or articulated. In these cases, decision-making runs in automatic pilot mode, creating default positions that are never appropriately validated that, sooner or later, will drive people, top or middle or bottom, for different reasons, simply mad.

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

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.

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

1. Doing lots, too fast without thinking. High adrenaline, not sure of solid outcomes.
2. Doing fast or slow, but sloppy and sloppier.
3. Having strong ‘logic archetypes’ dominating airtime. Translation: the organization has pervasive ways of thinking and ‘logic’ that act as sacred cows nobody dares to touch. (Example: Six months of developing The Strategic Plan dictates short-term actions. In the last 10 years, no Strategic Plan has ever been achieved. Every year the cycle is repeated.)
4. Repeating mistakes comes from either not learning or not unlearning fast. ‘Lessons learnt’ is a meeting ticking a box and not enough.
5. Putting a premium value on intuitiveness, agility, entrepreneurial spirit and speed in a way that un-critically suggests that these are by definition great, no matter what, before one has even attempted to define what each concept really means.
6. There is an ever-increasing desire for an extra supply of information on anything, even when the extra information never tends to change the course of things.
7. Mistaking correlation with causality. Routinely assuming that if B follows A; A is the cause of B (try this with ‘great sales’ follows ‘intensive sales training’, not mentioning that the competitors screwed up their product launch).
8. Banking too much on group discussions, group decisions, group accountability, and group thinking at the expense of individual reflection (by proxy: your calendar is full for months).
9. Working most of the time on single-track logic, deterministic views, one way, no options, and lots of ‘therefore thinking’. ^[8] Particularly when this is not recognised or even denied.
10. People equate ‘critical thinking’ with ‘common sense’. A variant: people say, ‘we are doing this already (critical thinking) all the time’.

If you recognise one of them, dig deeper. Two, it’s becoming serious. Three, explore your doctor’s options. Four, Houston, you have a problem. Five or over, you need to stop and seriously look for ways to put that ‘critical thinking’ in the water supply. If ten out of ten, you are living in an artificial reality and at a high health risk. If you are successful, you are successful despite yourself.

PS. Critical Thinking can be taught in the same way that your body can be re-shaped by going to a gym on a regular basis.

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

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.

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

The line is: This is what I am very bad at; what about you?

And it’s plural, what are we very bad at; what is this company very bad at; what about you, yours?

The Old School Toolkit has a saying, “we will take the best of A and the best of B in this new merged company”. However, this is a bad start. The best of A plus the best of B may still be  ^[9]insufficient ^[9]. Also, the safe discussion of ‘the best’ tends to hide the bad and the terrible for months.

Take the ‘this is what I am very bad at, what about you?’ line upfront. As you can see, it is more than a line. It is an approach, an attitude, a whole jumpstart in a box.

The artist Alex Grey once said: “True love is when two people’s pathologies complement one another’s.”

I think that this is a very good start to create ‘love’ in a reorg, an M&A, a whole restructuring. It should be a line and a quote for management. How about start loving fast?

In a new situation (and old ones), when Peter, Paul and Mary ‘now must work together’, the three of them bring their brains, hearts, and skills and competencies with them. They also bring their inadequacies, contradictions and flaws. At the top of leadership qualities, acknowledging our own contradictions must have a strong place. We all have them. Acknowledging them is a strength.

I don’t have to tell you what that approach will do for trust: you’ll see it rocketing soon.

The inevitable super-hero (even if sincere) ‘this is what I/we am/are very good at’ is a starter built upon competition. My ‘very good’ is bigger than ‘your very good’ sort of thing. The ‘this is what I/we am/are very bad at, what about you?’ points straight to humanity, collaboration, cut the crap, let’s do it.

Sure, you won’t see this in the PowerPoints of the Big Consulting Group Integration Plan. They never contain the how.

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

Traditional management was established to work top-down and through formal structures, such as teams and committees. More and more, the neat and innovative work is taking place outside the formal, hierarchical structures in the informal networks of the organization.

Forming and nurturing relationships outside the formal structures is a new key competence for managers and leaders, and for that matter, all employees. It’s not new, but the emphasis and the weight is.

But, in the last years, we have come a long way from seeing this intuitively and as an anecdote, to making it part of the leadership of the organization. It’s, of course, at the core of what is called ‘distributed leadership’. And it’s an engine far more powerful than the hierarchical one when it comes to shaping cultures, diffusing unwritten rules, copying and spreading behaviours, creating new norms, and sharing and establishing new ideas.

In the formal organization, you would not survive if you did not know the teams you have, their composition, their leaders, their goals etc. If you don’t have an equivalent for the informal organization (influencers, hyper-connected people, activists, mavericks, positive deviants, advocates, ‘who influences whom’ outside hierarchies– these are not the same, by the way), then you are missing at least three-quarters of the game.

There are ways of identifying these informal, peer-to-peer networks and integrating them into the life of the organization. However, the formal organization likes swallowing anything. It’s a macro-phagocyte that will tend to corporatize anything that moves. And this is a life sentence for the peer-to-peer networks which detest the teamocracy of the formal system.

If you feel that you are a bit behind in all these or that it is all very well conceptually, but not sure what to do about it, well, the world is in front of you. I am pretty sure that if you start with simple homework, you’ll dig and dig deeper. From first gear to fifth or sixth, it is all doable.

Start by reading about SNA (Social Network Analysis) and then explore possibilities. We at Viral Change™ do work with a particular peer-to-peer network of highly connected people. There are other peer-to-peer networks that are formed more in the traditional way of ‘communities of practices’.

Have a go. You are, of course, welcome to explore here in Viral Change™  ^[10]and my Homo Imitans ^[11] book.

Or have a conversation with us, contact us now. ^[12]

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

“A year from now, you all are here standing in front of the CEO and you say: we succeeded! Write the script for that year, what happened to take you there.”

Vey often I run these exercises (‘Success and Failure Scenarios’ ) with parallel sub-teams of Boards, top leadership teams or management teams. Literally I ask them to write those scripts down or at least find all the pieces and assemble them as a script would have been constructed – novel, film, short story… People are incredibly good at writing these scripts (the failure scenario is invariably faster …) and can relate to them much better than an account of goals and targets as written in the Strategic Plan. The storytellers inside all of us seem to enjoy the questions and the production of answers.

A long time ago, in my work with clients, I have switched from ‘Mission & Visions’ to ‘Space in the world’ and ‘Compelling narrative’. It’s not a simple change of terms. The questions are different. The emphasis is ‘What do you want to be remembered for?’ and ‘What’s the story, your story, perhaps your unique story?’ I also insist on writing down the headlines my clients would like to see in the newspapers in year one, or two, or whatever the time frame. A couple of lines, that’s all. I have seen more Executives surprise each other in this exercise than in many other times of interaction. These visual narratives are very powerful. They bring the authentic part of us to the surface.

Another method I use is to ask people to answer (all in writing, again) a question posed by their children (or other children if they don’t have of their own): ‘Dad/Mum/Sir, what do you do exactly?’ The exercise always starts with some light jokes until it gets really serious. Try to articulate ‘maximize shareholder value’ to your 5 year old.

It’s scripts, narratives, stories, not targets, numbers and earnings per share. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with targets, numbers and earnings per share, but the signposts are not the places themselves. If you care about the journey and the place, you need a story. If you have a good, compelling one, there will be lots of good people traveling with you.

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

These are 3 self-sabotage systems to be aware of:

1. Inner civil wars

Internal fighting is a potential feature of any complex organization, business or not. We see the caricature of this, and its high cost, in political parties or social movements. Usually, we see the features of the inner civil war in newspaper headlines or on our television screens. Often it triggers a feeling of ‘how stupid can these people be? they are killing it’ in us. And sometimes they do. In business organizations the mechanics of inner civil war are the same. The ones that worry me most are those that do not have 100% visibility: the hidden turf wars, the passive-aggressive reactions between corporate functions, the by-design unhelpful collaboration, the cynical comments expressed in the corridor, restrooms, by perhaps senior people, against senior people.

2. Employee disengagement

The industry of Employee Engagement (and there is one) tries to measure a mixture of satisfaction, happiness, and willingness to run the extra mile. Year after year the rankings, for whatever they are worth, are terrible. We know more about the diagnosis than the treatment. I have written about the difference between being engaged with the company or within the company. The within (doing lots of stuff to make people ‘happy’) is a distraction. However, you define engagement, running the system with high degrees of a ‘lack of it’, is pure self-sabotage.

Leaders need to spend time on this, but it’s not about ‘improving a ranking’ but about gaining a deep understating of the motivation and ‘the chattering in the corridors’. It’s seeing and feeling. Some leaders can, others meet budgets.

For more on Employee Engagement see my article here ^[15].

3. Dysfunctional leadership

For any functional and aligned Leadership Team I’ve met through my consulting work, there will be four or five dysfunctional ones. Most of them look like juxtapositions of people reporting to somebody, but not a single entity ‘collective leadership’ type. It’s a journey, though. You don’t achieve high levels of sophisticated leadership in a week. But you have to work on it. I don’t have a big problem encountering dysfunctional leadership teams, but I do worry when six months later they have not moved a bit. Or it seems they have via multiple changes and ‘musical chairs’.

These 3 areas – the inner wars, the hidden or not-that-hidden disengagement, and dysfunctional top leadership – are particularly toxic. The sad part is that they tend to come together like brothers and sisters in a dysfunctional family.

If any of this sounds familiar, to stop and think would be a great investment.

PS. Don’t try to correlate success. Some successful organizations are dysfunctional. Some functional ones are not successful. The issue for the successful ones working with high self-sabotaging levels is about opportunity costs; it’s about how more successful could they be.

Start your journey here. ^[16]

Journey 1 is perhaps painful. The organizational and behavioural side of consulting has this peculiar problem: Everybody thinks they know. People with little or no psychological background suddenly become behavioural experts overnight.

Managers who have never managed to seriously create traction in the organization, suddenly say that they have been doing this – whatever ‘this’ means- for many years.

I’ve never seen non-financial managers claiming huge accounting expertise, or non-engineers claiming manufacturing expertise, but I have encountered numerous people in the organization claiming to have a complete understanding of human behaviour, individual and social. Everybody seems to have some sort of unofficial PhD in Organizational Behaviour.

Journey 2 – full provision of hands-on expertise, advise, active involvement, with no pretension of democratic participation or over-inclusiveness – is far easier and less stressful.

I shared this dilemma some time ago with a good friend and client, excellent CEO, and he said: ‘Do what I do, go where the energy is and forget the rest’. There are choices. Bringing people along on a journey can hardly be dismissed as trivial. But one has to accept that it’s not always possible to have everybody ‘aligned’, to use a bit of managerial jargon.

Inclusiveness is a noble aim which can turn into a pathology – over-inclusiveness – very easily. Some people have an extra need to embrace everybody all the time. They are not content with the few, or even with a pure ‘rational understanding’ of the issues. They need full emotional, all-on-board, and, if possible, happy, personally engaged people. And they don’t get tired in the process. Bill Clinton was this kind of man when president. For all his shortcomings, this was his fantastic strength. He did not want you just to ‘agree’ on X but to emotionally love X.

I have to say, I have not seen many Clintonian leaders in organizations.

Inclusiveness should not be an automatic goal, especially at the expense of bold progress. It deserves good critical thinking of what is possible and realistic. In the meantime, I recommend going where the energy is.

Start your journey here. ^[16]

Very rarely will they express what is not for change, which is just as important as working out what can be changed.

“Nobody says, ‘this will not change’.”

Let me explain more in this short video.

My team and I wish you all a wonderful Christmas break and a happy new year. We hope we can create positive organizational changes with you in 2023.

In organizations with thousands of people, traditional change management solutions could be hosting lengthy training sessions, with endless PowerPoints or individual coaching sessions – left wondering why their culture is not improving.

The answer is: These are methods for small scale. To create change at scale, across a whole organization, we require completely different mechanisms. If you want to reach your whole organization, you are in the business of infecting people – not of communicating, coaching, training…

Let me explain more in this short video.

These ‘rules’ were emerging from the practical work that I was doing with my team, not from the theory of books or ‘change models’ or ‘change methods’. In fact, I have done a lot of challenging to the conventional management thinking in this area.

Let me tell you in this short video, why I think a focus on “assets and strengths base” is one powerful driver of successful (organizational) change.

“Campaign it” is one of them. Let me explain it in this short video:

In the social change arena, you don’t survive if you don’t “campaign it” – that is if you don’t campaign the changes you want to see. Yet, in organizations, we are not very good at campaigning. We often focus on top-down messages or run campaigns every few months.. that’s not enough.

People in the social change arena know that they need to campaign constantly. Leaders and organizations need to learn from this.

For successful organizational change, you need to campaign it!

If you want to have a conversation about the future of work, the nature of work, the post-pandemic work, the overrated ‘back to normal’, don’t start with hybrid versus non-hybrid, flexible versus non-flexible, zooms or not zooms, work from home or work from anywhere. It’s the wrong start!

The conversation is about the culture you have, want, need, hate, or want to re-shape.

Company culture is the petri dish where everything grows, good or bad. Focus on culture. This is the real driver. This is the true conversation.

The culture of your company is your workplace now.

If the post-pandemic triggers any ‘future of work’ conversation at all, culture is the literature. Workplace is the grammar.

The culture of your company is your workplace now.

If anything, the workplace (the place and space of work) is within the culture. Culture is not something within the workplace.

Culture first, number of zooms and number of days within the office walls, second.

I for one, think that those physical walls and corridors are incredibly important. But this is, of course, a grammatical issue.

Start your journey here. ^[16]