Here is this week’s second “recap” post on the Viral Change™ Mobilizing Platform. Enjoy!

 

Change management is dead. Let’s go and have a nice funeral

No offence to those with the title in their business card. No offence to the whole industry. You are well and alive. The dead body is the praxis, the discipline, the “for many moons” unchanged concept and its all-seasons meaning.

Change management started to feel a bit ill, and then spiralled into full illness, when people realised that one of the two words was redundant. Either it is management (of change, what else?) or change, which equals management (what else?).

It became seriously ill when still pretending that there was an A and a Z, and, in the middle, there it was, the vehicle itself, ‘change management’. Trouble is all the Z had disappeared from the organizational alphabet, so many other letters.

The ‘change management method’ was like a train that took you from city A to city B. It had passengers and a driver. Now, imagine a train that leaves station A and then shoots for B but encounters C and then diverts to D and then can’t find E so moves to F. That is the environment. In this environment trains don’t work. Train tracks have moved. (‘Who moved my cheese?’ was the title of a nineties ‘change book’. I’d love to write ‘Who moved my rail tracks?)

I know that people call ‘change management’ for many things, from installing a piece of technology in the system, to changing the culture, which makes the concept meaningless. That is part of the problem.

That ‘change management’ has died. Dealing with change has not, actually it has increased. A company that thrives has ‘change’ in the DNA, not external to it.

Change management professionals, there is no need to panic. Plenty of change around. But the time has come to throw the toolkits out of the window and look at how we can install change-ability in the system.

Instead of trains, build scaffolding and houses. Instead of methods (the train and the train tracks), build platforms (behavioural scaffoldings, new people operating systems).

Yes, precisely, I want a new ‘people operating system’ that allows me not to worry about the next change, and the next, and the next. An operating system that makes the word ‘project’ (as in a change project) redundant. An operating system that can handle transformation, evolution or crisis in equal terms.

If you want to take a look at the Mobilizing Platform that I have pioneered with my team, here is a 30 min video ^[1]. Created for a HR/OD/Comms conference that I could not attend, I share there the Viral Change™ mobilizing platform concepts once more.

After the funeral, there is actually a bright future. Refresh, reborn, rethink or re-anything. There is a full life in front of us. New business cards. But no trains from A to Z. Those predictable rail tracks have become very rusty and the grass has overgrown. Unsafe. Historical. Not in the guidebooks anymore,

That form of change management has died. Management can be reinvented. Mobilizing people, at a scale, for a purpose, using a platform, and building long term capacity. It sounds like a social movement; it feels like a social movement; it smells like a social movement. It is a social movement. No other mental frame, no other concept of organization, no other approach to change can cope today with the challenge of rail stations that have disappeared, oxidized broken rail tracks and useless maps taking you nowhere.

Dear Readers,

Daily Thoughts is taking a short holiday! But never fear, over the next few weeks we will be sending you a few of our favourite posts on themes such as Culture, Leadership and Social Movements. This week we begin with a few posts discussing the key elements and theories behind our Viral Change™ Mobilizing Platform. Enjoy!

 

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

I have said previously 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™ is our mobilizing platform.

So what is a platform? An ecosystem of rules of the game, social algorithms (logic, as in idea-logic or ideology) and communication mechanisms that all together form an operating  system. A mobilizing platform is an operating system.

It contains (or hosts) at least 10 components

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 no 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.

Happy weekend to all Daily Thoughts Readers, and apologies for the lack of summary last week!

This week we have been thinking about corporate culture – a major driver in many of our Viral Change™ ^[2] programmes as companies look for ways to amalgamate disparate cultures following mergers, or seek to define a common culture across a geographically diverse workforce (for example). Read on for some of our favourite posts on the topic, or click here to read all the recent articles ^[3].

Talk like an organizational and cultural expert. Money back guarantee. ^[4]

10 principles behind culture, behind ‘Employer Branding’, and behind anything that has to do with the DNA of an organization ^[5]

Clues to mobilize people inside the corporate tent, come from outside that tent. ^[6]

We hope you have a lovely weekend!

Best,
The Daily Thoughts  Support Team

Happy weekend everyone!
This is the Daily Thoughts support team calling!

As we start another month, we take this opportunity again to reflect over the passed few weeks, and some of the key messages Leandro has shared with you all. Please read on for links to 3 of our favourites Daily Thoughts posts from the last month. And as always, feel free to share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected] ^[7]

The glass-always-half-empty people never bother to fill it in
Reflecting on the kind of leaders and kind of people who make things happen

The 4 hats of leadership: a review ^[8]
How may of those hats can you see in your organization?

The best contribution that Neurosciences can make to Management and Leadership is to leave the room
Leandro is annoying the Neuro-Anything people, but he does not mean it. To annoy, that is. Tryst us.

Enjoy and happy weekend!

Best regards,
The Daily Thoughts Team
@The Chalfont Project

PS. Remember Leandro’s Webinar: Company culture as a social movement ^[9].  Few seats left.

Welcome to this week’s summary (a bit earlier than usual!)

 

Here at Daily Thoughts HQ and The Chalfont Project ^[10], we are Organizational Architects. We don’t do buildings, but if you want to build a remarkable organization, and are perhaps ready to challenge your status quo, we are here to help. For a taste of what we do, here are the latest posts on Organization Architecture ^[11] – and read on for our favourite posts.

 

A team is not a meeting. The best team is the one that does not need to meet. Almost. ^[12]

 

Speak like an organizational expert. Actually to fool everybody is not that difficult ^[13]

 

Re-structuring to force collaboration, is likely to create more anxiety than collaboration. Structural solutions for behavioural problems hardly work. ^[14]

 

Enjoy!

 

Best,

The Daily Thoughts Team

P.s. in case you missed the email last week, we are running a webinar! Click here ^[15] for details and to register.

Happy weekend to all our Daily Thoughts readers!

This week, some of The Chalfont Project team have been at a conference in Berlin focused on Employee Branding. A major topic of interest and discussion was peer-to-peer influence, so we thought this would be a great topic for this week’s summary. For all the latest posts click here ^[16], or read on for 3 of our favourites.

Peer to Peer networks are the strongest force of action ^[17]

In ‘people like us’ we trust, others must try harder, and leaders should go to the optometrist. ^[18]

What do you do with that guy who does not want change and/or is very negative? ^[19]

We hope you enjoy them!

Best,

Daily Thoughts Support Team

Happy weekend to our readers!

 

Here at Daily Thoughts HQ, social movements are one of our favourite topics…so although we have explored this topic relatively recently, there are already so many more great posts to share that we thought we should revisit it! For a re-cap on all the most recent posts, click here ^[20].

 

Clues to mobilize people inside the corporate tent, come from outside that tent. ^[6]

 

Corporate initiatives are born and die. And the reasons are seldom lack of goals. ^[21]

 

The insurgent wins. ^[22]

 

Have a great weekend.

 

Best,

The Daily Thoughts Team

Happy weekend to all our readers!

Here at The Chalfont Project and Daily Thoughts HQ, we have been talking a lot about our company values this week – and number one on our list is “Trust”. With that in mind, we have been reviewing all our recent posts on “Trust” ^[23], and thought we would share our favourites with you.

Enjoy!

In ‘people like us’ we trust, others must try harder, and leaders should go to the optometrist. ^[18]

‘The truth will set you free’, the Bible says. Using a Baloney Detection Kit will keep you sane. ^[24]

Top leadership needs to role model, lead by example and live the values. Now that we have said it, can we please stop talking about it? ^[25]

All the best for the coming week

The Daily Thoughts Support Team

Happy weekend!

Welcome to part 2 of our look at behavioural change. For all the most recent posts on this topic, click here ^[26].

Enjoy!

Defeatism and cynicism are two toxic sisters that need to be challenged. Any second of silence is a terrible complicity in the erosion of hope. ^[27]

Many cultural change efforts fail out of a mathematical mistake. They use addition instead of multiplication ^[28]

Agree conceptually on values, then abandon the labels as fast as you can and focus on their behavioural translation ^[29]

 

Looking forward to catching up again next week!

Best,

The Daily Thoughts Support Team

Happy weekend to all our Daily Thoughts readers!

This week at we have been focusing on Behaviours – after all, one of our mantras at The Chalfont Project ^[10] and Viral Change™ ^[2] is “there is no change unless there is behavioural change“. It is so integral to all the work we do here that we decided to dedicate two weekly summaries to our favourite posts on this topic…read on for part 1 and check back next Sunday for part 2.

Enjoy!

Daily Thoughts run up to end of the year (3/5) The real readiness trick is behavioural. The rest is commentary. ^[30]

The curious case of management bad sync: the video and the audio don’t match ^[31]

The ‘quick win-win’ theory, and tactics, often lead to people being put off quickly ^[32]

All the best for the week ahead!

The Daily Thoughts Team

Hello Daily Thoughts Readers! We hope you are all having an enjoyable and relaxing weekend.

This week we are thinking about Performance – in relation to ourselves, our teams and our organization as a whole. As always there are a wealth of Daily Thoughts on that matter, so we thought we’d share some of our favourites. Enjoy!

The curious case of management bad sync: the video and the audio don’t match ^[31]

The ‘quick win-win’ theory, and tactics, often lead to people being put off quickly ^[32]

25 facets of a Project Leader in a large organization (spoiled for identity choices) ^[33]

 

Looking forward to sharing more Daily Thoughts with you next week!

Best,

The Daily Thoughts Team

Happy weekend from Daily Thoughts support team at The Chalfont Project HQ!

Leadership is always a popular subject and an area which is covered frequently in the Daily Thoughts posts so today we have picked some of our favourites to share with you. You can see the full list here ^[34].

If you need to parachute help, send builders, not problem solvers ^[35]

Clues to mobilize people inside the corporate tent, come from outside that tent. ^[6]

Is leadership so elusive? Or only in the hands of academics? ^[36]

As always we thank you for your continued support and would welcome your feedback – please let us know if there is anything else you would like to see from the Daily Thoughts, any other channels we should be exploring or any topics you would like to see discussed – simply email [email protected] ^[7] with your thoughts!

Many thanks!

The Daily Thoughts Team

Hi, this is the support team of the Daily Thoughts on  Sunday’s duty! Refresh!

This week we have been thinking a lot about “Building Remarkable Organizations” – this is after all our mantra at The Chalfont Project ^[10], and the main focus of our work as Organization Architects.  Below are some of our favourite Daily Thoughts posts on the subject, and as always to view all of the most recent posts on Building Remarkable Organizations you can click here ^[37].

There is always room for uniqueness, even in the most standardized management process. What would it take? ^[38]

Archaeologists usually don’t build houses. We have lots of archaeologists in the payroll ^[39]

Bold leadership pays off. It can also be killed by those who are highly paid to be professionally afraid ^[40]

We hope you enjoy this week’s selection! Remember to follow us on Twitter ^[41] and LinkedIn ^[42] for more insights.

Best,
The Daily Thoughts Team

 

Thanks to all those who voted for their favourite Daily Thoughts of 2016 – we compiled the results and here is your Top 10 countdown, today taking us from 10-4.

10. Invitation: The year of Bullshit Detection ^[43]

9. The Zeus Strategy: de-aggregating the problem ^[44]

8. There are good leaders, excellent leaders and Gold leaders. This is what Gold looks like ^[45]

7. I want builders, not problem solvers,not flow-chart artists ^[46]

6. Efficiency, Efficacy and Effectiveness: the triplets of management ^[47]

5. What they don’t teach you in Business Schools about financial management: managing resources you don’t own or control ^[48]

4. It’s cool to think. It’s not cool to do crap things ^[49].

Check back tomorrow for the top 3 posts of the year!

In the second of our Daily Thoughts summaries this week, I focus on Organizational Culture. Read on for some examples of my latest posts on this crucial topic (which as you know is very close to my heart!)

1. Do corporate habits shape the morals of our families? ^[50]

In this post I ask whether we are being shaped by the 24/7 work world?

2. Much that looks sexual, hides deeper truths about human relationships. So we must travel behind the headlines to make sense. ^[51]

Here I consider the idea of power being at the core of any human relationship – including those within organizations.

3. What kind of association? What you think you are, where others see you, and where you may end up ^[52]

My non-scientific classification of forms of “collective action” and their equivalents inside organizations.

For more of my recent posts on Culture, click here ^[3]

 

 

Many of you have told us that a regular summary of Daily Thoughts’ posts, focused on certain topics, would be useful – so here you go! I will begin to regularly send these summaries out on a Sunday, but for this week only I’ve decided to create three posts on three very popular topics, starting with Leadership.

1. The leader is not an answerphone. Or a help-desk. ^[53]

In this post, I discuss the power of peer-to-peer engagement, and the fact that leaders do not have to have all the answers!

2. This time it’s personal, actually. ^[54]

Here I consider the power of personal contact and the value placed on this by our colleagues.

3. Five spaces that the organizational leader needs to design and nurture ^[55]

This popular post explores the ways leaders can create “spaces” for their employees to be heard.

To read more of our recent posts on leadership, click this link ^[34]

P.s want to nominate your favourite Daily Thought of 2016? Click here ^[56]to review the long list and cast your vote!

Hi there!

There is a pause in Daily Thoughts today, but here are three you may have missed that we have selected for you:

On the power of mental and communication frames. How choosing words is more than aesthetic or literary exercise

Your mental frame, as defined by words, will dictate your actions. Even your values. Words are dictators. ^[57]

On a disease spreading across organizations that need to me tackled

Defeatism and cynicism are two toxic sisters that need to be challenged. Any second of silence is a terrible complicity in the erosion of hope ^[27]

And the incredible power of an unexpected, kind thing done to others.

And he took the patient to see his cattle, and the patient progressed very well ^[58].

Enjoy it all

Leandro’s Team @ The Chalfont Project.

PS. Remember to invite colleagues or friends to join the community via email subscription @ www.leandroherrero.com ^[59] or twitter @LeandroEHerrero. (Most people choose to subscribe to the daily email.

PS2. We are working on different schedules and other channels such as facebook. Plus some Daily Thoughts compilations. Drop us a line ( [email protected]) ^[60] if you have a comment and a minute to spare.

Thanks for joining us every day.