If you think of most of the themes currently on the table of the organization these days, they all are behavioural, and yet, the attention is somewhere else. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) is a good example.

It focuses a lot on ‘the function’, which not surprisingly automatically requires a ‘Head Of’.  Then, on what needs to be changed structurally (e.g. more representation of minority groups). And finally, on the associated communication and training. There is usually not a lot of behavioural granularities here.

But if there is not habitual diversity of thinking and of ideas in the behavioural DNA of the company (which would mean that we value diversity per se, at a very granular level, foundational, not as an application), other applied ‘diversities’ (gender for example) could just become a quota to reach, a target, and, in the process,  possibly killing all the beauty of the never exploited primary diversity.

Some DEI warriors don’t like this thinking and tend to dismiss it as ‘general diversity’, not the real diversity which for them is mostly a question of quotas. There is no question that creating the conditions for diversity (providing seats at the table, seeking different experiences, transcultural, for example) is fundamental. But this cannot simply become management by ratios for the purpose of ticking some boxes.

For example, you can obtain a great deal of sustained diversity by having, say, 30% of your people this afternoon asking the questions: Is there a different way to solve this? Who else needs to know about this? Who needs to be involved? Or by always bringing 3 options to a decision, at least one of them unconventional. And this is not the whole list. We do this in our Viral Change™ ^[1]  programmes with great success. It may sound simplistic, but it is very powerful at scale, across an organization.

When this kind of primary diversity is widespread and entrenched as a habit, any other ‘particular diversity’ will already be finding a good home. Unfortunately, this is not the standard way. It’s easier to look at ratios and quotas and showcase them.

The re-presentations (as psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist ^[2] would put it) have taken over the presence. He often jokes about the question ‘how does one become a Buddhist?’ Easy – some people say – sit on the floor, cross your legs, wear orange, and close your eyes. My analogy is, have a Function, call it Diversity and showcase some people from minority groups in the leadership team.

By the way, there is little logic in grouping D, E and I into a construct called DEI. Even from a financial performance perspective, it makes little sense, as the superb professor of Finance at the London Business School, Alex Edmans ^[3], has demonstrated.

Mirror arguments can easily be made in areas such as ESG (another construct), Health and Wellbeing, Psychological Safety or even the whole ‘Future of Work discussion’, where the hybrid/non hybrid/remote/office ‘debate’ has taken over the airtime. The latter being the wrong end of the stick: workplaces are in cultures; cultures are not in a workplace – we have mistaken the content for the container. Debating the number of days in the office is like debating the number of commas in a Shakespeare play.

So, what about training? For example, DEI training.

Again, this is another ‘easy default’ that tricks us into adopting a relatively easy way to implement a ‘solution’. Training has more than a legitimate place in corporate development, serving well awareness and skilling. Unfortunately, it has limited power in cultures. These are largely un-trainable and shaped by the day-to-day (behavioural) interactions of people mostly following unwritten rules and social copying what is around them.

Sending bankers to a business school for a course on ethics, to become more ethical- a real example in the UK after the ‘banking problems’ – is either a commendable good intention of extraordinary naivety, or a bad joke.

The fact that people may ‘get’ the intellectual and rational side of something, does not mean that they will change behaviours. Rationally, people agree that smoking is bad, driving when under the influence of alcohol is bad, and ditto for not wearing a seat belt. If awareness and safety training were enough, most of these and other problems would have been eradicated ages ago. When compliance leaves the room, the real culture shows up.

Similarly, the success of so called Bias Training, is largely underwhelming, not because it’s wrong in itself but because people wrongly expect behavioural change from a bunch of lectures or presentations only. The emphasis is on the only. We attribute powers to training that it does not have in the behavioural arena.

Behavioural change at scale (and you would have thought that DEI advocates would want that, not just the awareness and enlightenment of a small part of the company) can only be achieved by a bottom-up ‘social movement’ that equally touches the Board and the front line.  That needs to be orchestrated carefully. Training is then a good comrade in arms. The combination of a top-down communication push-system and a bottom-up behavioural pull one is fantastic. I have described this in Homo Imitans ^[4] as the World I and World II working together and it’s at the core of our Viral Change™ methodology

The tragedy of DEI is that it may progressively die of terminal corporatization. A recent, ‘epidemic-like’ round of dismissals, of (relatively recently appointed) Chief Diversity Officers has been described in the US. People often report that ‘it was mission impossible’, a monumental task that was naively addressed by creating a corporate function.

All that is corporatized, eventually melts in the air, or in the pages of an Annual Report.

My intention is far from discouraging the tackling of the reality of diversity, equity and inclusion (or any other set of cultural drivers, which I am happy to group in trios if you wish – what about Performance, Engagement, Belonging?), but I am making a plea to take them seriously by being very critical about the ’labelled solutions’.  Those solutions for me are behavioural in their roots and therefore require a behavioural-cultural approach. Corporate is very good at wrongly providing structural solutions (a new Function) to behavioural problems and is applying the same medicine to the recently acquired DEI. No surprises here.

Using the lenses I use, I can tell you that DEI can be rescued from its hijack to truly realize the value of diversity of thinking, of ideas, of inputs, of participation, and equal treatment and involvement of people. The Viral Change™ mobilizing platform ^[5] provides the scaffolding to address the culture goals in an incredibly powerful way. It’s behavioural DEI, powered by Viral Change™. Just a conversation away if you wish. Reach out to [email protected] ^[6].

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]

We have treated cultural change as ‘a project’ and applied the mechanics of project management. It looks like this: Dozens (if not hundreds) of consultants land on the corporate shores, workshops multiply like mushrooms and a tsunami of communication comes from the top: ‘change is good, this is what you must do, do you get it? Cascade down the message’. Kind of.  So it takes six months to figure out what to do, including a cultural assessment (of course), a couple more to present findings, another to launch and you start doing something at month 6. If you’re lucky. Then, you start with the top (of course) and cascade down one layer, then another one, peeling the organizational onion with lots of messages and workshopsterone. You don’t see initial results until, say, year 2 and you need another couple of years to see more. See what? Well, good question, err, a different culture? How do you measure that? What do you mean? I told you, 20 senior managers workshop, 150 middle management and… Hold on, this is activity, not outcomes. Oh!

In traditional change management, you start with the top and cascade down one layer, then another one, peeling the organizational onion with lots of messages and workshopsterone.

The following is an example of non-workshopsterone-led fast cultural change: A new CEO said ´enough of meetings, I am not having them.´ 6 months later they had a 60% reduction in meetings, significant increase in direct communications, better fluid collaboration, the sky did not fall, business is booming. Guess what, employee engagement scores are up.

I am not bringing this case as an example of how cultural change should be done, but as a representation of a situation where culture change and culture re-shaping take place in a short period of time.

As I have repeated ad nauseam, organizational culture change is bottom up, behavioural based, peer-to-peer, using informal networks and with a particular kind of leadership that is movement-supportive (we call it Backstage Leadership™ ) I am of course defining Viral Change™, no apologies for the reference. Viral Change™ is orchestrated like a social movement, not as a management consulting programme.

Only behavioural change is real change

You can map new processes and re-arrange the organization chart. Install a new corporate software (ERP, CRM, etc.) and explain to people why this is good and necessary. Create a massive communication and training campaign and make sure that everybody has clearly understood where to go. Perhaps you’ve done this already and noticed that many people hang on to the old ways. That is because there is no change unless there is behavioural change. It is only when new behaviours have become the norm that you can say that real change has occurred. If you want a new culture, change behaviours. Cultures are not created by training.

Start your journey here. ^[12]

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. ^[1]

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].

This naivety about behavioural and cultural change is widespread in business and society and cuts across a diverse range of topics. It’s about time we learn how successful approaches have managed to mobilize large numbers of people.

We have traditionally seen it in the area of Health and Safety, where training is a requisite, and who could disagree with that? But training is a weak tool for behavioural change compared to copying and imitating others around you. Training to wear a helmet, telling people that it is a requisite, and people wearing it are three occasionally connected things. But if training is your essential tool, and you have a Full Division for it, then the old saying that ‘when the only thing you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail’ applies well.

In this model of hammers and nails, when there is a health and safety transgression, the ‘punishment’ may be… more training. ‘Sending people back to training’ is not just a feature of Health and Safety. In recent years it has included unethical bankers sent on courses on Ethics in apparently ethical business schools. It sometimes seems as if we were following a rule: if you misbehave, we will train you a hell of a lot.

“Training and communicating have gone from a measured and necessary intervention to a single, sufficient solution for many evils.”

We also see it more and more in the controversial area of ‘training on the unconscious bias’ to fight gender and race inequality. It’s not going to stop anytime soon until people realise that rational and even emotional training on a subject has little power in sustainable behavioural change. There is plenty of growing data on how that training may be useless, yet we keep doing it. Accepting that society’s ills are not solved in training rooms seems complicated.

“Gender and race inequality, for example, will not stop anytime soon until people realise that rational and even emotional training on a subject has little power in sustainable behavioural change.”

In the corporate world, top-down communication programmes aimed at ‘creating culture’ continue to be entirely present even when the very same people who have authority in dictating and constructing them will tell you in private that they don’t expect a massive impact. It’s, again and again, the repeat of the old tale.

Two people are talking to each other in a garden. One seems to be looking for something on the ground. The other comes along and says, ‘What are you doing?’. The first response was, ‘I’m looking for my keys’. ‘oh, sorry to hear that. Where did you lose your keys?’. The man says, ‘Over there’, pointing to the other side of the garden. The other man says, ‘Hold on, if you lost the keys over there, why are you looking at the ground here?’. The other responds, ‘Because there is more light here’.

There is certainly more light in training and communicating, but the keys are usually lost in the corridors, in the day-to-day interactions with people and in the unwritten rules of the informal organization. There is less light (but you will find your keys) in a bottom-up behavioural change approach. The one that is not conceived as a communication programme but as a grassroots movement. If there is any hope in addressing the ‘S’ in ESG (the Environmental, Social and Governance agenda), it’s not in top-down communication and training programmes to tackle ‘culture’ but in an ‘inversion of the arrow’, from top to bottom to the opposite.

“There is more “light” in training and communication campaigns, but you will find your keys in a bottom-up behavioural change approach.”

An extra and obvious problem with training in large organizations is that you soon start running out of bodies. You train (and communicate to) leaders, the top layer and a few layers down, and then the system closes its eyes, hoping that the miracle of scale will take place. This mental model suggests that large scale is small scale repeated several times, which is the equivalent of thinking that if you just put large piles of bricks together, you’ll get a cathedral.

Cultural change is on all tables today, corporate, society, education… It’s about time we learn how successful approaches have managed to mobilize large numbers of people. No revolution has started in a classroom

Or reach out to my team with specific questions 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’. ^[14] 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].

Safety communication and training usually follow a top-down approach where facts are presented, guidelines and procedures exposed, tasks explained, and threats of noncompliance declared. It is a rational and emotional appeal cascaded down across all information channels of the organisation. It suits ‘information’, but it does not suit ‘behaviours’. Behaviours can’t be taught in the same way as a three-step process can be explained.

Behaviours spread via imitation of others. Behaviours travel via social copying and emulation, sometimes unconsciously. Training and communications on safety are needed – and major corporations usually have very good educational programmes. But cultures are created outside the classroom and the auditorium, in the day-to-day life of individuals ‘doing things’. Cultures develop – sometimes very fast – by the power of person-to-person influence.

“Training and communications are needed. But cultures are created outside the classroom and the auditorium, in the day-to-day life of individuals ‘doing things’.”

The most powerful influence in the organisation is not hierarchical; it is peer-to-peer; it is the conscious or unconscious emulation of ‘people like us’. The Health and Safety personnel teach the rules of safety, inspection, safety implementation and improve processes and systems. However, the day-to-day social copying of good safety behaviours in the workplace, plus conversations in the canteen (that is, informal conversations with people one trusts), is what creates a culture of safety in real life.

Viral Change™ is a way to create a fast and sustainable culture of safety which does not rely on the rational understanding of hundreds of people attending safety training workshops.

In Viral Change™, we identify a relatively small set of ‘non-negotiable behaviours’ which, when spread across the organisation, have the power to create a behavioural fabric, a DNA of safety. We also identify a relatively small number of individuals who have a high level of influence with peers, who are well-connected, and whose behaviours are likely to have an impact on others in a multiplying mode. These people may or may not be in specific management layers but occupy various jobs across the organisation. We organise and put together these components, behaviours and influences, in a well-designed format. We let the spread and social infection go, and we back-stage the management of it. We engineer an internal social epidemic of safety behaviours that can be observable and measured.

We do not ask to stop the ‘push’ of training and development! We do, however, orchestrate the ‘pull’ of connected and influential individuals and their role-modelling behaviours who engage with peers in conversations and real-life ‘doing’ and engage others in a viral manner. Viral Change™ is the only way to shape a culture of safety and maximise the potential and the investment of training and communications.

Viral Change™ LLP is currently leading programmes focused on the creation of a safety culture in the way described above. For example, using these principles and methodology, a global company – which has state-of-the-art, award-winning top-down training systems – has engaged us to create a culture of safety virally, reaching and engaging 50.000 people across the world.

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  ^[16]insufficient ^[16]. 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].

“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 ^[19].

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. ^[20]

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. ^[20]

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.

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. ^[20]

If you want to discuss your behavioural and cultural change needs – let’s talk. Contact me at: [email protected] and my team will arrange a suitable time for us.