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

Redefining Talent Wealth

The war on talent
McKinsey consultants started it with a book of the same title. By focusing on what it seemed like a universal problem of scarce talent, and a subsequent call to arms in a battle to acquire it, they skilfully managed to distract the attention from a problem significantly greater: hosting talent. The military analogy (that management loves with narratives such as ‘win-win’, or ‘kill the competition’, for example) implied that talent is ‘outside’ and therefore there is a war to ‘get it’. Undoubtedly true in some occasions, organizations have today a greater problem with retention, engagement, and, as I said, hosting that talent. The war on talent is global, the skills gap is widening and employees are demanding more from their employers.

Organizations need to adopt a strategic approach to talent management. They must create workplaces where employees feel value, challenged and supported. They also need to invest in developing their employee’s skills and knowledge so that they can stay ahead of the curve.

The wrong capital
‘Talent management’ ( a sub-industry in its own rights) focuses too much on Human Capital, with emphasis on skills (and with emphasis on people ‘who have done it before’). However, in today’s world, social and emotional capital are just as important.

The best talent management programs focus on developing all three types of capital: human, social, and emotional.

Defining Talent
You’ll be surprised how many people can’t seriously articulate what this means to their organization. The narrower the definition, the bigger the problem. Once you have a clear definition of talent, you can develop programs and initiatives to attract, retain, and develop talented employees

It is vital to move beyond conventional boundaries and develop a nuanced understanding of talent management to foster a thriving workplace.

Can We Rescue DEI From Its Trap (The Label)?

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Behavioural Change,Behaviours,Culture,culture and behaviours,Culture Change,DEI,Diversity,Equity,Future of work,Inclusion,Leadership,Social Movements,Viral Change | No Comments
Most of the problems and challenges in organizations, together with most of the solutions, are behavioural in nature. It’s about what people do, not about what they are thinking of doing, or just thinking. People, however, naturally focus more on processes and systems because this is what is usually at the forefront of the corporate citizen’s mind, in their day to day life. That relegates behaviours into the ‘consequence’ basket, what happens after, a bit of an afterthought.  But the problem is that behaviours create cultures, not the other way around. They are the input, not the output, not the day after, but Patient Zero. It’s where it all starts (what are the behaviours we need for A?), not the endpoints (declare X, Y, Z and you’ll get these behaviours).

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].

How you can rescue DEI from its hijackers – some recommendations:

Don’t address DEI in isolation, as a distinct entity of some sort
Blend it with broader culture change and evolution. Otherwise, the organization becomes a playground of competition between acronyms and their meaning. Many people who quote ESG have no clue what the letters mean. The more you label, the less you get it.

Go down to the granular side (behavioural) as much as you can
What is diversity? How do you recognise it in terms of what people do, not a label in the management structure. Translate into behaviours. (Hints: Opening the door to somebody is a behaviour; being courteous is not. Diversity as a mindset means nothing since it would mean different things to people).

Don’t rely on training only
Intellectual understanding, even emotional reaction to it, do not always trigger new behaviours.

Above all, don’t use the victimhood card
It never helps real victims. The DEI world is saturated by it.

If you care about diversity, have the courage to say that it starts with ideas, opinions, points of views, cultures, experiences
And, even more courageous, to say that it is intrinsically good as a value. ‘Employee engagement’ has killed the intrinsic value of work. It has been presented as a utility to deliver performance. What if ‘engagement’ (with your own work, with others, with a collective effort in the organization) were good in itself, regardless of how much performance ‘you get’?

Diversity of the human condition, and in our business organizations, based on the intrinsic value of the dignity of work, is too important to leave it in the hands of any label
The ultimate goal of a DEI corporate function should be to become irrelevant as fast as possible.

If you are broadly in agreement with the principles of this article, and if you care about the behavioural and foundational aspects underneath diversity, but feel that the conversation has been hijacked, forward this article around your network.

Join the conversation on LinkedIn [7]

Training and culture change. The love affair that ends in tears.

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Behavioural Change,Communication,Culture,culture and behaviours,Culture Change,Management of Change,Organization architecture,Performance,Safety Training,Transformation,Viral Change,Viral Safety | No Comments
It seems to be very hard for people to get away from the idea that if we just put individuals in a room and train them on ‘something’, the job of achieving that ‘something’ will be accomplished. And if not, we will just train them again.

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

Learn more about our thinking here. [8]

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

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

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Activism,Backstage Leadership,Behaviours,Building Remarkable Organizations,Culture,Employee Engagement,Grassroots,Mobiliztion,Peer to peer infuence,Social Movements,Storytelling,Transformation,Viral Change,Workplaces Of The Future | No Comments
Mobilizing people. This is another of the Holy Grails (how many have I said we have?) in management. Whether you look at this from the angle of productivity, employee engagement, or any other, the key is ‘Mobilizing People’. Actually, I propose to change the word ‘leaders’ to ‘mobilizers’. Mmm, I won’t win this one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10. Go back to number one and down again.

Learn more about Viral Change™ and its applications here [9].

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

A culture of safety or a culture of training in safety?

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Accountability,Behavioural Change,Behaviours,Communication,Culture,culture and behaviours,Peer to peer infuence,Performance,Reputation,Safety Training,Social Movements,Values,Viral Change,Viral Safety | No Comments

Cultures are created by behaviours becoming the norm.

Safety is at the core of many industries. Significant budgets are allocated to safety training in major corporations. One death is too many. Accidents can be avoided. The cost of time lost due to incidents is considerable. Safety training is needed, but it does not necessarily create a culture of safety. Cultures are created by behaviours becoming the norm. A culture of safety is not one of well-trained (on safety) people but one where safety behaviours are the norm. These two things are not the same.

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.

Learn more about Viral Change™ and its applications here [9].

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

3 self-sabotaging mechanisms in organizations

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Behavioural Change,Building Remarkable Organizations,Change, Leadership and Society,Culture,culture and behaviours,Culture Change,Employee Engagement,Leadership,Management of Change,Organization architecture,Social Movements,Viral Change,Workplaces Of The Future | No Comments
Organizations, like organisms, have embedded mechanisms of survival, of growth and also of self-sabotage.

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 [10].

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.

[11]
Talking about behaviours and culture, this is a good opportunity to look at how you can reshape your culture, and we have a simple vehicle to achieve this.

Start your journey here. [12]

If you want to discuss your behavioural and cultural change needs – let’s talk. Contact my team at: [email protected].

Who should be involved in culture change? All inclusive versus going where the energy is.

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Behavioural Change,Building Remarkable Organizations,Collective action,Critical Thinking,Culture,culture and behaviours,Culture Change,Management of Change,Management Thinking and Innovation,Organization architecture,Transformation,Viral Change,Workplaces Of The Future | No Comments
Many times, in my consulting work, I find myself facing a dilemma: Do I involve many people on the client’s side, engage them, teach them about ‘behavioural change principles’ or ‘behavioural DNA’, for example, and create a journey of many travellers to reach some conclusions or destinations? Or do I go semi-solo, reaching the same shores, with the same happy CEO, and the same professional fees?

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.

[11]
Talking about behaviours and culture, this is a good opportunity to look at how you can reshape your culture, and we have a simple vehicle to achieve this.

Start your journey here. [12]

If you want to discuss your behavioural and cultural change needs – let’s talk. Contact my team at: [email protected].

Campaign It… is 1 of my 40 rules of change

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Behavioural Change,Building Remarkable Organizations,Change, Leadership and Society,Collective action,Communication,Critical Thinking,Culture,culture and behaviours,Leadership,Marketing | No Comments
When you filter out the noise, when you try to extract the core, the fundamentals, those ‘universal rules’ of change that refuse to go, you are left with a few strong and powerful drivers. I’ve got 40 of them. And I am seriously resisting the urge to ‘get them down’ to the most vociferous few.

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

[13]
Why “Campaign it”?

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 hear more about the full set of rules, my team and I have a great opportunity coming up very soon. Let us know if you would like to know more here [14] or via [email protected].

Hybrid or not hybrid? That’s not the question…

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Behavioural Change,Building Remarkable Organizations,Culture,culture and behaviours,Organization architecture,Viral Change,Workplaces Of The Future | No Comments
Culture is the new workplace

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.

[11]
Talking about behaviours and culture, this is a good opportunity to look at how you can reshape your culture, and we have a simple vehicle to achieve this.

Start your journey here. [12]

If you want to discuss your behavioural and cultural change needs – let’s talk. Contact my team at: [email protected].

Corporate tribes, intellectual ghettos and open window policies

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Behavioural Change,Communication,Corporate anthropology,Culture,culture and behaviours,Decision making,Organization architecture,Tribal,Workplaces Of The Future | No Comments
We talk a lot about silos in organizations usually in the context of Business Units or divisions. But these are not the only silos. Functional silos are often stronger: IT, Finance, the medics in a pharmaceutical industry, sales forces, HR, Communications people, etc. In this case, silos and tribes are the same.

The trade industry (and conference organisers) perpetuate this. Global conferences are set up where HR people talk to HR people, Internal Communications to Internal Communications, techie to techie, marketing to marketing, even CFOs to CFOs. These almost medieval trade groups talk to themselves. And have fun. It’s cosy, rewarding, predictable, and, despite what they may say, hardly a place for breakthrough thinking. By the way, it’s not unusual to find that, in those trade/silo/tribal conferences, 80% are ‘consultants’ and 20% ‘real people’.

Functional silos. Cosy, rewarding, predictable, but hardly a place for breakthrough thinking.

Yet, we desperately need the cross-pollination. (I want to see conferences with quota: how many HR, how many business leaders etc).

If a techie concept is not worth explaining to a non techie audience, it’s not worth marketing it. If a HR idea is not worth presenting to non HR, they’d better keep it to themselves.

The tribes will not go away. They never will. They do exist to provide a glue, a sense of belonging, a protected house, a defense castle, a place with an aura of accessibly, or lack of it. Corporate tribes are here to stay. But we need to use our imagination to allow, and promote, tribe A to talk to tribe B, routinely.

Gillian Tett, who heads the Financial Times in the US, an anthropologist by training, wrote an anthropo-journalistic-wonderful account of silos, and their cons (and also pros) – The Silo Effect. [15] It’s a good read and good account of these tribal ghettos (my term, not hers).

The trick with social phenomena like this is not to fight them blindly. Tribes, even intellectual ghettos, have a place. The question is how to establish bridges and communication channels. How to make sure that they all have windows that can be opened and fresh air let in. I don’t have a problem with tribes, even medieval-guilds-intellectual-ghettos, as long as their walls are very thin and with plenty of doors and windows.

And another thing. Make it compulsory for business/operational people to spend some time, perhaps six months, working on those Tribal Reservations: HR, Communications, IT. If they resist, make it a Conscript Project. In Situ Fertilization works.

For more on this you can also read my article: Corporate culture? Start with subcultures, find the tribes, and look for the unwritten rules of their dynamics [16]

The Myths of Company Culture
Explore the broader topic of corporate culture – watch The Myths of Company Culture webinar. Stuck in old concepts, we have made culture change hard and often impossible. In this webinar we look at the many outdated assumptions and discuss some of the inconvenient truths of company culture. Learn how to successfully mobilize your people for a purpose and change culture. Culture is now ‘the strategy’.
[17]
 

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.

Peer Networks are the strongest force of action inside the organization

Posted By Leandro Herrero On In Behavioural Change,Collaboration,Communication,Culture,culture and behaviours,Peer to peer infuence,Viral Change | No Comments

Peer-to-peer works, transversal, spontaneous or not, collaboration, peer-to-peer influence, peer-to-peer activities of Viral Change™ champions or activists, all of this is the WMD of change and transformation in organizations. I mean Weapons of Mass Diffusion.

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 mangers and leaders, and for that matter, all employees. It’s not new, but the emphasis and the weight is.

But, in the last few years, we have gone 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, sharing and establishing new ideas.

Understanding and nurturing informal
relationships has become an
essential part of organizational leadership.

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 of course 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 this, 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 some simple homework, you’ll dig and dig deeper. From first gear to fifth or sixth, it is all doable.

Start of course by reading about SNA (Social Network Analysis) and then explore possibilities. We at The Chalfont Project [18] undertake work with a particular peer-to-peer network of highly connected people through our Viral Change™ programme [1].

If the business if the mission, culture is the strategy

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Behavioural Change,Building Remarkable Organizations,Culture,culture and behaviours | No Comments

Culture is in the A list, the one where ‘work’ sits. Not in the B list (‘when I have time, after A’).

Culture is not a project, something to do on top of normal work, an extra, something to get your hands around once the big stuff has been done.

Certainly culture is not an ‘HR function topic’ but a business one, with all the help of HR and non HR that you can get.

Culture is a big word, with similar liabilities as ‘change’: overused, prompt to cynicism, multiple use, a thousand meanings.

Culture is the how you do the what, the platform for your success or failure.

So, how can you create and sustain the culture you want?

Behaviours create cultures. Master behaviours, agree upon them, declare the non negotiable ones, spread them, and you’ll get culture.

Culture cannot be taught. It’s something lived, and, in behavioural terms, something that grows from behaviours. Behaviours scale up via social influence, so suddenly you have a causal link between behaviours, influence and culture. Get the first two right, you get a great third.

Most problems with cultures come from decoupling the idea of culture from ‘the real stuff’:

Culture is business. Business is culture. Stuck to each other with super glue. Behaviours are the super glue.

Culture, still a big thing, needs to be unpacked further. Chances are you don’t have one corporate culture, no matter how much you preach that. You have subcultures overlapping in a Venn diagram. My rule of thumb is to start from the subcultures upwards, not the other way around. Form your views bottom up. Instead of ‘this is the culture, let’s look deeper’, start with what the engineers do, the finance people do, the sales ones do. Then join up.

Rethinking the role of Leadership

You may also have a sub-subculture in a perhaps almost self-contained territory called the Leadership Team. Conventional wisdom says that they represent the corporate culture. My unconventional-less-wisdom says that most of the time they represent themselves, their own ecosystem, their own island.

Dysfunctional leadership teams seem to coexist with rather healthy and successful subcultures, and some dysfunctional organizations seem to have a good functional top. And combinations.

Ah! I wish something could correlate with anything in the organizational world.

As leader, I have a strong recommendation: don’t be shy to talk about culture. If people begin yawning, wake them up. If they smile, smile back and ask why. If they say ‘here we go again’, stop and have a conversation.

As leader you will probably not be shy to talk about performance. Apply the same to culture. Leaders are curators of cultures. And all this is happening in the A list of things. Not the B.

____________________________________________________

The Culture Labs

We have a simple vehicle to address your culture challenges. In just 2-3 months we will get to the bottom of your culture issues and provide you with a carefully crafted action plan.

Our expert consultants have transformed multinational organizations for 20+ years, and are ready to support you in accelerating your strategy through culture change.

Do you want to learn more? 
Book a short, explorative call with my team via (+44) 01895 549158  or [email protected] [19].

Culture is the new workplace

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Corporate anthropology,Culture,culture and behaviours | No Comments

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 no zooms, work from home or work from anywhere. It’s the wrong start.

The conversation is about the culture you have, want, need, hate, want to reshape. The culture as the petri dish where everything grows, good or bad. Focus on culture. This is the real driver. This is the true conversation.

If the post-pandemic triggers any conversation at all, culture is the literature. Workplace is the grammar.

The culture of your company is your workplace now.  If anything, the workplace/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 a grammatical issue.

___________________________________________________

Petri dish is the company culture, where everything grows.

Imagine that everybody did (behaviour here), that it became the norm, a routine; what kind of organization would we be building? This ‘imagine if’ test is at the core of the way we need to map behaviours.

Culture is not a closed container of things such as beliefs, attitudes, values, behaviours, and logos. Intellectually it may be stimulating to use all these terms but pragmatically other than the visible logo the only other observable things are behaviours.

________________________________________________

Webinar: The Myths of Cultural Change 
Stuck using old concepts, we have made culture change hard and often impossible. The failure of communication programmes or ‘culture training’ tells us a lot about the myths in this area. Learn how to successfully mobilize your people for a purpose and change culture. Culture is now ‘the strategy’, but we need to get rid of some assumptions and learn inconvenient truths.

Watch now [17] 

_________________________________________________
New from The Chalfont Project – a simple and carefully crafted vehicle, offering
a fast review of your culture change plans and actionable recommendations to implement changes.
Learn more.. [11]

Peer-to-peer is the strongest engine of change

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Change, Leadership and Society,Culture,culture and behaviours,Management of Change,Peer to peer infuence | No Comments

Welcome to my weekly focus on culture change, leadership and organizational design. This week, I focus on what culture is, how behaviours create culture and the importance of peer-to-peer networks in achieving large scale, sustainable cultural change.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Extracts taken from my book ‘The Flipping Point‘. [20] 

Culture is hard stuff

Culture is the difference between 30 people making a decision in 30 days, or 3 people making the same decision in 3 days. Culture is the difference between hiring costly employees and retaining them, or hiring costly employees and losing them after 6 months. Culture is the difference between making a decision and implementing it, or making the same decision and waiting to see if it sticks or people take it seriously. Culture is the difference between agreeing the plan in the meeting room, or trashing it at the break in the toilets. Culture is hard stuff. Do you need me to give you an ROI on these differences?

I use lots of these examples to show that culture is ‘hard’, not ‘soft’. Anybody with a calculator can see it.
Behaviours create culture, not the other way around. Change behaviours get culture.

Behaviours are copied and scaled up peer-to-peer. Everybody copies everybody but some people are more copy-able than others. It turns out that 5 – 10% have very high (non-hierarchical) influence. Find them, ask for help and give them support. Tell stories of success all the time. Make sure leaders do support the peer-to-peer work, but don’t interfere. This is the ‘what’ of Viral Change™  [1]in a box. The ‘how’ is what I do for a living.
Peer-to-peer is stronger than managerial top down
Peer power: if managers say, ‘safety is first’, the impact may be relative. The dictation is totally expected. This is what they are supposed to say. If my peer says, ‘safety is first’, I’m beginning to pay attention. It’s not expected, we were talking football and holidays. (what is the matter with him?) But I hear it. Tell me more. Peer-to-peer is stronger than managerial top down.

Peer power: Peer-to-peer is the strongest source or engine of change and mobilization inside any organization.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Peer-to-Peer Influence

More and more, the neat and innovative work is taking place outside the formal, hierarchical structures, in the informal networks of the organization. Extend your reading on this topic – with free material available on our Academy [21] site, material includes:

 

 

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Behavioural Based Change Resources

Behaviours are at the heart of Viral Change™ [1] because only behavioural change is real change. Behavioural change is sustainable and scaleable as behaviours creates cultures – not the other way around. For a deeper dive into this area, download our Behaviours Part 1 [22].  This material includes:

 

________________________________________________________________________________________________
Previous issues on behaviours:

Habits have no meaning, they create it. Start with behaviours,
get meaning

Only behavioural change is real change [23]

Start with behaviours, get meaning

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Behavioural Change,Behavioural Economics,Change, Leadership and Society,Culture,culture and behaviours | No Comments

For those of you not yet familiar with the change. Daily Thoughts has evolved. New name and format. Rather than daily, I will share with you a weekly focus on culture change, leadership and organizational design fit for the future.

This week, I continue my focus on behaviours, looking at the importance of habits in creating meaning when it comes to large scale behavioural change.

 

 

 

Habits have no meaning, they create it. Start with behaviours, get meaning

In my organizational consulting work, and in behavioural terms, I am very used to being told, and challenged, that there is no point focusing on behaviours (as we do with my team) if people ‘don’t mean it’. The conventional wisdom is that meaning is first (intellectually, from your heart) and then behaviours are the output, the consequence; that behaviours by people who ‘don’t really mean it’ are simply useless.

There is a logic behind this. It is the Homo Sapiens logic. The well regarded view-of-our-selves that makes us feel superior, in full control of our actions.

This is, however, in contradiction with reality, where, every day, we all have plenty of things we do as habits, which would be very difficult to associate to a ‘previous meaning’.

We do things, we establish routines, and we don’t ask ourselves whether we mean them or not.

We just do them.

 

This is important because behaviours are copied (Homo Imitans) and therefore good routines and habits, if collective, are likely to be copied and multiplied. I have just described culture in the above line.

With my behavioural hat on, I prefer, a thousand times more people establishing some habits, adopting some behaviours, whether they mean it or not (and see afterwards the consequences of the circumstances that they themselves have created) than being stuck looking for the cognitive full understanding first. Translation: for example, in large scale organizational change, start adopting some key behaviours, creating some critical mass and then ‘find the meaning’. I know that this is unconventional and a bit counter intuitive in traditional organizational development. I also know that Homo Sapiens readers interpret this as a rejection or dismissal of cognition, reflection and critical thinking. Far from it. But in organizational terms, we cannot simply wait for the sequence ‘understanding-internalization-emotional integration-aha!-action’, for everybody on the payroll.

Routines and habits create meaning, at least as much, if not more, than the other way around.

People going to the gym every day become more aware of their health, more than people aware of their health decide to go to the gym. Religious rituals create belief, more than belief creates religious rituals.

In large scale behavioural change, define key behaviours and make them live and multiply them; and don’t worry about whether people ‘mean them or not’. Meaning will come.

I know Homo Sapiens do not like this, but I am writing here on behalf of Homo Imitans. [4]

________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

 

The Myths of Change [24]
Traditional management and a great deal of academic thinking is responsible for the colossal failure of ‘change programmes’.

This webinar, part of a series of 5 webinars, debunks uncontested assumptions in this area and uncovers the alternatives, whilst considering why this debunking of myths is even more relevant today in the current exceptional environment.

To drive change which makes organizations fit for the future, we must think and act differently in the management of our organizations, particularly in the areas of change and transformation. We must abandon change as something imposed in favour of people becoming true agents.

Organizations that have mastered this have been ‘fit for the future’ for a while!

Behaviours Create Culture

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Behavioural Change,Behavioural Economics,Change, Leadership and Society,Culture,culture and behaviours | No Comments

Daily Thoughts has evolved. New name and format. Rather than daily, I will share with you a weekly focus on culture change, leadership and organizational design fit for the future.

As we move into a new month, my focus is now on behaviours. “There is no change without behavioural change”.

 

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.

You need to uncover the non negotiable behaviours

The trouble with value systems is that, very often, they have no proper translation into pragmatic and visible expectations that can be rewarded or not, accepted or not, and into something with unequivocal meaning. I have just defined ‘behaviours’.

For those of us sitting with one foot in the Behavioural Sciences, the use of the term ‘behaviour’ is far more restricted than the average often seen next to many vision and mission statements. For many years now, since the word ‘behaviour’ became more fashionable in the corporate and HR language, behavioural statements have populated Values/Mission/Vision sets, added there with the hope of increasing their ‘practical weight’.

But adding or labelling something as ‘behaviour’ does not make it one. Many behavioural translations of Values remain trapped into circular explanations, saying the same with different words. ‘Honesty’ as a value, as an example, could be ‘translated’ and explained as: ‘Act with sincerity and authenticity; be candid and open; create trust’. Which explains absolutely nothing about honesty, but looks like a solid line of ‘explanations’. Just hope that the consultant’s bill was not too high.

Creating a set of behaviours that are visible, reward-able, concrete and, above all, have unequivocal meaning, is key to being able to use them as a currency in the organization. (Honesty, sincerity, authenticity, candour, openness and trust do have equivocal meaning. None of them are behaviours).

Behaviours create cultures. Master behaviours, agree upon them, declare the non negotiable ones, spread them, and you’ll get culture. 

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Homo Imitans

The Art of Social Infection; Viral Change™  In Action

Behaviours change culture, not the other way around. The spread of behaviours is the real source of social change. Behavioural imitation explains how social change happens, how epidemics of ideas are formed, how social fashions appear and how company cultures shape and reshape themselves. This book addresses Viral Change™ in action, showing that the more primal ‘Homo Imitans’ is still a powerful force. Understanding how social, behavioural infection works is the basis for the orchestration of any ‘epidemic of success’, be it a successful change inside a firm or a counter-social epidemic to tackle negative socio-macro phenomena.

Read chapter extract here [25]

 

Why getting rid of inefficient processes in the organization is so hard. Anthropology explains it.

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Culture,culture and behaviours,Rituals | No Comments

I had a discussion with a client recently, about the resistance to get rid of complicated processes that almost everybody agrees are, yes, too complicated, too long and even unnecessary, at least in their present forms.

The client had brought in expert management consultants to ‘inject simplicity’. Over a few weeks, they had dissected every single overweight and overgrown key process and come up with recommendations to streamline, change and even kill.

Months after that forensic expedition, a fraction of those recommendations had been implemented, and people continued to complain about the ‘growing complexity of their processes’. How come?

You can blame leadership, or a culture of ‘poor follow up’ or any other systemic ill. Not obvious, by the way, in that particular client. But chances are the reasons are more primal and only understood from an anthropological perspective.

Most inefficient processes that stay in place in defiance of logic, and that seem to be resistant to modification, may be so stable because they are very effective. And something else, their efficiency as processes may be low and frustrating, but they may be very effective as rituals.

The consultants brought in were not anthropologists, so they did not see the same world as anthropologists do. They were (very good) experts in ‘plumbing efficiency’ and discovered that the decision making pipes of the company had many of those pipes, many turns, many twists, many loops and many itineraries. They saw the process, not the ritual.

An organizational ritual provides the glue for people. Preparing a budget to present to somebody who needs the presentation to present to somebody higher, who will sanction the budget via that presentation, is a ritual. Dozens and dozens of people are involved, lots of meetings to discuss, don’t forget the rehearsals and ‘run throughs’. The involvement, the discussions, the meetings, the rehearsals, the visual representation into a corporate formatted PowerPoint, are at least as important as the content.

In ritual terms, that needs time and space. In process-efficiency terms, you could cut the whole thing easily by 50%. But if you did, you would eliminate part of the glue: people defending positions, playing their personal power-capital, testing each other, protecting the turf, enjoying deep and rational discussions (‘hard work’), establishing alliances, protecting against the enemy, performing, including some, excluding others, etc. And suppressing these would be a big problem in the absence of another platform in which all those games of power and inclusiveness could take place. Eliminating the campfire without an alternative does not sound a good idea.

Part of a ritual is its intrinsic perseverance. ‘The presentation’ (the nomadic expedition)  comes back via those twisted and convoluted pipes that the simplicity consultants hated, only to say that all is very well, good job, could you please cut the budget by 10%? That triggers ritual part 2 called ‘we need to find 5 million’. And this is a ritual as important as the previous one, now even more challenging. In fact, tribe members thrive in these alpha male and alpha female exercises where everybody talks about the difficulty of the task and the ‘hard reality of these times of budget constrains’. (I have never seen better employee engagement than a bunch of executives finding cuts in budgets).

A simple recollection of the previous 5 years of budget processes (rituals) would have shown in less than 5 minutes that, systematically, every year, the budget ‘presentation’ travels back down the pipes with a request of at least a 10% cut. I could hear the simplicity-efficient consultants shouting, for goodness sake, present three budgets: inflated by 10%, as is, and minus 10%! Wow! That would be very efficient as a process. But not as effective as a ritual.

You can’t kill a ritual easily. But you can kill a process. The question is, which of the two do you see?

If you see high ritualisation, you have to see what that ritual is effective for, and somehow cater for those needs.

In my personal experience, when I bring the topic to a table of frustrated team members, project managers and receiving leaders, and disclose the differences between (and the coexistence of) an utterly inefficient process and an incredibly robust effective ritual, eyes are often opened and we can tackle both in equal terms. Formidable conversations appear over that new campfire. Then, we improve the process big time, and we start a conversation about culture. All in one.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

For an example of the power of Viral Change and the work we do at The Chalfont Project [18] read about GSK Vaccines’ culture transformation: championing catalytic change. [26] (article written by: Hilton Barbour).

The Organizational Logic: the basic people algorithms that steer the navigation. Reframing the company steering system. (2 of 5)

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Complexity,Corporate anthropology,Culture,culture and behaviours | No Comments

Yesterday’s Daily Thought [27] introduced the formula:

(1) Space in the World (Purpose) + (2) Core Beliefs + (3) Non negotiable Behaviours + (4) Organization Logic (Basic People Algorithms) = (5) Company Constitution

What is the Organizational Logic? It is the set of People Algorithms that constitute the basic Code under which the company needs to operate.

Example of the algorithm: ‘If there is problem in A, it is solved in A and not escalated to B, unless X happens’. Rule: an algorithm needs to fit into a maximum of two lines. These are like the code of the operating system. Rule 2: you must have a maximum of 10 algorithms in the company. In a large set up you may need some extra for specific areas, but you should never go beyond 10-15 basic algorithms. If you find yourself going that way, you are writing literature, not grammar.

No, this is not the complex ‘governance’ structure usually reserved to describe ‘who does what’ and who is allowed or expected to make particular decisions, a Rights System. The algorithms sit lower than that, underneath it all, at DNA (values, non negotiable behaviour) level. Organizational logic is to Grammar what Governance is to Literature.

To reiterate, ‘If there is problem in A, it is solved in A and not escalated to B, unless X happens’ is an algorithm. ‘All projects in Product Development are reviewed every month at a Product Review Committee, whose members are F,G,H’, is governance.

What is the connection between beliefs and the logic? In the example above, the belief is that people should be empowered (and that people will accept the empowerment) to deal with ‘A problems’. An opposite belief is, ‘we don’t trust people to do that, so we promote escalation’.

In an escalation system of beliefs, everything goes up and ends up with the Board. Or it does not. Interestingly, escalation cultures create their own unintended consequences of self-defence. Knowing that everything escalates, secrecy and ‘protected bubbles’ appear, and subtle (or not that subtle) conspiracies of silence are generated. Example: the banks. Ok, some banks. Despite their monolithic appearance to mortals like myself, many banks are organised in tribes: ‘the traders desk’, ‘the retail group’ etc. Many recent big fiascos have taken place at ‘trading desks’ that self-protected themselves (as good tribes do, after all, it may be you next time) and they ‘did not escalate’ issues or dealings in ‘grey areas’.

Spending time and investing serious leadership efforts in establishing ‘The (Organizational) Logic’, shortcuts months of alignment in the maturity curve. Usually it all starts with ‘it will be impossible to write the Logic down’, or ‘there will be dozens, if not hundreds, of algorithms’. Once a bit of settling in has taken place, this upfront panicking reduces and people progress, with joy, to the discovery of the very few lines of ‘code’ that should inform everything.

Next is ‘Non Negotiable Behaviours’.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

What are your culture challenges?

Let us help you build the culture you want.
Culture is the new workplace.

 

Conversations about the future of work, don’t start with hybrid vs. non-hybrid, flexible vs. non-flexible, work from home vs. work from anywhere. It’s the wrong start!

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

We want to hear from you!

What current culture challenge is your team/department/organization facing?  Send your number one challenge to us and we will come back to you individually with some expert resources from our extensive experience in behavioural and cultural change. Email your challenge to: [email protected] [28]

For more complex challenges, we would be more than happy to discuss these with you. Email us at: [email protected] [29] and one of our team will be in touch.

 

Beyond mission and vision …and the rest. Reframing the company steering system in 2021. (1 of 5)

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

Many companies operate under some sort of ‘Mission and Vision’ framework, often also accompanied, or preceded, by a statement of values. This is fundamental to good governance. It has however become such a ‘default position’ that the model has aged, and, in the process of growing its own grey hair, it has endured a fair dose of abuse, criticism and cynicism.

There are hilarious websites that can create mission and vision statements for you via simple permutations. Those missions and visions often seem undifferentiated and equally applicable to both, your hi-tech business and your neighbourhood hairdresser.

The mature ‘vision and mission system’ has created its own memes: self-contained sentences that have a life of their own. ‘Exceed customer expectations’, ‘maximise shareholder value’ and more recently, ‘positive impact in the communities we operate ’ are examples of them.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong, nor that I particularly dislike the old frame. But I have found the need to move on to more contemporary frames. To the cynical eye, it may look like simple semantic tricks. To the clinical eye, you will see that it is definitely more than that, and a different frame altogether.

My hope is that people don’t stop at the possible attraction of the freshness of the language. Conceptually this is not entirely new, but it pushes people away from the default position, whilst pointing to the direction of a perhaps  entirely new game. At least this is how I coach and help my clients.

The frame I am now using with my clients reads like this:

 (1) Space in the World (Purpose) + (2) Core Beliefs + (3) Non negotiable Behaviours + (4) Organization Logic (Basic People Algorithms) = (5) Company Constitution

I will deal with each piece of the formula separately in a few Daily Thoughts, starting at the bottom and going backwards. Then I will put it all back together.

The last bit (5) is simple, to explain here briefly. Why ‘Constitution’? I think that the model of Citizenship is more appropriate than Employee-ship in the modern company. It has the potential ability to host better things such as activism, responsibility (individual and collective), rights, vision of the common good and overall purpose. ‘Constitution’ has a more powerful frame to express the purpose, the reason for existence and being the home of the rules of the game.

There are two basic reasons why we change the labels of things. One, because we can (for the sake of it, or fashion, or boredom or a colossal branding consulting bill), or because we want to steer meaning into a new direction. I hope the latter prevails here.

More later. Tomorrow I am moving backwards in the formula, and I will introduce ‘The People Algorithms’.

Do come back.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

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

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

 

Start your conversation with us today. We can support you and your organization on your culture journey.  Contact us at [email protected]  [30] or visit. [31]

 

 

Obituary: Incrementalism

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Culture,culture and behaviours | No Comments

Please pray for the soul of incrementalism that, after a long and slow incremental illness, left us for good. After so many years of service and so many Continuous Improvement Programmes, fatigue took its toll. All sorts of incremental remedies were used in the effort to prolong life, to no avail.

Incrementalism is survived by their partner of many years One-Thing-At-A-Time, and their two children Take-Risks-But-Not-Too-Much and Rome-Was-Not-Built-In-A-Day.

The funeral has been planned for next month to allow for relatives and sympathizers to come from everywhere in the world. In particular, the following have announced their presence so far: Patience, Compromise, and the owner of the largest mind tranquilizer  factory, ‘We are all saying the same, but with different words’.

Incrementalism is said to leave behind a large fortune to be used mainly in the creation of a new Slow and Painful Change Foundation.

RIP

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

Culture is the new workplace.

Read Hilton Barbour’s recent article: Championing the Catalytic Change at GSK Vaccines [32], about the work we’re doing with GSK.

We’d love to hear from you.  Our team of experts are here to discuss your culture change needs. Contact us [14] to find out more.