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.

• Social Capital refers to the quality and quantity of an individual’s relationships. Employees with strong social capital are better able to collaborate, solve problems, and build consensus.
• Emotional capital refers to an individual’s ability to manage their own emotions and the emotions of others. Employees with high emotional capital are more resilient, adaptable, and effective leaders.

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.

Mobilizing people. This is another of the Holy Grails (how many have I said we have?) in management. Whether you look at this from the angle of productivity, employee engagement, or any other, the key is ‘Mobilizing People’. Actually, I propose to change the word ‘leaders’ to ‘mobilizers’. Mmm, I won’t win this one. How do you create a social movement? Perhaps a good start is to look at – well, social movements. OK, you don’t see this as a ‘standard management practice’. I do. The answers to better management, exciting management, and new, innovative management in 2023 are at their best when distant from ‘management science’. Old toolkits are gone! Where are the new toolkits? They need to be reinvented. Culture shaping (forming, changing, transforming, growing…) is the development and management of an internal social movement. Yes, a la ‘social movement’, as read in Sociology, Anthropology, Political Science, and Political Marketing and very little, if not zero, in MBA curricula. I could go on for hours on this topic. It’s one of my favourites, full of hope and expectations, but I said this is a Cheat Sheet, so I will have to send the Bullet Points Brigade. 1. (Re)frame the narrative. Acknowledge a spectrum of motives. Example: Take Obama to the White House (2008, 2012 movements), Fix health care, Decrease Inequality, better Human Rights and Justice, for example, were co-existing narratives. Not one. Corporate listen to the one, single, overriding, all-singing-the-same-song narrative. Have different frames, no one. ‘One only’ is a mistake. 2. Acknowledge the above differences, so accept also different, co-existing types of fellow travellers and frames.  However, agree on non-negotiable behaviours. This is the universal bit. Don’t compromise with it. Get it wrong, no glue, no movement, all in different directions. 3. Define the tribes. Peer-to-peer, bottom-up, self-organizing- whatever you want to call it in the organization, is tribal. Influence is horizontal. I did not say teams, divisions, functions or Task Forces. I said, tribes. If you don’t know your tribe, hire an anthropologist. Or us. 4. Fix coexisting expectations. Get them in the open. Brief and debrief. Define the rules. Activism is to act. Clicktivism is to click and say ‘like’. Donate is to donate. Advocacy is to say ‘I endorse, this is good’. Corporations are notorious for mixing up concepts and pretending that they are all equal. Nope. If you like clicking and we are here all for acting, this is not your social movement, sorry. 5. Engage the hyper-connected. If you want to infect (behaviours, values, ways), you’d better find the nodes of high connectivity. It can be done. We do this in our organizational work. You miss the hyper-connected, but you have a bunch of passion, forget it. I know it is not much of a PC statement, but it’s true. (Please don’t ignore ‘passion’, but between a bunch of poorly connected passionate people and a group of highly connected and influent dispassionate, I choose the latter for the work and the former for the bar) “Backstage Leadership™ is the art of giving the stage to those with high capacity of multiplication and amplification, the hyper-connected.” 6. Focus on grassroots. Organise grassroots. Learn about grassroots. Became a Grassroots Master. The Obama campaigns focused on ‘it’s all about you, guys, not the one with the speeches’. It is grassroots, or it isn’t. Many Corporate/Organizational development groups haven’t got a clue about grassroots. They think it has something to do with the gardens. 7. Practice Backstage Leadership™. The key type of leadership in social movement making/organizational culture shaping is Backstage Leadership™, not Front Running Leadership with PowerPoint. Backstage Leadership™ is the art of giving the stage to those with high capacity of multiplication and amplification, the hyper-connected from grassroots, very often a rather invisible and not very noisy bunch, as compared with the ones with the Communications Drums. 8. Track progress. Set indicators. But these are not the traditional KPIs. Before creating measurements, ask yourself a simple question: what do I want to measure? What do I want to see? Which is different from ‘what I can measure’, and ‘what everybody measures. In Viral Change™ for example, we measure the progression of behaviours and stories, quantity and quality. 9. Master a fantastic Storytelling System that has two opposite origins meeting in the middle: top-down from the formal leaders (yes, we have formal leaders, you have formal leaders as well) and bottom-up from the grassroots. In the job structure, make sure that whoever is in charge of Storytelling’, is ‘the best paid’. It pays off to pay him/her well. Storytelling is the glue of change. 10. Go back to number one and down again.

Learn more about Viral Change™ and its applications here [1]. Reach out to my team to learn more via [email protected]

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

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

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

Some behavioural economists such as the prolific Cass Sunstein ^[2] have argued that people who are polarised, when discussing in a group situation end up being even more polarised. Those experimental social studies do not sync too well with the reality, a fact very common in social science unfortunately. The reality is that people can change their minds even if they were polarised on one side of the argument. The pro-life study that I mentioned above is a good reminder of our human flexibility (or the power of homo imitans ^[3]as I have described in my book).

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

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

John le Carré ^[4] said that ‘a desk is a dangerous place from where to see the world’. Probably we could say that a desk is a dangerous place from where to expect people to change their minds or anything.

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

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

 

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

 

Change is social, doing it together, a praxis. The modern Kyoto Zen school is truly rich in observations. The Roman vs Greek comparison is very present in recent Taleb ^[5] writings. The ‘collapsing the distinction between knowing and doing’ is of course on the Zen side.

 

Extract from my book: The Flipping point – Deprogramming Management. ^[6]

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

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

I suggest we aim at a package of shifts in organizational life: a 10 point manifesto, the Remarkable Organization Manifesto (AKA about time we move in these new directions. Here it is:

1. From a multitude of ‘methods’ for a multitude of initiatives that solve problems more or less but left no legacy behind, to a single Mobilizing Platform with rules of the game that builds constant capacity. No apologies, for us this is Viral Change™
2. From ‘culture’ as a project, to the shaping and curating of an internal social movement (tip, don’t look in the MBA books)
3. From prima donna push systems (communications), to both push and pull systems (communications + behavioural) that work in tandem
4. From obsession with processes to leading through behaviours
5. From top down organising and dictating to bottom up grassroots organising
6. From predominant hierarchical influence to the wide use and orchestration of peer-to-peer influence and networks
7. From a primary formal organization with its overgrown structures of teams, committees and task forces, to a healthy and leading informal organization
8. From overwhelming top down narrative systems (missions, visions and the rest) to organic bottom up storytelling
9. From top down leadership domination to top down working with a powerful distributed leadership system and supporting it ‘backstage’
10. From ‘change’ and change management to ability to change and creation of a permanent state of readiness.

We are in serious need of these shifts. The music has been there for a while, but I have not seen the orchestra, so I suspect there is an organizational development conspiracy in the form of a massive MP3 of some sort.

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Continue the conversation….

Learn how to successfully mobilize your people!

 

Do you want to learn how to successfully mobilize your people for a purpose and change culture? Culture is the key to the complex post Covid-19 future in front of us.  Join us on 16th July, 18:00 BST/19:00 CET for our free webinar on The Myths of Company Culture ^[7].

Stuck in old concepts, we have made culture change hard and often impossible. The failure of communication programmes or ‘culture training’ tell us a lot about the myths in this area. Learn how to successfully mobilize your people for a purpose and change culture. Culture is the key to the complex post Covid-19 future in front of us. Over the Covid-19 peak across the world we have seen the best and the worst of company cultures. Sometimes it felt like a pressure cooker. Culture is now ‘the strategy’, but we need to get rid of some assumptions and learn inconvenient truths.

Register Now! ^[7]

 

Each participant who attends any of the live webinars of the Feed Forward series will be eligible for one copy of The Flipping Point ^[6].

 

____________________________________________________________________________________________

Contact us ^[8] to find out more about engaging Dr Leandro Herrero for speaking opportunities ^[8] with your company.

A social movement is not a bunch of people, even hundreds, or thousands, moving socially. A social movement needs a purpose, people joining it, and doing things together, usually until the goal is reached, or everybody gets tired, or whatever comes first. Social movements have their own life cycle. Some of them make it, some don’t.

Businesses and organizational life have discovered the language and is ready to incorporate it. But there are some misconceptions that could kill the concept in corporate life.

I have been an armchair scholar of social movements for a long time. With my behavioural sciences and consulting hats on, my interest is in people mobilization at a scale. And the world has plenty of examples, so no shortage of insights. There is, however, one area of human collective behaviour and mobilization where the social movement frame has been historically absent: the company. The size of the company may be huge, but nobody has ever been interested in seeing its functioning and its people mobilization as a social movement. Until now.

Yes, this is changing now, slowly. In my consulting activity, we certainly see it like this, and see our client’s challenges through these glasses. If you want accountability, customer-centrism or, say, agility, it does not get better than creating an internal social movement that can deliver accountability, customer-centrism or agility. Not a ‘change management  programme’. When we use these glasses, all the logic of the social movement, the things that work and the bits that don’t, are there, in front of us. And we orchestrate this.

But, some warnings. We need to distinguish the real social movement from lots of people, making lots of noise socially. A social movement needs a platform, a mobilizing platform. One that creates long term capacity for the movement, not one that simply facilitates the interaction of people during one-off large events. Large events that create high motivation, high commitment and high energy, are not social movements, no matter how large these events are, unless there is an ongoing continuity and activity with check points and recalibrations days, weeks or months after ‘the event’.

I have written before that there is a crucial word missing in Margaret Mead’s ^[9] famous quote: ‘Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has’. The word missing is the word ‘organized’, as in organized, committed citizens.

There is a lot of writing these days about using the ‘people movement’ model of actions to solve lots of organizational and business problems. And it usually comes with the warning that it will be, will have to be, messy, emergent, chaotic, un-managed. Apparently, some good will then come of it.

I could not disagree more. The movement needs a mobilizing platform. It will not be messy, it will be organised, and will have to be managed. There is fear in some quarters that these three characteristics are against the idea of the social movement in itself. But the only thing that these three characteristics are against are irrelevance and premature death.

The chaotic element of the social movement is usually ‘explained’ by historical examples such as the human rights movement. But Luther King did not have a twitter account. Not that I am suggesting the difference today is only social media. The point is that today we have mechanisms for the social movement to work faster, better and in more innovative ways, whilst leaving behind a legacy of how people can organise themselves and join in for a cause. It’s the platform that makes the difference. And it works exactly the same outside organizations in the macro-social world, and inside organizations, as we do with our clients via Viral Change™.

Nothing is a movement until it proves that it moves. Until then, it may be a festival, a social media frenzy, thousands in the streets, a protest group, an issues media campaign, a series of one-off large events that are good at creating awareness, corporate flash-mobs in a Sheraton or Holiday Inn.  All of the above. But not a movement. In social movements, we move, we don’t only sing and powerpoint each other.

This phrase is attributed to the physicist Wolfgang Pauli ^[10], who also described some arguments or theories as so bad that they were ‘not even wrong’.

What is clarity of thinking? Is it the same as simplicity? Does clarity mean truth? Do ‘confused’ arguments make them wrong?

I have written many times about Critical Thinking and the need to find a way to inject this into the water supply of our organizations. I have designed a Critical Thinking programme for one of my clients and explored hundreds of sources in the quest for the right combination of ideas, toolkits and practical applications for everybody in the company. In this journey, I have become more aware, more excited about the topic, and more sceptical about what passes as ‘serious thinking’ in our business organizations.

Every ‘pret-a-porter’ template, off-the-shelve programme with its set of ‘the 10 things leaders do’, contains the seeds of Outsourced Thinking. Yet, we need tools, and ‘maps’, and types of help to navigate through the enterprise. The issue is neither to accept them blindly, nor to discard them completely. It is about exercising the discipline of thinking critically and making sense of the maps and tools we choose to use.

The beauty of Pauli’s harsh language is that it confronts us with our own deficiencies, and forces us to bring more rigour and more logic to the party. Our management teams, our consultants, our Boards, ourselves, we are all in need of a good dose of the Critical Thinking vaccine.

In some places, not being ‘able to tell whether something is nonsense or not’, is endemic. Truths come in a bundle with half truths and no truth at all, ‘management consulting findings’ are dressed up as scientific data, and sets of assumptions are elevated to the category of reality.

But, I think that I got this business of ‘injecting Critical Thinking into the water supply of the organization’ wrong. Too late. The target should be our primary and secondary school systems.

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, or Employee Engagement, or other, the key is ‘Mobilizing People’. Actually, I propose to change the word ‘leaders’ for ‘mobilizers’. Mmm, I won’t win this one.

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

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

I could go on for hours on this topic, 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. Fix healthcare, Decrease Inequality, better Human Rights and Justice, for example, as co-existing narratives. Not one. Corporate listen: the one, single, overriding, all-singing-the-same-song, narrative works in North Korea. Have different frames, not one. ‘Only one’ 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 tribes, hire an anthropologist. Or us.

4. Fix co-existing expectations. Get them in the open. Brief and debrief. Define the rules. Activism is to act. Click-tivism is to click and say ‘like’. Donate is to donate. Advocacy is to say ‘I endorse, this is good’. Corporate is notorious for mixing up concepts and pretending that they are all equal. Nope. If you like clicking and we are all here 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 it in our organizational work. You miss the hyper-connected, but you have a bunch of passionate, 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 dispassionates, I choose the latter for the work and the former for the bar).

6. Focus on grassroots. Organise grassroots. Learn about grassroots. Become a Grassroots Master. 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 the  PowerPoint. Backstage Leadership™  is the art of giving the stage to those who have the highest capacity to multiply and amplify, the hyper-connected from the grassroots level, very often a rather invisible and not very noisy bunch, 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 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 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 go down again.

Months ago, I found myself in front of a large audience composed of the highest ranks of the HR function within the Civil Service, the ones hiring the best minds to serve in many places of the Government of the country. I made a comment in passing about the need to know people beyond the superficial managerial relationship yet respect their space and individuality. In that particular sector, the turnover was very low, and only recently people had started moving across departments. In that context, the top managers told me that they knew their people quite well, working closely with them, with the same ones, all the time. Something made me feel that this was more of an assumption than fact, given the array of ‘people issues’ that they seemed to tackle. I suggested that perhaps because they knew them so well, they did not know them at all.

In throwing this little grenade, I was thinking of what the late John O’Donohue ^[11] said in his bestseller Anam Cara. He told the story of the Latin American writer and Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927-2014) who said of his wife ‘“I know her so well now that I have not the slightest idea who she is.” Which is a poetic version of the Hegelian ^[12] ‘the familiar, precisely because it is familiar, remains unknown’.

The familiarity of people working with us all the time gives us an illusion of proximity, but often we don’t know them. Their presence (our presence) is predictable, perhaps very pleasant, perhaps not, but not necessarily a reason to understand the individual working with us, or for us.

I suggested in my talk that leaders should make a concerted effort to get closer not to people who they don’t know, but to people ‘they know well’, and let a deeper understanding emerge. I have associated Leadership to the creation of space. This space for people, for all of us, brings the hidden humanity to the surface. Who knows, we may discover unknown skills or interests, or simply a completely different version of ‘the colleague’.

At a structural level, very close teams, very used to each other in the team, very familiar with each others thinking, may be a barrier for new ideas and innovation. Letting the hidden humanity out (social-ability and social space) may just discover a completely different set of colleagues.

That was perhaps the more interesting thing about that gathering of Civil Servants and myself; the rest perhaps forgotten, who knows. I don’t know them well, so I think I know what their challenges are.

Is LinkedIn a Digital Rolodex? A digital Resume/CV Library? Do you connect with people who have already given you the business card, sort of? Some LinkedIn members adhere to the rule of not accepting connections from people they don’t know. Indeed this is a LinkedIn recommendation and part of the system, as they describe and explain.  Other people accept everybody who asks. Obviously, these are two very different interpretations of ‘linking in’. For the former, LinkedIn is a controlled acceptance of being part of my ‘library’. For the latter, it is partially the same, but the primary goal, stated or not, is to increase the size of the network. And this increase is likely to take place via people you don’t know, that is a, ‘Weak Link In’.

‘Weak Links’ (technically ‘Weak Ties’), are an old sociological concept that has proven very valuable. They are the opposite to  ‘Strong Links’ (technically ‘Strong Ties’)

In 1973, the sociologist Mark Granovetter ^[13], wrote a very important article with the title: ‘The Strength of Weak Ties’. The title says it all. Your weak ties (people you don’t know well, a bit distant, not strong connections, but certainly not zero) open your horizons. In Granovetter’s research, the chances of getting recommended for a job are greater when coming from weak ties (people who don’t know you well) than from strong ties (people who know you well; too well?). That was a counter-intuitive finding at the time, as much as today.

LinkedIn is obviously a spectrum of Weak and Strong Ties. People very protective of their connections, who will never accept anybody who is not ‘known to them’, create a digital Rolodex and, in the extreme, miss the point completely in terms of the Granovetter factor.  Other people on the other side of the spectrum, create a wealth of Weak Ties (the Strong Ties are a given, but may be a small part) and they are higher in ‘connectivity  strength’, using Granovetter’s concept.

I think there is a case for a Linked Out (as in out in the world) system. Social networking today is the vehicle for Strong and Weak ties. Concepts are now completely redefined in digital terms. We need more research to define which ones are more powerful. My gut feeling is that Granovetter still wins today.

From time to time you see the occasional and mostly not very solid comparisons between ‘the company’ and a religion. It is usually done in the context of explaining the need for extraordinary commitment, a sort of Mother of All Employee Engagement models. These comparisons are not taken very seriously and it’s easy to understand why.

Another model of engagement has compared the commitment of employees to the military ‘tour of duty’. A kind of time-limited mutual contract in which for the commitment to the ‘tour’, the employee gets compensation, protection and skilling.

I think that new generations of employees are pointing us to a different direction. Even if it is a gross generalization to talk about ‘new generations’, Millennial for example, it is true that there is a shift towards ‘purpose’ and being part of it. Equally tempting and risky is the generalization towards ‘purpose’, particularly social purpose and societal impact. However, all these shifts, overestimated or not, should makes us think of the reasons why employees may join an enterprise in future. The modern enterprise, and the one described in textbooks, or even the one in existence until recently, is not anymore a solid model for the future. There is little ‘built to last’ around, but little excitement as well for ‘maximising shareholder value’ as the Mother of All Motivations.

I believe ‘the cause’ may give us better clues. Joining a cause, small or being, is joining a common sense of purpose and a shared commitment to action. Asking ourselves about ‘the cause’ that may be behind what we do in organizations, goes well beyond the rather cold description of missions and visions. The problem is that many leaders may have difficulties in articulating their cause, their company cause. They don’t think in these terms. Take this as an example.

Is the cause of pharmaceutical company X to (a) develop a medicine for Y; (b) cure Y; (c) eradicate Y; (d) transform the way Medicine is practiced when dealing with Y; (e) bring total health to Y sufferers; (f) prevent Y; (g) have and give immense joy and fun for employees working there; (g) enhance the shareholder value of people putting money in?

At this point, our minds get uncomfortable with the multiple choice and start looking for the comfort behind ‘surely some of them; they are not incompatible’. But I think this is a trick. Other than possible incompatibilities (e.g. the company is simply not set up to fully prevent Y), this is not a true ‘pick your own’. One or some are the cause, the rest is music. Pick one. Which one? Which two? What is the real, real, real cause? Well, you’d better have a clear idea and a clear answer for people joining you.

I deeply believe that these are not simply semantic games and that we need more clarity on ‘causes’, or the lack of them. I would welcome the fact that this makes some people uncomfortable and dismissive, if this is a trigger to take it seriously. If not, not serious, complete dismissal or sheer inability to articulate the real cause, I am very sorry for you, have a pain-controlled decline.

PS. Spare me the ‘to make money’. Drug dealers make money; human traffic makes money; corrupted governments make money.

One of the key rules of activism (social, political, cause) is not to spend more than the minimum necessary time reacting to the opposition. Reacting to the push back, opposition, barriers, enemies, people who have a problem with X,Y,Z must be contained, or it will take over the whole airtime. A cause is not a permanent discussion with those who don’t like it.

Good activism is focused on driving the agenda (political, social) not on reacting to those who have a different one, or don’t like yours.

Against a backlash on X, the key is to build enough critical mass (people) for X, so that the ‘backlash people’ remain a minority; not to discuss with every possible ‘backlash people’ their reasons and rationale. Indeed, key activist-leaders may spend time discussing and trying to convince ( and we see this all the time on our TV screens and press), but this is the visible part of the moving iceberg. True activism needs to push forward all the time.

In behavioural terms, I have written several times, ^[14] you don’t combat a behavioural epidemic from within; you create a counter-epidemic that takes over.

This key principle (drive the agenda, vs. react to an opposition) may sound harsh for us always wanting to convince via rationality and emotions. The point is, we should continue to do that but always be mindful of how much we are advancing. In pure activism terms (no moral judgement attached), the focus is to enlist as many pro-cause. Between the choice of spending time to get 50 more people engaged, or not doing so because we need to convince a few who ‘don’t get it’, the activist’s choice is clear: the 50+ win.

Park this principle for a second. Let’s reflect on how much of this is going on in our day-to-day management in organizations. I suspect not a lot. In the traditional ‘change management’ approach, a lot of energy went to full discussion and full intellectual engagement with ‘everybody’. Traditional ‘change management’ never distinguished between people’s attitudes; it never segmented the population properly so that it could focus on a majority that could create a fast critical mass. It also invented the flawed ‘people are resistant to change’, which made the whole affair dully masochistic.

What if leadership (and leadership of change for that matter) was closer to ‘activism ‘than ‘management’? What would the above rule mean?

David Brooks, columnist of the New York Times and author (too conservative for the liberals and too liberal for the conservatives) has created the Weave project. He wants to find and give a voice to normal citizens constructing ties and weaving a social fabric of society. Those who start perhaps little movements without knowing that they are doing so. His article in the New York Times ^[15] is worth reading for anybody interested in people mobilization and peer to peer work. That includes leaders in organizations.

In Viral Change™ we define culture as the behavioural fabric of the organization, the tapestry of unwritten rules where the written ones come and visit, come and go. We can say we are weaving. I have never used the English term because it is not straight forward or ‘easy’ for people who do not have English as their mother tongue. Like me.

My father was a weaver, as in textile worker in front of a machine. I should know about fabrics. I should have remembered my father.

We all are waiving relationships. Behaviours are the thread. BTW, it all goes back to the Greeks! This is where the term ‘web’ comes from

PS: Michael Gerson, columnist in the competition, the Washington Post, wrote an article about this. I reproduce here some paragraphs that I think are beautifully written.

Eventually, someone who writes on public policy comes up against the limits of words. There are only so many times you can urge, condemn, cajole, wheedle, praise, remind, prod, propose and coax before your vocabulary and patience both give out. This is not to say that public argumentation makes no difference. But for a columnist, that influence consists mainly of throwing 750 words over a high wall and hoping they land with a pleasing thud on some doer or decider.

Having mastered the arts of opinion writing, cultural criticism and human decency, David Brooks of the New York Times is now undertaking a project at the Aspen Institute called “Weave ^[16] ,” designed to recognize and help people directly involved in social repair. In the work of lighting candles to push back the darkness, Brooks wants to be a lamplighter.

‘Having mastered the art of human decency’ – I’d love this as my epitaph.

Whether in society or inside the organization, we have plenty of ‘theories of change’ surprisingly unchallenged. Can we please look at them with a critical eye?

This first insight provides  a counter intuitive position, I know. But it goes like this:

Big demonstrations and protests, cause-driven festivals and gatherings and, in the organization, ‘change days’ and similar, are Slow Change. They create peaks of excitement and awareness (good in themselves) and contribute to giving voice and highlighting issues (good again) but they tend to fade after the peak. It’s Slow Change because long term success would require a continuous repetition of ‘activities’, most often impractical and likely to create initiative fatigue in the medium term. Most likely they eventually switch everybody off. Slow Change lacks a fundamental element: battery life. There is no sustainability mechanism in place

Orchestrated, bottom up change, engaging grassroots in a peer-to-peer network,  and using a mobilizing platform such as Viral Change™, is Fast Change. It lacks the visibility and the attraction of the big event and the naïve targeting of ‘the world’. Instead this type of Fast Change targets relatively small number of individuals who are highly influential and can multiply their engagement towards a meaningful critical mass that multiplies itself. There is a platform in place that ensure its continuity and sustainability.

Slow is noisy, fast is more silent. Slow consumes all battery life, fast has long term battery life.

In the corporate world we are very good at the Big Activities  (off-sites, Change Conferences, Leadership conferences). They are motivating, educating and aligning events, but very often  lack a continuity (platform) mechanism. They profess the assumption (mostly unsaid) that an audience enlightened and motivated is ready to go. Naive view of human nature at the very least.

Sadly the life cycle of these Big Events’  enlightenment often ends in the car park back home.  Without a ‘Day After Plan’ (that is not a repetition of the event or simply a cascade down of information), this is Slow Change.

But we love these jamborees.

Continuing my revised 12 laws of social change at a scale. Very simple laws apply to any large scale change including the one inside organizations, cultural change and transformation.

Yesterday, I launched the first 6 laws:

1. Cater for many motivations, but establish non negotiable behaviours
2. Create a compelling narrative that explains ‘the cause’ and ‘success’
3. Segment, segment and segment. Then segment again. One single monolithic, top down message works in North Korea only (but may corporations don’t get it)
4. Above all, engage the hyper connected
5. Fix role assumptions, expectations, labels. Activists, advocates, volunteers…These tribes are very different
6. Passion per se is overrated. It’s hard work first!

Here are the rest:

7. It’s grassroots, or it isn’t. These ‘nice words’ ( a grassroots movement) won’t generate a bottom up system per se. The greatest force of influence is peer-to-peer, but it needs to be orchestrated; it needs to be organized. ‘People-like-me’ plus organization (platform) is the change dynamite equivalent.
8. Leadership is needed. Big discovery! But not any thing leadership. There are at least 2 types. The top down –leadership needs to support, endorse and provide resources. That’s their first hat. Their second hat is Backstage Leadership, the art of supporting the distributed peer-to-peer network in an invisible (backstage) way.
9. ‘Readiness’ is a red herring. No revolution started when everybody could be ready for it. In fact, most likely, not many people may have been ready. Don’t wait for full alignment, full endorsement and full support unless, that is, if you have a second and third life in mind. If you work on this one, go, go, go; people will get ready then.
10. Build in a tracking process, but be careful what you measure, it may be irrelevant. Be clear what you want to see, then figure out how you can capture and extract meaning.
11. Master bottom-up storytelling at a scale. Impactful, even game changing stories are often small and prosaic, but an indication that progress is made. Make sure they are not hidden, a kind of precious secret. Get them out. Big heroic stories are overrated. They don’t speak to ‘people like me’.
12. Recalibrate all the time. Stay in beta. Don’t aim at perfection, or you’ll be perfectly dead soon.

 

Apologies for the delay in Daily Thoughts posts this week, we have been having some technical issues! We are now back up and running, thanks for your patience. We hope you enjoy this post, originally published back in May last year… 

It’s been a while now since the world of HR/OD/Management/Consulting has realised that ‘top down’ (stuff) is not politically correct anymore. Top down apparently is only welcome now by farmers when hoping for rain.

To solve this, we have added the opposite to the language, that is, ‘bottom up’, the other side of the coin, supposedly the troops taking more charge.

So now it’s easy to hear, far more than a year ago, ‘bottom up this’, ‘bottom up that’, which hopes to give an automatic legitimization to the opposite of top down.

But the language of ‘bottom down’ does nor ensure that this is what it is. In fact, I find more and more people saying that they had something to do and ‘decided not to do it top down, so they had 100 workshops bottom up’.

But these workshops were not bottom up. They were 100 top down workshops done at the bottom. The geography has changed, nothing else. You still push down, and sideways, and in quantity, but there is not emergent, real bottom up creation. It is created for you by the top and deployed at the bottom.

I am afraid we will have to do better than this to create a culture of real grassroots/bottom up. The change of geography in the activity is not enough.

The second post in my “Leadership Recap” series…

One of the key rules of activism (social, political, cause) is not to spend more than the minimum necessary time reacting to the opposition. Reacting to the push back, opposition, barriers, enemies, people who have a problem with X,Y,Z must be contained, or it will take over the whole airtime. A cause is not a permanent discussion with those who don’t like it.

Good activism is focused on driving the agenda (political, social) not on reacting to those who have a different one, or don’t like yours.

Against a backlash on X, the key is to build enough critical mass (people) for X, so that the ‘backlash people’ remain a minority; not to discuss with every possible ‘backlash people’ their reasons and rationale. Indeed, key activist-leaders may spend time discussing and trying to convince ( and we see this all the time in our TV screens and press) , but this is the visible part of the moving iceberg. True activism needs to push forward all the time.

In behavioural terms, I have written several times, ^[14] you don’t combat a behavioural epidemic from within; you create a counter-epidemic that takes over.

This key principle (drive the agenda, vs. react to an opposition) may sound harsh for us always wanting to convince via rationality and emotions. The point is, we should continue to do that but always be mindful of how much we are advancing. In pure activism terms (no moral judgment attached), the focus is to enlist as many pro-cause. Between the choice of spending time to get 50 more people engaged, or not doing so because we need to convince a few who ‘don’t get it’, the activist’s choice is clear: the 50+ win.

Park here this principle for a second. Let’s reflect on how much of this is going on in our day to day management in organizations. I suspect not a lot. In the traditional ‘change management’ approach, a lot of energy went to full discussion and full intellectual engagement with ‘everybody’. Traditional ‘change management’ never distinguished between people’s attitudes; it never segmented the population properly so that it could focus on a majority that could create a fast critical mass. It also invented the flawed ‘people are resistant to change’, which made the whole affair dully masochistic. The Viral Change Mobilizing Platform ^[17] avoids those traps

What if leadership (and leadership of change for that matter) was closer to ‘activism ‘than ‘management’? What would the above rule mean?

It’s just simply impossible to go business as usual after the Manchester events. Yet, the best thing we could do after the shock, the sympathy and the anger (no particular order) is to make the best of our work, our lives, our sense of duty.

It is perhaps unfair that we are surrounded by horrors across the world but only react with deep emotions to those close to home. Yet it is inevitable as humans, and no necessarily a sign of moral failure.

I feel slightly embarrassed to look at the events and the behavioural fabric underneath through my professional glasses. It feels as if I should leave those glasses at the door. But, I wear those glasses all the time. What can I do?

My professional life is largely focused on helping organizations, public and private, to create large scale behavioural and cultural change, to organize internal social movements that bank on the combined power of non negotiable behaviours, peer to peer influence (the power of social imitation I describe in Homo Imitans), the informal day to day interactions, storytelling and backstage leadership. Those are the ingredients of the Viral Change™ Mobilizing Platform. ^[17]

With those glasses, I can tell you that that, addressing the mega problem in front,  I would put my money on number two in that list: peer to peer. I’ll explain.

In fact, my ridiculous oversimplification of options looks like this:

• You can fight the command and control centre of the so called Caliphate. (Being born in Spain where we had 800 years of our history under Caliphs of some sort, I can tell you that most of them would be horrified of what is happening today under that name). Here is where all the political, economic and military interventions reside. Certainly I look at them as an anxious observer with zero expertise.
• You could fight the ideology. Ideologies are epidemics of ideas. You don’t fight a bad idea/behavioural epidemic from within. You need a counter epidemic that takes over. It needs to be orchestrated. I look at this with more expertise. Until we see this as an infection model, not a rational discussion or an argument-counterargument issue, we will never win. ‘Defending our values’ is creating an epidemic of them. Incidentally, if you give me 100 units of energy to spend between ‘understanding the causes’ and ‘creating a counter epidemic of the opposite’, unapologetic, I would  give 1 unit to the ‘understanding’ and 9  to the orchestration of the counter epidemic.
• You can fight the network at its granular roots. This is where specific, concrete behaviours are cooked, copied, imitated and reinforced. It’s not as glamorous and headline grabbing as sending the troops or cyberattacking the system but it is incredibly effective. It banks on the universal power of peer to peer influence, proven again and again as the engine behind the shaping of cultures, the creation of fashions or the crafting of revolutions. The greatest source of influence is the tribe. The horizontal, ‘people-like-me’, patient to patient, consumer to consumer, ex-gang member to gang member, ex-dysfunctional family to dysfunctional family, ‘youth to youth, granny to granny’ (I use this expression in Homo Imitans ^[18]). Politicians, imams, priests, rabbis, social workers, police officers, elders and wise men (‘not people like me’ the terrorists say) jumping in to help, can’t even start to compete with the power of ‘tribal members’ (‘people like me’) which, in the case of terrorists, means ex-terrorists and/or people of the same age, religion and culture with alternative views. And guts. I can’t expand on the how in this space but this is the goal. It is peer to peer or it isn’t. We need battalions of those same age-religion-culture that can interact and confront.

I know there are about another hundred things you can do but I would put my money and energy on this one.

I can’t help feeling guilty of enormous oversimplification for such complex system, a true wicked problem of our lives. My intention is to draw attention to a point in the complex web of interconnected hubs in the network of this epidemic where there is a lot that can be done locally. Now. Orchestrated like a good social movement, propwrly organized.  (PS: not the same as Protest Groups)

Streets of Manchester 1, UN Security Council  nil. There is where it can be cooked. Peer pressure at a massive scale. No apologies.

PS. Here some previous Daily Thoughts on these principles:

A behavioural epidemic can’t be fought from within. It needs a behavioural counter-epidemic to take over ^[14]

Don’t fight an epidemic of bad things. Create a counter-epidemic of good ones. ^[19]

Counter-fundamentalism secret weapon is yet to be deployed fully. Homo Sapiens drops bombs. Homo Imitans changes minds ^[20].

PS2. Just checked that the web domain www.exterroristslikeme.com is available for 9.95 US dollars

I can’t get rid of this theme in my head. I have written about it so many times that my deja vu detector is giving up. I have several labels for it:

The tyranny of the one off shot
The illusion of protest as change
The lack of scaffolding in well intended ‘champions training’

It seems to me that we human actors, wearing a corporate hat or not (inside the tent) immersed or not in a social change initiative (outside the tent) are quite good at the initiation of the tsunami. Not that bad either at bringing others to the big shot: street demonstrations and occupying streets in the social sphere (outside the tent); our one-off retreats, corporate conventions, leadership conferences (inside the tent)

The tent of course is a relative concept. For me, writing this, means the organization, within its borders. So, yes, I am writing from inside tents (lots of them) but have a helicopter that monitors lots of tents, and what happens between tents.

One of the key questions in the Mobilizing sphere, the topic of the book I am writing at the moment, is remarkably simple: why is it that some big noise mobilization reaches a peak and then fades, whilst others stay and create a movement?

A protest is not a movement. Demonstrations are not movements. Leadership conferences that enlighten people about leadership of change are not change or leadership per se.

One of the most recent translations of the above question is why the US Tea Party became a powerful influential movement but never quite called itself that way, whilst the incredible cinematic and watchable Occupy Wall Street movement never became one?

The default answer that we tent-inhabitants have, perhaps influenced by the rational logic that we got ingrained in management thinking (vision first, then  strict strategy and goals, then structure and processes etc) is, it must be the vision and/or the goals. If these, mission and goals,  are messy, sure the whole thing will fall apart. Which is true, bit not applicable to many ‘failed movements’ or ‘movements-to-be-that-never-where’ .

Somebody who has something to say in this topic is Micah White who wrote the book ‘The End of Protest: A new Playbook for Revolution’. He has a good pedigree: he co-founded The Occupy Wall Street show. In a recent interview he was very clear: usually the problem is not the clarity of goals (Occupy Wall Street could not have them clearer), it is the lack of a path (his words) , the organization moving forward, the ‘organizing’.  What I call the scaffolding, the ‘mobilizing platform’. And that is why Viral Change™ works so incredibly well when many other ‘change methods’ fail.

By the way, Micah White gets very binary on the possibilities moving forward: revolutions or winning elections. And his bets are unequivocally on the latter.

Back to our tents, we must have at least a sanity check on the one-off activities that create an illusion of lasting engagement, whilst engaging for sure some people in the very short term. From one-off conferences and ‘leadership programmes’, Town Hall meetings or Roadshows, One day training of champions ready to change the world, the question is, where is the scaffolding for the day after, for the journey, for the sustainable part? Well, that is called ‘the movement’, and it needs to be organized. Don’t be fooled by the word ‘grassroots’. If this sounds to you like ‘I don’t have do do anything about it, it will happen’, you are kidding yourself big time.

As The Washington Post put it regarding the Tea Party,  and the bitter Democrats who kept watching it, (the key was) ‘a combination of grass-roots energy and well-funded conservative organizing’. For some reasons, we inside the tents also love ‘the energy side of things’. We often forget that the sustainable, post off site, post Town Hall, post ‘event’ requires one thing: damned hard organizing work.

Corporate initiatives are born and die, and the reasons are seldom lack of goals. We should not create one anymore without a sustainability clause. It’s hard organizing work.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In our Viral Change™ Programmes, members of the community (company) of activists, invariably ask questions such as, what shall we do with people who are negative? What do we do with those colleagues who are not engaging with me in the conversation? How can I keep the motivation of my peers going? Etc.

In the early days of Viral Change™, we worried about this a lot. By ‘we’ I mean us as consultants, the sponsor/client, the project team members, all the above. We felt compelled to have ready-made answers, a library of FAQs. So, we did.

But quickly we learnt that our answers were not as good as the answers of the champions/activists themselves, and, if they were, champions/activists paid more attention to the answers coming from ‘people like them’, that is, other champions.

We soon switched the emphasis and diverted those questions to the community itself. Answers came back in the form of ‘this is what I did’ or ‘this is how I would do it’, followed by a stream of other people agreeing (‘me too’) or disagreeing (‘that would never work for me, however…’).

It was much better!

There is a broader reflection on leadership here. The leader is not an FAQ machine, an answerphone. The leader however must have enough insights about what is going on and how people do and solve things to say ‘this is how other colleagues of yours have dealt with it’. And then, it is OK to say, ‘I would also suggest’. But the power of the peer-to-peer engagement and cross fertilization is never matched by the mighty leader delivering ‘the right answer’.

You as leader do not have to have all the answers. In fact, I would be suspicious of the one who does. My rule of thumb is ‘the answer is in this room somewhere’. Most of the time, this is the plain truth.

This is plagiarism, of course. I am stealing 13^th Century saint, Francis of Assisi’s  line: ‘Preach the Gospel all the time. When necessary use words’. Translation, do more, talk less. Lately recycled as ‘walk the talk’. Twisted by me as ‘talk the walk’. That is, you walk first, then you explain the walk.

Yes, I think the walk the talk order is wrong. As leader, you walk, and walk; then, you bring people along and explain the walk, whilst walking, that is.

In our organizations, we have conceptual tsunamis of values and beliefs. Most of them dwell in the corporate graveyards of annual reports, reception halls and HR systems. These are words, not behaviours. People copy behaviours, not words on walls, not bullet points in powerpoints.

We need to agree the non-negotiable behaviours of values and beliefs so that we can ‘do them’ and exhibit them, not just explain them. Those behavioural translations are life or death.

The ‘when necessary use words’ should be the motto of so called change management processes.

The pending role model/employee/ peer-to-peer revolution, will be driven by deeds, not by words.

But let’s not forget. Words certainly engage, and motivate. Words are the wake-up, the alarm bells, the declaration of intentions, the intellectual vehicle and the pre-emotional triggers of action. So we’d better be good at them as well.

However:

Words are pre-social, the revolution is social.

‘The things you don’t have to say make you rich’ – William Stafford’s (1914 – 1993)

Let’s get richer. We act more, then, when necessary we will use words.