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:

[1]

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 [2] or via [email protected].

I am your customer, you are my customer. When I need to provide you with something, you are my customer. When you need to do the same for me, I am your customer. I am marketing, you, finance, are my customer when you ask me for data.  I am corporate finance, you, country finance, are my customers. I am R&D, my customer is marketing and sales. I am sales, my customers are the consumers. I am information management, the rest of the company is my customer.

The customer-centric mantra that has been in place for many years has created this muddle. Not pronouncing the word ‘customer’ is so politically incorrect that we tend to pollinate our thinking and our language with it, to make sure we don’t miss it. There is an historical point and reason behind this. Many organizations work in silo mode with low grade cross-communication and cross-collaboration, so, it made sense at some point to inject a bit of ‘consumer mentality’ to make the point that we are all serving each other, in one way or another, within the organization. However, by over customer-izing the language, the real customer gets lost or neglected. There is only one customer, the ones who pays the bill. This is the external customer – an individual in Business to Customer (B2C) a company in Business to Business (B2B). Anything else is muddled thinking.

I encourage my clients to make language choices. The internal “I serve you, you serve me’ may need a different language: call it client, business partner, co-workers, co-dependents, chums, internal service providers… I am playing silly language games here on purpose. Find a way, other than ‘customer,’ so that we can have a real conversation about the real customer. So, a simple rule such as ‘the customer is always external’ could do the trick. Of course, there may be more than one external customer, of course.

Cleaning up internal language is important. Customer-izing the internal organization may be nice and rewarding. It may create a good feeling of cooperation, but it dilutes the external focus. And since many companies spend 90% of their time looking inwards and 10% outwards, a bit of ‘externalization of the customer language’ would do nicely.

A while ago, my brand new iPhone was stolen at the airport, having left it behind on a table for just a few minutes. Clever thief, stupid me! I had just acquired the phone with a data package from my carrier as a bundle. I called my carrier. Since I had a business account, I expected that a handset replacement would be easy to obtain. I did not expect it to be free. I was prepared to pay whatever was required. When I called them and explained the circumstances, they told me repeatedly that ‘it was not their policy’ to replace a phone, even if I paid. The phone came with a package and that was that. One contract, one phone. No provision to have a second one, even if I paid.

His level of sympathy was zero. The ‘It’s our policy not to do that’ was repeated several times by the ‘customer services representative’ at the beginning of each of his sentences, no matter what. When I challenged him that I needed help, not a lecture on their policies, he suggested that I try their competitor! Literally. Because ‘it was their policy not to replace a handset’, of course. Today, I am with another carrier.

But I didn’t go to their competitor at the time, because I decided to call Apple directly. A human being with a Californian accent (I was in the UK) was at the other end in less than a minute, compared with the close to five of my previous experience. I explained the incident in the airport, and how bad (stupid?) I felt. The voice at the other end started to engage with me in a conversation about how dreadful it was to have your phone stolen, how bad one feels, and how having a hard time on this is the last thing one wants on a busy day. And he went as far as saying, ‘I feel sorry for you’. I could not believe it. There was a human being with empathy for my little troubles at the other end of the line and he was truly sympathetic and kind. Had he tried to sell me a fridge I would have agreed. But I bought a new iPhone from him. Before he went off, we chatted about the weather in California and the UK.

In the last weeks, I have tried to book a hotel for a family weekend trip to Ireland. The hotel reservation person told me that, for that particular weekend, they had a policy of not accepting less than 2 nights. I only needed one. I expressed my surprise. I confess I have not encountered this before. ‘Sorry Sir, it is our policy that during these busy weekends, we don’t book for less than 2 days’. I protested, and they suggested that I should write to the manager. So I did. Guess what the manger’s email said?   That ‘it’s our policy’ etc.  I did email the general manager to test if he hired his staff from Robots Anonymous. His reply came with a familiar statement: ‘It’s our policy that’, etc.

These examples of self-centred-not-customer-services are not uncommon. People who are supposed to serve you, don’t listen to you and show zero interested in serving. None of these people at that hotel spontaneously suggested any alternatives to me. But I know a bit more about policies now. And I still think an Apple fridge is a good idea.

Managers are good at messaging and communicating. OK, this is a benevolent assessment but let’s assume this. Also, OK at triggering behaviours. We do this all the time. Sustaining? That’s the problem. Nothing seems to last sometimes. Change does not stick, decisions are not followed up, big peaks of excitement after a motivational speech are followed by fading memories of the event. Why are we so bad at that continuity, sustainability?

The answer lies in the differences between the Push and the Pull mechanisms that I have described in Homo Imitans ^[3]. The Push, fundamentally informational, loses power as it is cascaded down. The, Pull, mainly behavioural, scales up. In behavioural terms, that means some people start doing something, other people follow, and eventually some critical mass appears.

Traditional management has been based upon Push mechanisms: we tell people what to do, what is expected, what the strategy is. We cascade information down the pipes. Somehow we expect that this will be good enough to change behaviours, to do something. But this is very often not the case. We are not trained in mastering the Pull: defining behaviours and scaling them up.

Many prospective clients coming to me complain that they have initiated something (a programme, an initiative), that all the pieces seem to be in place, even that something has started, but that they are stuck and nothing sticks.

The answer is almost never strategic, or informational (‘a communication problem’). It is behavioural. Whilst behaviours scale, communications fade. You need to have a behavioural plan in place to makes things happen and change behaviours, perhaps culture.

Stickiness is the great management problem. The only way many managers know how to tackle the un-stickiness is to repeat the message: another communications programme, another messaging, another event, another initiative, another one off. It is more and more medicine for a problem that does not need it.

There are no magic answers, but the point of bringing this here is one: focus on stickiness, not on one-off communication ‘exercises’ hoping that a refined one of these (inspirational, for example) will be good enough for people to do something.

Before starting anything new, try to have an answer to the question: how can this stick? If you don’t have a good answer, don’t start. The problem with initiatives that do not stick is not in the intrinsic ineffectiveness (that being a serious problem in itself) but in setting progressive precedents that make for any further initiative harder and harder to succeed.

If you don’t know how you will make it stick, don’t initiate it.

I owe this to Nassim Taleb ^[4] (‘Fooled by Randomness’ (2007), ‘The Black Swan’ (2008), ‘Antifragile’ (2013). As a traveller of many years through New York airport, he recalls the times when he had to carry his always heavy luggage, or use a porter, until one day, from the middle of nowhere, the concept of a piece of luggage with small wheels comes up. Suddenly, all these years of bad back and bad shoulder disappear, and legions of people drag their luggage along the ground with little effort, as opposed to pushing them,carrying them, or sticking them in trolleys and pushing the trolley. Where did it come from? Not from Harvard or an academic institution, he says (he is not very fond of them).

He also brings up two observations, all in his very, very witty tone. One: this innovation took place 30 years after we put a man on the moon. Two: those airport lounges and terminals had seen quantum physicists and Nobel Prize winners go by in large quantities,(presumably all carrying wheel-less luggage), and of those “brains” came up with the obvious innovation. (In fact there was apparently a patent for some sort of wheeled suitcase as earlier as 1972, but the ‘invention’ did not take off until 1987 thanks to a pilot. So, still Taleb’s argument applies).

One of Taleb’s thesis, is that knowledge (and institutionalized knowledge in particular) does not bring innovation. You’ll have to read ‘Antifragile’ to navigate through his myriad of insights.

I’m going to compare ‘The Rolling Luggage Paradox’ to our inability to ‘see’ some simple solutions because we are determined to find a complicated one, and because we have Departments of Complicated Solutions with people on the payroll. Disruptive Strategies however needs disruptive thinking (and I have compiled 30 Disruptive Ideas for organizations as a book, and designed a short, intense ‘disruptive’ intervention that I call an ‘Accelerator’).

There is no magic in how to exploit disruptive approaches that will help us to ‘see’ the innovation, other than injecting this disruptive thinking and letting the innovation emerge. What we do know though, is that if you hire quantum physicists and Nobel Prize winners, you’ll never imagine those tiny wheels at the bottom of a piece of luggage.

Organizational life is in desperate need of spotting, grabbing and mastering its Rolling Luggage Paradoxes.

My revised 12 rules of social change at a scale.  These very simple laws apply to any large scale change including the one inside organizations, cultural change and transformation and any other labels.

1. Cater for many motivations. Don’t kid yourself everybody will join in with the same motives. Super-alignment is overrated. You need to aim at ‘compatible dreams’. But, be very clear and ruthless about the non negotiable, no matter what motivations may be behind. A good focus for the non negotiable is behaviours.
2. Create a compelling narrative, one that explains ‘the cause’ and ‘the success’. In organizational terms, use ‘the cause’ as well as term to frame purpose and direction. Success does not have to be articulated in numbers (only).
3. Segment, segment and segment. One single overriding, top down narrative of mission/vision/strategy that comes down from the top in monolithic form does not make sense. Be aware of the tribal listening. Who expects to hear what? This is normal in political marketing, and very unusual in organizational internal marketing.
4. Engage as many people as you want but the key ones, if you are into scale (and you should be) are the hyper connected, the ones who have a natural pull effect, and can influence many. It has nothing to do with hierarchy. If you don’t know who these people are, you have a big problem.
5. Fix role assumptions, expectations, labels. Advocates, activists, volunteers, passionate, mavericks, rebels, doers… these are very different types of people. Obvious as that may seem, we mistake them all the time
6. Passion per se is overrated. It’s hard work first! 50 passionate people in the room exhibiting passion won’t change many things. Passion is a great bonus when associated to 24/7 commitments

The other half tomorrow, to end the little list of social change rules.

Our faith in communication is enormous. Why? Perhaps because we know well the problems associated with the lack of communication. However, we expect miracles from communication. After all, we hear the mantra: ‘communicate, communicate, communicate’.

We know about the liabilities of the lack of communication but we don’t worry too much about the other extreme, the over-communication. In my consulting work I see more problems coming from over-communicating than from the lack of it. If anything, everybody is communicating something, sometimes very loud: new corporate initiatives, new leadership principles, results of the Employee Engagement survey. All  usually done for very good reasons. Each ‘owner’ of an initiative has been told: ‘make sure you communicate this’.  And so they do.

Channels are often saturated and messages compete for airtime. The result could well be a preventative switch off from people, a sort of mental parapet, a shield against the bombardment of messages, good or bad, relevant or irrelevant.

I have often stumbled across this channel saturation by accident, when suggesting a small behavioural survey in a selected sample. It is not unusual to sense some apprehension, even when my client knows the limited scope of the survey and the low level noise I am proposing. Why? I hear: ‘We’ve had five surveys in the last two months! People can’t stomach another one, even a very friendly one!’

‘Communicate, communicate, communicate’ does not make more sense than the hypothetical ‘manage, manage, manage’ or ‘lead, lead, lead’.

Communication de-cluttering is needed in many organizations as a way to re-sensitise and re-educate the brains of all of us, in order to be able to spot the signals and filter the noise.

The alternative to a healthy communication ceasefire may be a nasty War for Attention.

The fastest and best way to build a creative culture is to have lots of creative people together. No kidding. It works. Hire creative people, they will create a creative environment (because the leaders will be creative) and we all will be creativists.

I am not pulling your leg. The issue is that we often hire lots of non-creative people, people who have never created anything (seriously, never, not even in school) and then we say: we want an innovative culture, we want you to be creative. It does not work.

Problem two (the above was problem one) is the inverse. We hire or gather lots of creative people, but we ask them to recite the yellow pages in search of the Big Idea. Bad idea.

Back to the creativists. Many people can innovate and be creative if, and there is an if, the environment pushes them that way. Innovation is going to the mental gym every day. No gym, expect arthritis.

Creativity is very sensitive to suppression. It’s actually quite easy to curtail. The education system in many places is a benign straitjacket. Entering the school system as a question mark, leaving as a period ^[5], a la Neil Postman.

Leaders have to create the conditions for creativity and innovation. I don’t buy the functional and professional boxing: accountants are not creative, engineers neither, and designers (particularly the ones in a garage) are full of uncontrollable creativity (And don’t try to put the accountants in the garage, you will waste your time and it annoys the accountants). I have met incredibly creative engineers ( and accountants) and lots of emperors-with-no-clothes designing in garages.

Bottom line. Expect miracles if you wish, but to accelerate that thing called creativity and innovation, (1) transplant those people and give them the space; (2) add not-so-innovative people; they will copy the others.

Even in the case of creativity and innovation, Homo Imitans ^[6] works.

If you love KPIs, here is one. The attractiveness of your (corporate) function is defined by the number of people who want to join you. No queue, bad news. ‘Place to be’, excellent news. There is no other way.

You need to make the ‘place to be’ accessible to people who want to join you but who can’t simply abandon everything else. Provide short secondments, shadow work, job swapping, anything that can open your work to others. And yes, of course, job openings if you have them.

Make a rotation to your function very attractive. To learn new things, upskill quickly, see the world from other angles. The stay does not have to be long. You may even declare quotas. Three places for Marketing people, four for Sales, five for R&D, etc.

A gentle dose of internal competition does not hurt.

Make no apologies for the fact that you want your area to be a magnetic place. If others are envious or uncomfortable, ask them to do the same.

Create your own internal alumni and treat them like that, with appropriate reunions for example.

If you are uncomfortable with this internal marketing, I have a suggestion for you:  get over it.

The second of this week’s revisited posts – this one was first published in June 2016 (check back tomorrow for part 2)

My revised 12 rules of social change at a scale.  These very simple laws apply to any large scale change including the one inside organizations, cultural change and transformation and any other labels.

1. Cater for many motivations. Don’t kid yourself everybody will join in with the same motives. Super-alignment is overrated. You need to aim at ‘compatible dreams’. But, be very clear and ruthless about the non negotiable, no matter what motivations may be behind. A good focus for the non negotiable is behaviours.
2. Create a compelling narrative, one that explains ‘the cause’ and ‘the success’. In organizational terms, use ‘the cause’ as well as term to frame purpose and direction. Success does not have to be articulated in numbers (only).
3. Segment, segment and segment. One single overriding, top down narrative of mission/vision/strategy that comes down from the top in monolithic form does not make sense. Be aware of the tribal listening. Who expects to hear what? This is normal in political marketing, and very unusual in organizational internal marketing.
4. Engage as many people as you want but the key ones, if you are into scale (and you should be) are the hyper connected, the ones who have a natural pull effect, and can influence many. It has nothing to do with hierarchy. If you don’t know who these people are, you have a big problem.
5. Fix role assumptions, expectations, labels. Advocates, activists, volunteers, passionate, mavericks, rebels, doers… these are very different types of people. Obvious as that may seem, we mistake them all the time
6. Passion per se is overrated. It’s hard work first! 50 passionate people in the room exhibiting passion won’t change many things. Passion is a great bonus when associated to 24/7 commitments

The other half tomorrow, to end the little list of social change rules.

I think the current life cycle of a ‘best practice’ is a month or so. And this is benevolent. In the old days ‘best practice’ was a way to copy the good things that others have done. Like benchmarking, they were rear view mirrors of a race already won by somebody else. Today, if you navigate in ‘best practice’ and ‘benchmarking’ mode, you’ll perhaps be able to stay afloat, but will never win the race.

OK, these concepts are not going to disappear. But they will not come up any more in the format of big conferences, big retrospective dossiers and other forms of rear view mirror management.

You see ‘best practices’ by reading them in social media, by reading some books, by subscribing to cool newsletters and blogs, by having lots of free Google alerts. They are there in front of you in great quantity, for you to seal, copy, get inspired, frustrated, dismiss them or fall in love, all in one afternoon if you wish.

If you are still fond of these two sisters, Best Practice and Benchmarking, invite them for dinner, have a chat, see what they have to say, have some fun, and call it a day. Don’t let them live with you permanently. They are charming and other people may fall in love with them. Before you know it, they will take over the house.

A key strategic question for you (company, group, team, individual) is: are we benchmarkable? Would anybody see this as best practice?

If the answer is yes to all, congratulations, but remember it won’t last. Plan your next ‘ahead of the game’ move.

If the answer is no, I am very sorry to hear that, my condolences, let me know the time and place for the funeral.

 

Dear Mr Herrero. I have been trying to contact you but you were busy.

No, you haven’t, we have no record of you trying to reach me today, or yesterday or any time.

I am following upon my previous email explaining that we have great interest in your work in your area.

I can’t recall a previous email, nor Mr Junk Folder knows about you.

There are people very keen to know more about your architectural offerings and want to have some examples shown in our magazine.

Excuse me , hope you realize we are ‘organization architects’, as in, err, architects of organizations. We build organizations. We don’t do buildings. Organization architects, you get it?

Our magazine reaches an average of 20000 people per month, People who have money to invest in home improvements.

Good for them, we are organization architects, we don’t do buildings, we don’t do home improvements.

Your recent works in this area have been known to us for a while

Hardly, we don’t do buildings

I would welcome an opportunity to discuss how we can showcase your portfolio of architectural work.

We don’t do buildings

Your work will also be automatically featured in ‘Home Improvements’, ‘Grand Designs’, ‘The Eco House of the Future’ and ‘Luxury Affordable Homes’.

That would be as helpful as advertising in Anglers United, Sahara Nights or The Lazy Farmer Weekly. You see, we don’t do buildings

I am in the area in the next week. Could I call you Tuesday?

Since when do you need to be in an area to call? What area is that anyway? Never mind.

There are dozens of costumers that have asked us specifically to publish a feature article about you. They are a mixture of commercial property buyers and residential people in search of suppliers for vast re-development.

Please keep those dozens away from me. I told you, we are organization architects, not brick and mortar architects. You are either making it up or you have a weird network of people who talk to you.

Thanks for your attention Mr Ferrero. Please reply to this email to set up a call.

Herrero, Herrero, not Ferrero. I don’t want a call, I don’t want the magazine, I don’t wan to be featured. We don’t do buildings. I want you to go away

PS. Your investment is 100% guarantee.

My investwhat?

Mark as junk, block sender