I suppose the question is how long is long and how difficult is difficult? In general, business and organizational consulting have always overstated the time needed to create cultural change. This is simply because we have been using outdated toolkits and methods. We have treated cultural change as ‘a project’ and applied the mechanics of project management. It looks like this: Dozens (if not hundreds) of consultants land on the corporate shores, workshops multiply like mushrooms and a tsunami of communication comes from the top: ‘change is good, this is what you must do, do you get it? Cascade down the message’. Kind of.  So it takes six months to figure out what to do, including a cultural assessment (of course), a couple more to present findings, another to launch and you start doing something at month 6. If you’re lucky. Then, you start with the top (of course) and cascade down one layer, then another one, peeling the organizational onion with lots of messages and workshopsterone. You don’t see initial results until, say, year 2 and you need another couple of years to see more. See what? Well, good question, err, a different culture? How do you measure that? What do you mean? I told you, 20 senior managers workshop, 150 middle management and… Hold on, this is activity, not outcomes. Oh! In traditional change management, you start with the top and cascade down one layer, then another one, peeling the organizational onion with lots of messages and workshopsterone. The following is an example of non-workshopsterone-led fast cultural change: A new CEO said ´enough of meetings, I am not having them.´ 6 months later they had a 60% reduction in meetings, significant increase in direct communications, better fluid collaboration, the sky did not fall, business is booming. Guess what, employee engagement scores are up. I am not bringing this case as an example of how cultural change should be done, but as a representation of a situation where culture change and culture re-shaping take place in a short period of time. As I have repeated ad nauseam, organizational culture change is bottom up, behavioural based, peer-to-peer, using informal networks and with a particular kind of leadership that is movement-supportive (we call it Backstage Leadership™ ) I am of course defining Viral Change™, no apologies for the reference. Viral Change™ is orchestrated like a social movement, not as a management consulting programme.

Learn more about Viral Change™ [1]

Successful cultural change is not top down, not workshopsterone-fuelled, not an information tsunami, certainly not long, painful, super-expensive and ending in a fiasco. Hold on! The example of the meeting-hater CEO was top down! Yes, the trigger was at the top but the Anti-Meeting Movement took place with no meetings (about not having meetings), no workshops and no communication plan. It was Homo Imitans in real life, viral and behavioural spread by massive social copying. Can we say that the Emperor of the long, difficult, herculean, massively complicated, information tsunami, unpredictable organizational cultural change has clearly no clothes whatsoever? Yes, we can! Given the time this has been going on, he must be freezing.

[2]

Only behavioural change is real change You can map new processes and re-arrange the organization chart. Install a new corporate software (ERP, CRM, etc.) and explain to people why this is good and necessary. Create a massive communication and training campaign and make sure that everybody has clearly understood where to go. Perhaps you’ve done this already and noticed that many people hang on to the old ways. That is because there is no change unless there is behavioural change. It is only when new behaviours have become the norm that you can say that real change has occurred. If you want a new culture, change behaviours. Cultures are not created by training. Start your journey here. [3]

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

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

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

Peer-to-peer work, 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. By WMD, 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 managers and leaders, and for that matter, all employees. It’s not new, but the emphasis and the weight is. But, in the last years, we have come 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, and sharing and establishing new ideas. 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 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 these 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 simple homework, you’ll dig and dig deeper. From first gear to fifth or sixth, it is all doable. Start by reading about SNA (Social Network Analysis) and then explore possibilities. We at Viral Change™ do work with a particular peer-to-peer network of highly connected people. There are other peer-to-peer networks that are formed more in the traditional way of ‘communities of practices’. Have a go. You are, of course, welcome to explore here in Viral Change™  [5]and my Homo Imitans [6] book. Or have a conversation with us, contact us now. [7]

[8]

Learn more about our Leadership and Culture interventions here [9]. Reach out to my team to learn more via [email protected].

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 ^[10] undertake work with a particular peer-to-peer network of highly connected people through our Viral Change™ programme ^[1].

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.

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Extracts taken from my book ‘The Flipping Point‘. ^[11] 

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.

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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 ^[12] site, material includes:

• 3 Articles written by Dr Leandro Herrero:
• 1 Video (accessible via Pdf)
• Time to REFLECT: 4 Questions for you to increase your learning outcome
• Time to SHARE: A summary of main take-aways you can share with friends & colleagues or via social media

 

 

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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 ^[13].  This material includes:

• 4 Articles written by Dr Leandro Herrero:
• 2 Videos (accessible via links in Pdfs):
• Time to REFLECT: 4 Questions for you to increase your learning outcome
• Time to SHARE: A summary of main take-aways you can share with friends & colleagues or via social media

 

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Previous issues on behaviours:

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

Only behavioural change is real change ^[14]

Serious behavioural change? Start with micro-behaviours, then walk backwards to values, never the other way around. And bring peer-to-peer or you are running in first gear.

There is a beautifully pragmatic, heuristic side to the behavioural approach to change, including organizational change, that has always been dismissed and even trivialised by the abundant numbers of advocates of complex cognitive thinking. When it comes to ‘change’ (allow me to quote/unquote to host lots of types of change), the energy always goes to the big why, and the big effort for cognitive understanding as a prerequisite.

The promoters of culture-of-violence-change focus on peoples understanding of how terrible violence is. The workers on dysfunctional-families-change expect to spend time understanding the root and causes, the probably complex psychodynamics of the family and the plausible connection of the situation with a more than stressful and abusive childhood. The consultants on corporate change are not expected to do anything until there is a full assessment of the current culture, a prerequisite to change it.

All of those have a Homo Sapiens pattern of thinking (analysing, understanding) then acting. Thinking first, behaviours will come, they seem to say, which is a laudable, brave, ill conceived sequence.

The miracle (if you aim for one, and those situations require something close to it) require the other homo that we have forgotten, Homo Imitans   ^[15]

Let’s take dysfunctional families. It may be laughable for some to think that the key to change from a dysfunctional to a functional one is to focus all energy on the kids: get up early, brush their teeth, get to school on time, say hello and thanks, lower the voice and make that damned appointment with the dentist. If you manage to install those micro-behaviours, they will stir things backwards once the habit has been created and then, that discipline will contaminate other things. At some point, who knows, we may even have a discussion about ‘understanding’. Micro-behaviours first, that’s my rule.

This may sound a bit like a Super Nanny approach, and indeed from my very superficial knowledge of that TV series, I know that it took some similar behavioural principles and put them into reality in the form of ‘rules of the game’. The key difference in what we propose and do in our work on large scale change is our Part 2: Bring in ‘people like me’ to shape it, not a social worker, not an authority or expert but an ex-dysfunctional family. It is peer-to-peer or you are wasting your time. In Homo Imitans ^[15] I used a sub-chapter title: ‘youth-to-youth, granny-to-granny’, to emphasise that peer-to-peer power is greater than anything else in social change.

The formula is micro-behaviours plus peer-to-peer. Not macro-ideas/values plus authority intervention.

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Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[10], an international firm of organizational architects, and the pioneer of Viral Change™ ^[1], a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers sustainable, large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations, which creates lasting capacity for changeability.

Dr Herrero is also an Executive Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Organization, Drucker School of Management.

An international speaker, Dr Herrero is regularly invited to speak at global conferences and corporate events. To invite Leandro to speak at your conference or business event contact: The Chalfont Project ^[7] or email: [email protected]. ^[16]

If I were the one in charge of deciding the ‘person of the year’ for the front cover of Time Magazine, or other front covers for that matter, I would pick ‘The Peer’. As in peer-to-peer.

Maybe this is more than ‘the year’. It’s the decade of the Peers. And I am not talking about the “British nobility’ in the House of Lords.

The Edelman Trust Barometer has been highlighting the importance of ‘people like me’ (my peers) for many years. I trust ‘people like me’ twice as much as I trust the CEO, the barometer says. Peer-to-peer is the strongest source of trust and collaboration within the organization. There is a whole ‘peer economy’ in which buyers and sellers interact directly. There is peer-to-peer lending. There is also peer-to-peer banking on direct transfers of funds between people. There is an equivalent term used in IT. There are ‘patients like me’ websites, and for mums, and for many other tribes. There is ‘peer-to-peer coaching’.

Peers! The transversal, horizontal connectivity between people. The tribes. The alternative to hierarchical models. The Facebookization of life.

Only a few years go, we would not be talking peers other than in the scientific arena (peer reviews of journals) or in the context of vaguely defined ’peer pressure’. The peers are not new, but they have only recently reached adulthood. And they have even been given business models.

Trust has gone horizontal, it’s people like me, not people like those at the top. And for better or worse, this ‘like me’ is also working in the mobilization of people in the political arena: one of us, versus one like them. In the US, this is pure polarity at the moment.

Peer-to-peer in organizations is today more and more at the core of ‘where real stuff happens’ . In Viral Change™ ^[1], we orchestrate peer-to-peer engagement and activism as the engine of change.

Yes, the world is flat. Well, not that flat, mainly horizontal.

It is the year of the peer, the year of the horizontal, and the year of HR/OD/L&D/tribes of human capital to once and for all pay attention to social, non-hierarchical influence inside the organization. Horizontal management and horizontal leadership.

The world looks sideways, not just up and down.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[10], an international firm of organizational architects, and the pioneer of Viral Change™ ^[1], a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers sustainable, large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations, which creates lasting capacity for changeability.

Dr Herrero is also an Executive Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Organization, Drucker School of Management.

An international speaker, Dr Herrero is regularly invited to speak at global conferences and corporate events. To invite Leandro to speak at your conference or business event contact: The Chalfont Project ^[7] or email: [email protected]. ^[16]

Many years ago companies started to say ‘we are organized into project teams’. Professional projectisation was the thing. Until it became commoditised and meant nothing. No project team was equal to another. One has project leaders with budget accountabilities and great autonomy, another was a bunch of guys who did not want to be there and wrote minutes. Anything in between. Who cares today? ‘We have project teams’ sounds like we have electricity. You don’t get on the front page saying that, in your company, you switch that thing on the wall and light is produced on demand.

My prediction is that something similar is about  to happen with ‘influencers’ . Everybody seems to have ‘them’. The proliferation of methods to find them and name them has contributed to it. Years ago, a not terribly well-respected, branch of Sociology called Sociometrics had some grasp of the real connectivity between individuals.  Today you have many providers of those tools.

At The Chalfont Project, our Viral Change^TM progammes use Social Network Analysis (SNA), because of its strong scientific basis and friendly commercial applications, the latter not compromising the former. It’s as good as it gets.

My non scientific analysis of the current usage of SNA to find influencers is as follows: 4 out of 5 companies who ‘have done it’, have no idea what to do with the findings. Shockingly, they have not done it anonymously or on an opt-in basis, which means that names of people have been known at least to HR/OD/L&D etc. You now have that elite group exposed to all, with no clear plans, but sent to an off sites to ask them to deploy Vision Success or Future 2020 or Alignment & Empowerment 2.0 or whatever the name of those ‘change efforts’ may have.

In a recent HR/OD conference I dared to say that the corporation has no right to unveil all that and ask people to ‘use their influence’ unless they have opted in anonymously; that being, a high influencer was probably not in the job description and not something for what people were paid for. They did not like it. Some people were convinced I represented the workers Unions (not an offense in its own right, but a proxy for obstructionism).

Besides the ones who ‘have done it’ but who don’t know want to do with it (I swear I am not kidding, these companies do exist), others have commoditised the concept and in the process have muddled it. You hear people talking about influencers and mixing up role models, talent management, volunteers, and, of course, champions or ambassadors. Companies now have ambassadors of this and that, like they have those switches on walls.

SNA, with its ability to map the real organization (that is, not the organizational chart) has untapped potential to discover how information flows, how knowledge and expertise is used, or, for sure, who are the highly connected individuals.

Using SNA and ‘finding the influencers’ must not become a HR/OD sport. It drives me crazy to see how we can easily kill one off the very few management innovations of decades. It seems like ‘Le beaujolais nouveau est arrive’, the new beaujolais wine has arrived, as we get every year from wine merchants, but in organizational version.

‘Identifying influencers’ is becoming something that companies do ‘because they can’. Bad management at its best.

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Our Feed Forward Webinar Series is now available to watch, on demand.

 

Watch our webinar Can you put your organization through an MRI?  ^[17]

 

Yes you can. You can have a diagnosis. Learn how our online product 3CXcan provides this analysis based on the highest scientific principles of network sciences. In the current environment it’s important to base the recovery and the post Covid-19 organization with full understanding of its formal and informal connections, communication channels and internal collaboration. Suspend judgement about your assumptions and find the truth. This webinar will show real examples of this kind of diagnosis performed in real companies. Understanding the real organization, which may or may not be the one you assume it is, will show a completely new baseline upon which to navigate the future.

 

What attendees said:

‘Thank you for the opportunity to participate in this fantastic webinar. Both the depth of the discussion between Leandro and Carlos and the very intensive exchange in the chat inspired me.’

 

It was a great pleasure to participate in today’s webinar…. If you would have been sitting next to me, you would have seen a lot of ‘head nodding’ and heard a couple of loud ‘yes’es’ from the bottom of my heart. 

 

WATCH NOW ^[17]

 

Four types:

1. The generosity of the traffic light. Every fixed interval, it lets you get through. It even changes colour for you. This is the generosity of the organization that generously rewards people for what they do. No more. It’s a clear transaction, no fuss. As predictable as the green light.

2. The 1/365 policy generosity. One day you agree a generous policy for employees (extra holiday, extended leave, subsidised meals…). You expect 365 days of gratitude. You don’t have to think about generosity for 364 days.

3. The I am making myself available generosity. It may be a pain, an inconvenience at the very least, but you make yourself available to others, all the time. (My experience? People don’t abuse this).

4. The I give more than I am asked generosity. You don’t have to. You do it intuitively. There is something inside you that tells you that this is right, that keeping more for yourself is wrong. (But you may not be sure if it’s sensible, after all).

How generous is the organization you work for, or that you lead? Traffic light generosity? Giving more than asked? People make themselves available (and this is not in the job description)? One off generosity policy? Other?

How do you spread generosity? In behavioural terms, I can tell you: 3 is first, 4 is second, 1 is effective in fooling everybody, 2 looks good in the annual report but, once in place, people will take for granted and will ask for more.

There are choices. A generous workplace is not a question of employee-employer dynamics, it’s a ‘culture of’, or it isn’t . It’s a Viral Change^TM epidemic of generosity type 3 and type 2 combined.

Studies in altruism has shown (I hate this kind of sentence) that altruism spreads via social copying (homo imitans). In a neighbourhood some people start doing ‘altruistic things’ and soon the neighbourhood does. No training, no Declaration of Altruism is Good for You.

Generosity in the organization follows the same (scale up, Viral Change^TM) rules. Master a critical mass, going that way you can start a little revolution.

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Extract taken from my book ‘The Flipping Point‘. ^[11] A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. ‘The Flipping Point‘ ^[11] contains 200 short vignettes exploring what ’deprogramming management’ may look like.

 

Behaviours create culture, not the other way around.

Behaviours create culture, not the other way around. Change behaviours get culture. Behaviours are copied (homo imitans) and scaled up peer-to-peer. Culture is not trainable in classrooms. 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™ in a box. The ‘how’ is what I do for a living.

 

This book asks you to use more rigour and critical thinking in how you 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!

Available from major online bookstores ^[18].

‘People like me’ is a category in its own right in the Edelman Trust Barometer. Multiple sets of data point to this category being the highest source of trust inside the organization.

Translation: my mates, my colleagues, my peers, people who share similar worries about life to me, kids or football. Also, ‘one of us’. Call it as you want. It may or may not include the so-called friends in Facebook.

I am talking about this transversal, horizontal tribe, or tribes, I belong to, which have more credibility than official authorities. I play with this in my book Homo Imitans where I said it was ‘youth-to-youth, granny-to-granny’.

This horizontality of trust clashes with the verticality of our leadership.

• You can send 5 social workers to help a dysfunctional family, or enlist an ex-dysfunctional family to fix the problem. Ex-dysfunctional 5, social workers nil.

• You can preach and send messages from middle to old age priests, rabbis or imams to disengaged, disenfranchised youth, or you can engage people of the same age, positive youth, youth-to-youth. Young activists 5, clerics nil.

• You can bombard people in the organization, top down from the hierarchical system with calls to something (safety, accountability, execution) or you can craft and nurture peer-to-peer networks. Peer-to-peer networks 5, top down nil.

The world is horizontal. We think vertically.

The implications for leadership are enormous. ‘Looking sideways’ has a stronger traction than ‘looking up’. I always, always, always get push pack on this, saying I ignore the very hierarchical social systems of the world, where people look up for approval. All those patriarchal and caste-based systems, all those behavioural tapestries in which nothing is supposed to move unless approved by the authorities, elders, seniors and the rest. And that maybe true. People look up in those systems. But how they respond, is much influenced by their looking sideways, how other peers react, what ‘people like them’ do. If compliance is the norm, they will comply. If rebellion is, chances are they will rebel as well. Don’t underestimate the ‘looking sideways’ power.

This my PhD in psychology in one line. People behave the way they do for three reasons: (1) because they are told to; (2) because they want to, or (3) because other people like them do.

The entire traditional management system has been crafted around (1): telling people. The entire motivational/employee engagement system has been crafted around trying to make people behave in (2) mode: make people want to. In the process, people have forgotten (3): because others do.

And this is the best kept leadership secret/gem in front of us.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Extract taken from my book The Flipping Point. ^[11] A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. The Flipping Point ^[11] contains 200 short vignettes exploring what ’deprogramming management’ may look like.  Read recent reviews on LinkedIn ^[19] and Amazon ^[20].

Peer-to-peer networks are dynamite. Teams are ground transportation, not Formula 1.

We still live in what I call teamocracies. Teamocracies are responsible for a great deal of the slowness of the place and it’s dismal innovation.

Have you got your copy ^[11]?

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Contact ^[7] my team for a diagnosis of your informal organizational networks. 

 

With 3CXcan ^[21], a simple to use online survey, we can reveal your formal and informal connections. We have turned organizational network science into real practice: we uncover your networks with no pain, efficiently, fast and with absolute confidentiality. Find out more. ^[21]

Contact us now ^[7] for a free virtual consultation.

OK, at least you’re reading. Thanks.

The organization is a network. Networks have emergent properties. Translation: things come up from the randomness of interactions in a way not entirely predictable. Super-nodes, for example, behaving as a single node. More translations: that group of connected, yet not formally related individuals that ‘create’ a tribe (group of common interest or habits) that starts having a single and similar view of the world. Nobody set out to achieve this; it happened, it emerged, good or bad.

But for that to happen, a network was needed (ok, it was there), connectivity (they actually could use the internal Yammer group) and a progressive sense of belonging formed by seeing and feeling that they were sharing similar stories. For example. They did not have rules imposed. They were not given constrains and, frankly, for pretty much all the time, they were left alone and invisible.

There are options. You can let the network produce emergent effects (spontaneous collaboration, innovation hubs, Sceptical United Group, or bunch of bloggers, or the tribe above) or you could induce and engineer some effects, not waiting, but designing.

Spontaneity, emergent collaboration and idea sharing either come from a network effect, or need to be engineered. Engineering means creating the conditions, seeding the possibilities, giving and publicising permissions, producing safety nets and broadcasting the business impact. If you want spontaneous collaboration, wait for it, buy water coolers and sofas. Also bring engineers from the fifth floor to sit in front of the commercial guys on the second floor, and the other way around. The physical movement was engineered, the mind sharing is not.

Design forms of social-ability and don’t worry about their potential misuse. Increase interactivity and stop worrying about ‘meeting rules’. Don’t worry about internal Face-booking-waste-of-time. If waste, it will dilute itself. Believe me, this is the least of your worries.

But this is not what many people do. Because they fear the lack of control, they start putting borders.

Here is your team, be innovating, think out-of-the-box, collaborate, be autonomous, be entrepreneurial and be productive. This is the membership of the team, this the Product Leader, these are the Product Managers, this is the core and this is the extended. This is your budget; you’ll need to report the first Wednesday of every month. Take risks but not too many, and better if they pay off. Challenge the default positions of the company but don’t touch A, B or C. Be creative but make sure it is productive. You are free my friends, be happy.

Freedom in a straight jacket is the closest thing we have in many organizations. Designing the informality of the network is key. Internal Communications people have a role. HR has a role. Business leaders have a role. IT has to curate.

Because of the (on purpose) apparent contradiction in terms (‘All that must be spontaneous must be engineered’) people react in horror. That is good! How can that be? But it can. We plan for formality: teams, committees, reporting. We similarly must plan for informality: emergent clusters, emergent social networks, increased connectivity, peer-to-peer engagement and work, barriers down, let it go.

It’s not one or the other (I can hear) but both.

The point is, we spend 75% of the time designing formality that produces 25% of the goods, and 25% of the time designing for informality that produces 75% of the best innovation, the best employee engagement, the best culture to be proud of and the best overall effectiveness.

Surely not even the accountants can see this logic.

Choices!

All that you want to come up as spontaneous must be engineered in their conditions for that to happen.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Here at The Chalfont Project ^[10] we undertake work with a particular peer-to-peer network of highly connected people through our Viral Change™ programme ^[22] and now we can help your business too, with our 3CXcan ^[21] product. This online survey which uses organizational network science software called Cfinder Algorithm, a tool for social network detection, will give you a profound understanding of your internal networks.

With 3CXcan ^[21] we have turned organizational network science into real practice: we uncover your formal and informal networks with no pain, efficiently, fast and with absolute confidentiality.

3CXcan  is a diagnostic tool which:

◦ PROVIDES A PICTURE: of the formal and informal organization and how effectively both operate.

◦ REVEALS organizational connections from strong to weak, to ineffective and broken connection.

◦ GAINS INSIGHT on the specific solutions and interventions required

◦ IDENTIFIES the individuals that will leverage change more effectively (ie champions)

If you want to know your REAL orgaization and be able to break down silos, identify collaboration barriers, unite your organizaton after a merger and more, then 3CXcan is your solution.

To find out more or book your free virtual consultation for a short walk through our demo – contact us now! ^[21]

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Don’t miss it – our webinar TODAY – 18:00 BST/19:00 CET.  

During Covid, digital has taken the lead with remote working, virtual events and more connectivity, but have we become more collaborative & how do we keep the human factor?

Join us for this webinar on High Touch and High Tech in the Digitalization Era. It will bring insights into the not very well solved tandem ‘high touch- high tech’ and how we can shape a future where the human condition wins.

Register Now ^[23]

Peer-to-peer work, 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.

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 these, 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 ^[10] undertake work with a particular peer-to-peer network of highly connected people through our Viral Change™ programme ^[22] and now we can help your business too, with our 3CXcan. ^[21] This online survey which uses organizational network science software called Cfinder Algorithm, a tool for social network detection, will give you a profound understanding of your internal networks.

With 3CXcan ^[21] we have turned organizational network science into real practice: we uncover your networks with no pain, efficiently, fast and with absolute confidentiality.

3CXcan  is a diagnostic tool which:

◦ PROVIDES A PICTURE: of the formal and informal organization and how effectively both operate.

◦ REVEALS organizational connections from strong to weak, to ineffective and broken connection.

◦ GAINS INSIGHT on the specific solutions and interventions required

◦ IDENTIFIES the individuals that will leverage change more effectively (ie champions)

If you want to know your REAL orgaization and be able to break down silos, identify collaboration barriers, unite your organizaton after a merger and more, then 3CXcan is your solution.

To find out more or book your free virtual consultation for a short walk through our demo – contact us now! ^[21]

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Don’t miss it – our final webinar of the Feed Forwards series TOMORROW – 18:00 BST/19:00 CET.  

During Covid, digital has taken the lead with remote working, virtual events and more connectivity, but have we become more collaborative & how do we keep the human factor?

Join us for this webinar on High Touch and High Tech in the Digitalization Era. It will bring insights into the not very well solved tandem ‘high touch- high tech’ and how we can shape a future where the human condition wins.

Register Now ^[23]

 

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.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

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 ^[17].

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! ^[17]

 

Each participant who attends any of the live webinars of the Feed Forward series will be eligible for one copy of The Flipping Point ^[11].

 

____________________________________________________________________________________________

Contact us ^[7] to find out more about engaging Dr Leandro Herrero for speaking opportunities ^[7] with your company.

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: If managers say, ‘safety is first’, the impact may be relative (…)  If my peer says, ‘safety is first’, I’m beginning to pay attention. Peer-to-peer is the strongest source or engine of change and mobilization inside any organization.

 

I believe that most silo problems have names and surnames

Stop complaining about silos between divisions. Computer screens are the new silos. If you amalgamate non-collaborating silo A with non-collaborating silo B with the hope of creating a collaborating non silo C, good luck. People will bring their screens with them anyway.

Stop complaining about silos between divisions. Computer screens are the new silos. Most structural solutions (amalgamation of divisions or groups) are a response to behavioural problems (e.g. lack of collaboration). Entire re-organizations, with hundreds of people disrupted, are triggered by very few people being the problem. The so-called Big Collaboration Problem between Marketing and Sales can actually be traced back to Peter, Head of Marketing, and Mary, Head of Sales. The rest have no problem but are forced to migrate with their screens. I believe that most silo problems have names and surnames.

 

Extracts taken from my new book The Flipping Point. ^[11] A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. The Flipping Point ^[11] contains 200 short vignettes exploring what ’deprogramming management’ may look like.  Read a recent review ^[19].

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Feed Forward Webinar Series – the organization now, under new management

Join our second thought-provoking webinar in the series. This week – can we MRI the company & diagnose its health in terms of internal connectivity, communication and collaboration? Yes we can.  Join Leandro Herrero ^[24], Marieke van Essen ^[24] and Carlos Escario ^[24] on 2nd July – 18:00 BST/19:00 CET – to learn how 3CXcan provides this analysis using the highest scientific principles of network sciences.

Bring your critical thinking brain, switched on. It’s a serious business. It may also be fun.    REGISTER NOW! ^[24]

 

Extracts taken from my new book ‘The Flipping Point‘. ^[11] A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. ‘The Flipping Point‘ ^[11] contains 200 short vignettes exploring what ’deprogramming management’ may look like.

 

 

An epidemic of nastiness can only be combated by a counter-epidemic of kindness.

An epidemic of nastiness can only be combated by a counter-epidemic of kindness. Don’t fight a behavioural epidemic from inside. Don’t try to convert nasty people one by one. Use your energy to flood the system with as much non-nastiness as possible. Your hope is a counter-epidemic of the opposite, not fighting from inside. If you have an epidemic of individualism, don’t fight it at an individual level. It’s a waste and you’ll never win. Create a counter-epidemic of collaboration that takes over. In the organization, (behavioural) change is social. Or it isn’t.

Nasty, sceptical, negative, toxic people cannot be changed by rational appeal, performance management or special prayers. In my previous life as a psychiatrist, many of my most successful ‘interventions’ were transplants. Not of organs but of the entire being to a new, different, a bit unknown (but relatively safe) territory. Temporarily (but drastically) changing the family environment, for example, at a distance, always paid off. My main question was often ‘where is your most distant relative with a house and a room?’.

 

Find gracious, generous people of character who want to make a difference.

Find gracious, generous people of character who want to make a difference. Let them have hope, confidence and strength. Be honest from day one: it won’t be plain sailing. Give them a big common goal and ask them for help. Invite them to join you. A journey you (must) have already started. Give them the space to work in peer-to-peer mode. Treat them for who they are, not their title or their rank. Provide resources. Trust them. That night you’ll sleep well. You will have started a management revolution.

Decouple titles and rank from the individual. One of the key success factors in our Viral Change™ programmes is that Viral Change™ project teams have no hierarchy within. Also, our communities of champions are hierarchy-free. Their membership is completely divorced from ranks in the system, even if those ranks still exist outside the borders of the Viral Change™ programme.

____________________________________________________________________________________________

The Flipping Point ^[11] – Deprogramming Management. This book asks you to use more rigour and critical thinking in how you 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!

Available from major online bookstores ^[18].

^[11]

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

New webinar series launching in June.

Feed Forward webinar series – the organization now, under new management

Machines work on feed-back. Minds work on feed-forward. We don’t need thermostats; we need new compasses. There is no ‘back to normal’. Normal has not been waiting for us.   Leandro Herrero

To change to ‘the new normal’ we must think and act differently in the management of our organizations. Join Leandro Herrero and his team of organizational architects for these 5, free webinars as they debunk uncontested assumptions and uncover the alternatives, whilst considering why this is even more relevant today in the current exceptional environment. Join us and bring your critical thinking brain, switched on. It’s a serious business. It may also be fun.

All attendees receive a complimentary copy of The Flipping Point.

Webinar topics:

1. The myths of change.
2. Can we put the company in an MRI? Can we diagnose its health in terms of its internal connectivity, communication and collaboration?
3. The myths of company culture.
4. The myths of management.
5. High touch and high tech in the digitalisation era

Request ^[25] more information about these webinars.

Extracts taken from my new book ‘The Flipping Point‘. ^[11] A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. ‘The Flipping Point‘ ^[11] contains 200 short vignettes exploring what ’deprogramming management’ may look like.

 

 

Top leadership role modelling is overrated.

It’s history’s equivalent of the great man theory, always one behind events. Most people don’t arrive at 09:00 in the car park wondering how the top leaders will behave that day. Most don’t care, sorry. Their role models are their peers. What shapes behaviours is what you copy every day from your immediate environment. In role modelling, peer-to-peer one, top leadership nil.

Read my book Homo Imitans (2011). Also, read the Edelman Trust Barometer which Mr Google will be happy to show you.

 

Leaders have two hats.

Leaders have two hats. Hat one is the hierarchical one, the one that is usually the reason to be hired or promoted. It comes with a position in the top down structure. Hat two is the one I have described as Backstage Leadership™. Hat two uses the power of hat one to create the conditions for peer-to-peer and informal networks to work, without dictating what to do, without interfering. Hat two recognises that leadership  is distributed across the organization and beyond the boxes of the organizational chart, the one populated by hat ones.

Leaders have two hats. This ‘two hats’ leadership is at the core of Viral Change™. There is (1) hierarchical and top down, (2) distributed significant number of natural leaders and people of influence with no correlation with their position in the hierarchy, and (3) backstage, based upon the need for the top down leaders to support from the back, not the front. Backstage Leadership™ is the bridge between the hierarchy and the peer-to-peer networks. Even the Intellectual Property Office understood that when they granted us the Backstage Leadership™ Trademark. I often think that we were more successful with the IP office than with some corporate VPs.

____________________________________________________________________________________________

The Flipping Point ^[11] – Deprogramming Management. This book asks you to use more rigour and critical thinking in how you 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!

Available from major online bookstores ^[18].

^[11]

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

New webinar series launching in June.

Feed Forward webinar series – the organization now, under new management

Machines work on feed-back. Minds work on feed-forward. We don’t need thermostats; we need new compasses. There is no ‘back to normal’. Normal has not been waiting for us.   Leandro Herrero

To change to ‘the new normal’ we must think and act differently in the management of our organizations. Join Leandro Herrero and his team of organizational architects for these 5, free webinars as they debunk uncontested assumptions and uncover the alternatives, whilst considering why this is even more relevant today in the current exceptional environment. Join us and bring your critical thinking brain, switched on. It’s a serious business. It may also be fun.

All attendees receive a complimentary copy of The Flipping Point.

Webinar topics:

1. The myths of change.
2. Can we put the company in an MRI? Can we diagnose its health in terms of its internal connectivity, communication and collaboration?
3. The myths of company culture.
4. The myths of management.
5. High touch and high tech in the digitalisation era

Request ^[25] more information about these webinars.

There are always people who ‘don’t get it’, are against cultural change efforts, do not support a programme, torpedo it, or are simply a toxic of some sort. Some of them may be senior people with senior bonuses, or at the very top, or a bit below, or combinations.

The traditional thinking says: time out! There is nothing I can do because if the top doesn’t get it, nobody will. Let’s spend the time trying to convince the top, and the next down top, and the next next, that this is good. Only then, we can change … the company/the world/anything. Which is a good explanation of why we are not that good at changing …the company/the world/anything.

Rational PowerPoint presentations to the top, led by well intentioned champions of the idea, internal and external consultants, trying to explain why ‘this is what we need’. The tribunal (there is no other way to describe that Executive Committee) pushes back with things such as: give us examples, tell us something concrete, concrete, concrete, very concrete, and what exactly is going to happen on Wednesday 23rd in the afternoon.

Let’s assume here that you have the extraordinary luck of a visionary leader who says: let’s do it! When can we start?! So you do. But you still have the problem of many others who ‘don’t get it’.

If revolutions were to start when everybody is convinced that the revolution is needed, including the ones who could, or should, start a revolution or could torpedo it, no revolution would have ever taken place.

The aim of a large scale behavioural and cultural change (as we do in Viral Change™) is not to fight these people, disable them, argue with them, convince them, detoxify them or have a long and rational discussion to rehabilitate them. The goal is to reach a threshold of critical mass of engaged, committed, positive and forward looking people, who are actively making changes, that makes the other irrelevant.

It’s a question of critical mass, not seniority or hierarchical power. When things are moving, changes take place, differences are noticed, the Opposition starts to fragment into different groups. One, the ones who continue to oppose and can’t handle it. They either leave or have gastric ulcers. Two, the ones who can see and hear and become supporters. Three, the chronically neutral. By the way, a subgroup of Two are the ones who say, ‘I have always believed that this was the right thing to do’, even if they were the ones ready to kill you. This beautiful tribe deserves a big, big, big smile, followed by a ‘thanks for your continuous support, sir’.

What if there is still a fierce opposition at the top? Many years of organizational consulting with companies across the world, many, many Viral Change™ programmes later, many years of living on both sides of the fence of leadership, have found me the perfect formula, which I am happy to share with you. Here it is. If you are in a company, as an employee, manager, external consultant of an organizational type of some sort, where the top, or quasi top ‘don’t get it’, are against cultural change efforts, do not support a programme, torpedo it, or are simply a toxic of some sort, with some of them being senior people with senior bonuses, at the very top, or a bit below, or combinations, there is one clear and powerful, strategy: leave.

PS. If you are a consultant, don’t forget to give them the telephone number of your competitors.

In Latin ‘Post hoc ergo propter hoc’. Free translation: B follows A, so A must be the cause of B. It’s a fallacy. We installed that piece of software; since then, the computer is very slow; that software is causing this performance issue in my PC.  We have just come back from a trip abroad; one of the kids now has a serious fever and is sick; she must have got food poisoning from that last dodgy restaurant.

Since everyday life is full of ‘post-hoc fallacies’, there is little point in giving more examples. You have, and will recognise, plenty of them. Not surprisingly, ‘post hoc fallacies’ also dominate business life.

• All people in the sales force have gone through the new, expensive sales training programme in the last six months. Our sales figures have markedly improved. That sales training did the trick.
• Joe has taken over as the new CEO, after the rather disastrous year of Peter at the helm. The stock price has rocketed. Joe is the right leader, the market always knows.
• We have gone through a one year, intensive Employee Engagement programme, with multiple initiatives at all levels, and you can see what happens: the overall company performance this year has been brilliant. And the overall employee turnover halved!  Another example of how Employee Engagement pays off.

These are three real stories from my consulting work with organizations. And ‘stories’ is the right term. Damn good ones, I have to say. But without exercising some critical thinking, these stories may remain at the stage of fallacy.

• The sales training may have been excellent, but the markedly improved sales figures could also be explained by a pathetic performance of the main competitor, who completely screwed up their greatly anticipated new product launch.
• Joe may, indeed, be what that company needs as a CEO. But the stock price success could also be explained by a cost cutting programme that Peter, the disastrous CEO, had started before he left, and which just now is showing results. No offense, Joe.
• The Employee Engagement programme is a great initiative, but instead of leading to a brilliant company performance, it could be that the brilliant company performance (based upon a series of successful launches) had shaped employee satisfaction and sense of pride. This may be why people scored so high in many parameters in the Satisfaction Questionnaire. A Halo effect.

A fallacy is only a fallacy until one looks critically at it and explores alternative thinking. Left on their own, they may be very good stories of success, but the arguments behind may or may not be true. When, in my Speaking Engagements, I challenge audiences to think of  potential fallacies in our arguments, I am conscious that I am pushing dangerous hot buttons. No Training Manager wants to hear that their programmes may or may not have the attributed impact. The same for Investor Relationships, or the Board of Directors, or HR.

Taken to the extremes – people tell me – we would not do anything, since (according to me, they say) we can’t prove much in Management. But this is a narrow view of why we should do things in management. Sales Training programmes need to take place, perhaps CEOs need a replacement, and there is nothing wrong at all with that Employee Engagement programme. We do all these things because we believe in good management and because we are paid to exercise judgement. Don’t stop them!

Exercising critical thinking and practicing good management are not in contradiction! Not all good stories of success contain a fallacy. But spotting management fallacies can only lead to a better management. The key is not to settle for a good story.

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 ^[26] 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.