To continue on the theme of Purpose…after yesterday’s: Purpose is always in the basement ^[1]

 

Suddenly purpose is back.

We are told that Millennials want purpose. Which may be true. As much as many other non-Millennials. I wish we could stop talking about Millennials as if they were a particular type of android.

When used in business, purpose usually means social purpose. Social purpose is a noble aim which could be easily hijacked and absorbed into mainstream management speak with little meaning.

Maria Hengeveld describes, very elegantly, her presence at a conference in which she was supposed to write on the back of her badge ‘her purpose’. She also criticised ‘Davos style platitudes’ and how purpose could become a political correct device. See her piece here ^[2].

I suppose in the same way ‘social corporate responsibility’ is not in many, terribly responsible places.

In a recent contract we have been asked to state our social corporate responsibility activities.  My team did a bit of head scratching . We occasionally get requests from Procurement Departments, particularly of large clients, to describe our ethical source of materials. It is clear that nobody in those departments has bothered to understand our consulting business because I don’t think they mean the source of our paperclips, or toners for our printers. I think.

We call ourselves (with pride) ‘organization architects’ and I often get emails inviting me to Grand Designs type of events or greenfields with planning permissions. No, we don’t build houses, but their algorithm does not know. Tick, tick, tick

Will purpose become a new box to tick?

PWC has a ‘Chief Purpose Officer’. That is a symptom of commoditisation. Do we need Chief Ethics Officers, Chief Customer Officers, Chief Kindness Officers, Chief Values  Officers?

Business loves institutionalisation. It thinks that giving a structure and a title solves any problems.

I support any of those things provided that their goal is to self-destroy in a year or two. Proving that they are not needed anymore.

Let’s not have purpose hijacked as well .  ‘Melted in the air’?

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For more insights and thought-provoking discussion WATCH our free on demand webinars led by Dr Leandro Herrero and his team of organization architects. 

 

‘A Better Way’ Series ^[3]

This series explores the future of organization life. We will explain how the 3 Pillars of The Chalfont Project’s Organizational Architecture – smart organizational design, large scale behavioural and cultural change and collective leadership – work together to create a “Better Way” for organizations to flourish in the post-COVID world.

 

Feed Forward Webinar Series ^[4]

In this series, Dr Leandro Herrero and his team of Organization Architects debunk uncontested assumptions and uncover the alternatives, whilst considering why this is even more relevant today in the current exceptional environment.

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Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[5], an international firm of organizational architects. He is the pioneer of Viral Change,  ^[6]a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers 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 Dr Herrero to your event you can find out more here: Speaking Bureau ^[7] or contact us directly at: The Chalfont Project. ^[8]

One’s true purpose is never finally decided.

Like history, purpose is always found backwards and then edited. A little journey of re-creation and reconstruction perhaps occurs every day. It’s a journey to the basement to unpack old boxes and dig through the clutter.

There are discoveries and dust, photographs you thought you had scrapped and items you thought you had lost. Interesting encounters will be mixed with embarrassing memories. Let the truth come out.

Perhaps at some point you will be tired of the digging. Perhaps you will become elated like at Christmas Eve. Who knows.

Purpose is always at ground zero, never in the shiny windows of the penthouse. Don’t waste your time on those elevated floors full of neon signs. Let the basement free you.

When you go back to the upper floors, you may indulge yourself in creating goals and milestones to look forward, but don’t get too excited. Purpose is never strangled in a set of events or in a calendar. It always remains a bit mysterious, unfinished, in progress.

You will always edit it as you go along.

PS: The basement also holds all your ‘why’ but, it’s so cluttered there, that it may be difficult to find them. Let them discover you. If you always ‘start with why’ you will become proficient at providing answers. Answers and truth are distant cousins, but not the same. The ‘why’ are also reconstructed backwards.

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The Chalfont Project Speaking Bureau ^[7]

 

If you’re looking for a dynamic and provocative keynote, workshop or masterclass for your business – we want to hear from you ^[8]. Here at The Chalfont Project we can deliver speaking engagements that are guaranteed to motivate, inspire and inform your audience.

Leandro and our team of senior organization architects, with their high-level expertise, thought-provoking content and engaging stage presence will inspire your audiences, encouraging them to challenge the status quo and adopt new ways of thinking.

The result is an audience motivated to take action and equipped to make a lasting difference to their organizations.

Over the years we have created bespoke keynote interventions, workshops and masterclasses for both large industry conferences and C-Suite level corporate events, covering a wide-ranging and hugely varied number of topics. We will work closely with you to fully understand your audience profile, business issues and specific event objectives to ensure we create a tailormade, immersive and personal experience.

To find out more visit ^[7] or contact us ^[8] to discuss your particular needs.

 

A few years ago, I was in the lobby of a global pharma company waiting for my appointment. I sat in front of several big flashing screens of the type one sees in the reception area of many companies. I was curious to see what was displayed. The content was constantly moving, pretty fast, with smiling pictures of people and other things like buildings that looked like scientific labs and manufacturing plants.

The gentle bombardment was constant and very rich in data. There you had the names of the medicines they sold, market share, number of countries in which they operated, number of people dedicated to R&D, so many nationalities of people in the workforce, an award for employee engagement, and a few lines of what it seemed to me to be their mission statement.

My curiosity grew when I felt something was missing. Since I was looking from some distance, it might be, I thought, that I was not looking properly. I got closer to the panels but the panorama only changed a bit. Now I could see a Stock Market ticker showing the stock price of the company, proudly exhibiting an arrow point upwards and a plus sign followed by the number 0.5.

There was no mention of number of people treated (which is not the same as number of medicine units sold) or how the medicines were affecting people’s lives. One of the medicines in their portfolio is simply lifesaving. For a lifesaving drug, you would have thought that it would be just natural to say how many lives have been saved. Nope.

I felt embarrassed. Unfortunately, this is not uncommon. We see far more display, whether in LCD screens or in a less digitalised world, of operational performance than of purpose. By purpose I don’t even mean ‘high purpose’. There may be other not so dramatic purposes in many industries, but there is always one.  But for a pharma company to forget the number of lives they have saved is pretty bad.

The very few times I have discussed this kind of thing with other people, I find myself in a strange minority. What? – I am told – you don’t like seeing that people are making money? Or do you have a problem with profits? Or what’s wrong with making money? Which are kind of strange reactions because last time I checked, I was not going around dressed like, or posing as, Saint Francis of Assisi.

The purpose of a company is to make money, people say. More people than you think. Is that it?  The following human activities make money: arms traders, a casino, an insurance company, a supermarket, illegal human trafficking, the mafia, a bank. Should I carry on?  This commonality does not make them equal.

It seems that we are still apologetic or embarrassed, with the word purpose. Perhaps we have grown so sceptical of ‘mission and vision statements’ that anything that smells slightly ‘soft’ (as some people still say) is simply suspicious.

What a shame that we sometimes cannot articulate, clearly and loudly, the purpose of the organization, its space in the social world.

Incidentally, the real pharma example that I have shared is still stuck in my mind, but anybody can extrapolate the argument to any other company and sector. High purpose, purpose, small purpose. Please tell us, clearly, not whispering, why you exist.

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12 Rules for a behavioural counter-epidemic to deal with Covid-19

A viral epidemic for which there is no immediate cure, only ways of managing it, can only be controlled by a counter behavioural epidemic.

The very likely availability of several vaccines in the near future brings well founded hope. But there is part of the population that may be reluctant to be vaccinated, mostly out of misinformation and powerful belief systems.

This article addresses the non-medical management of the pandemic through the lenses of large scale behavioural and cultural change principles, as practiced by the Viral Change™ Mobilizing Platform for the last 20 years, in the area of organizational change.

Click here for full article and downloadable PDF ^[9]

 

Nassim Taleb ^[10] has written about ‘antifragile’ as the quality of ‘growing from disorder’. He says that the opposite to fragile is not robust, but antifragile.

Translation: in a non-antifragile mode you address a crisis by adapting, surviving or coping.  You praise flexibility. Flexibility is getting yourself hit and bouncing back. More or less ready for a new hit. Think one of those punchbags or sandbags used in boxing training. Always back. But still the same punchbag, just a little bruised.

In antifragile mode you will try to come out of whatever critical situation stronger than before. You are not back to baseline. You are transformed. You are beyond predictions. And you surprise yourself.

What if we did that? What if we treated the coronavirus pandemic as a chance in a lifetime to surprise ourselves, surprise our colleagues, surprise our clients, surprise the market with our new ‘us’. Not survived, and tired, and happy to still be running, but unpredicted and unexpectedly better, fantastic, enhanced by a serious multiple.

It’s doable.

A while ago, I was told an anecdote about an MBA student who returned to their alma mater for a reunion. They greeted the Dean. “Dean, remember graduation day? You were on stage trying to drive the long procession of students at a pace to get our diplomas. We were both slow and overwhelmed. From the corner of the stage you kept telling us in your deep voice: “Keep moving! Keep moving!” You know, Dean? That was the best business advice given to me in all those three years. This is what I have been doing since.”

A less kind version of the anecdote says: “I don’t remember much of the MBA, but I do remember the ‘keep moving’ of the graduation”.

So, this is the core of my ‘Keep Moving’ strategy. I use the ‘keep moving’ story (and the strategy) a lot. Many times, we get stuck in organizational life (or, is it ‘life’?). Roads have too many bifurcations. The uncertainty of the journey, too high. We don’t have all the facts. We have contradictory views from people. We don’t quite know for sure where we are going. And as Lewis Carroll told us, ‘If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there’.

That’s right, keep moving!

I know that some people may think, that this is crazy. We really need to know – they say – otherwise the movements may not be in the right direction. Sure! I have a lot of sympathy for this. But, at the extreme, this is the justification for the perfect Strategic Plan, the perfect Mission and Vision statements, the perfect ‘lets have all pieces in place before we move’.

The Perfect Strategy First, is lethal. There is no such thing. I am all for the good intellectual and emotional diagnosis of situations, and rigorous planning of business execution and solutions. But never, never, at the cost of immobility. Keep moving, or start moving. The road will become clearer. Some of those assumptions in the Strategic Plan will go out of the window soon. Some early customer insights may modify your thinking. You will never discover any of these from a static strategic plan department.

Wearing my behavioural sciences hat, the advice (‘keep moving’) will be the same. Action is the best cure, even if you don’t know 100% in which direction. Inaction is never the answer. Only when you ‘keep moving’ will you discover the roads. If in doubt, do anything but stand still.

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.

On one side, taxes are good, big government, social welfare, fighting for social justice and social mobility, human rights, women rights, pro-abortion, pro gay marriage, pro LGBT, piss off bankers, pro immigration, diversity and inclusion, and transgender education in schools. Ah, climate change is big and a green world is a super super priority.

On the other side, not to abortion, any, individual achievement, ‘there is no such a thing as society’, taxes are bad, government to the minimum, freedom of the individual, traditional family, piss off transgender education in schools (trans what?),  low taxes, no immigrants.  Ah, and climate change not sure, really, overrated at least, and green  world, well, I am already doing my recycling.

I have no idea which side I am anymore. I have been offered every single day a polarized, binary, Manichean world, and I’m am supposed to tick all the boxes to ‘belong’.

I am of an age that this polarization annoys me enormously, but I can navigate. The new generations are offered a package. Package One or Package Two.

The problem is that there is an insidious,  cognitive halo effect that is unconscious. If you care for the environment and social justice, great. Automatically you will be pro-abortion and big taxes. I have never understood what abortion and taxes have to do with each other, or pro LGBT and climate change for that matter.

If you defend the traditional family and declare yourself pro-life, you must surely want no taxes and think that climate change is a hoax.

Try to choose the bits you want and you’ll find yourself orphan.

Sad that, if you vote, you’ll need to choose the less-evil.

Polarity is the new slavery of the mind.

David Brooks, columnist of the New York Times and author (too conservative for the liberals and too liberal for the conservatives) has created the Weave project. He wants to find and give a voice to normal citizens constructing ties and weaving a social fabric of society. Those who start perhaps little movements without knowing that they are doing so. His article in the New York Times ^[11] is worth reading for anybody interested in people mobilization and peer to peer work. That includes leaders in organizations.

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

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

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

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

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

Having mastered the arts of opinion writing, cultural criticism and human decency, David Brooks of the New York Times is now undertaking a project at the Aspen Institute called “Weave ^[12] ,” designed to recognize and help people directly involved in social repair. In the work of lighting candles to push back the darkness, Brooks wants to be a lamplighter.

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

The author Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote a most interesting book  about the Lincoln presidency: ‘Team of Rivals’. It says it all.

John Kerry teamed up with John McCain for years to fix problems. Before that, Kerry the anti war and pacifist, and McCain, war veteran, prisoner of war, did not speak to each other for 10 years.

Spain’s 1978 constitution, post Franco, was literally written and signed at once by great minds from the ex-Franco system, the Christian Democrats, the Socialist Party, Communist party and nationalists parties. They were genuinely at war with each other well before, for years.

South Africa, came up from apartheid with the two opposite poles teaming up. Mandela offered government places to people who had ‘managed’ his prison.

The Good Friday agreement in Ireland managed to get together irreconcilable positions, historical, political and religious.

If all this can happen in the real big world, it can happen to you and me in our real small worlds. You and I work in or with corporations. We have rivals with small ‘r’. OK, sometimes the font is big.  It looks like a big ‘R’. But usually we are not asked to write constitutions with people who wanted to kill us.

This is a five point winning strategy:

List your rivals
Invite them to team up
Watch their faces of surprise
Insist
Surprise everybody

You are in the path of success big time.

Try it. Probably it has never been done around you.

(I thought you wanted innovation)

Some organizations are breathless. Frantic. It could be good or bad, usually not too good.  Other organizations are like funerary places on a bad day. Some of these things are chronic, some acute illnesses.

Calibrating the energy of the organization is one of  the leadership roles. Sensing the temperature, being mindful of dynamics, knowing how much to push, or let it go, or observe, all these are leadership skills.

Each culture has its own pace, determined by lots of factors, from the model of personal relationship (Fluid? Structured? Artificial?)  to the physical environment (Open plan? Doors closed? ). Incidentally in some places open plan is a blessing, and in others a nightmare. Open plan is not intrinsically and unconditionally good. Mixed floor plans with different spaces are more effective. Another conversation.

There is a collective organizational health that sometimes shows up in the form of vulnerability, even with visible indicators, like sweating and a fever in your body. People systematically irritated for small things, more passive aggressive behaviours (the dictionary says: ‘denoting a type of behaviour or personality characterized by indirect resistance to the demands of others and an avoidance of direct confrontation’), more ‘individual retreats’ from people usually social, small absences, all are symptoms of fatigue, maybe exhaustion, maybe disillusion.

These symptoms are precisely that, symptoms. In themselves they mean little but need to be interpreted.

A good leader’s question is ‘what is the temperature telling us?’, ‘what is the chattering about?, ‘what’s the collective mood?’ My rule of thumb is that reaction to all symptoms, all the time, is not in itself healthy. However, paying attention and recalibrating at the right time is important. Putting yourself in other people’s shoes, perhaps recognising a true  restless time in the organization, perhaps uncertainty, all these matter a lot. The worse is always the unsaid. The healthier, a conversation in the open. The right dose (I must confess very difficult to achieve) the one where we talk about, pause, reflect, suspend judgement and finally make sense. Then move on, not endless self-absorbing, navel gazing. The company is not Big Group Psychotherapy.

As in our bodies, after a little or not little infection, antibodies do a good job and not only fight that but perhaps more defences are built. In the organization, you want to come up of a bad cold with renewed energy, not more exhausted. It is doable.

In Medicine (sorry to go back to my roots) we know that you should not treat pain of unknown cause indiscriminately, with strong painkillers. It may simple mask a real problem.

We use too many painkillers in the organization, not always understanding the pain. Just a thought.

This is an unwritten rule in US presidential elections and a line in a witty and fascinating book by Dan Pfeiffer ‘Yes we (still) can’

It has made me think. It has clear translations for our own professional lives, even if we don’t run for President. Do you?

The best state of professional freedom is the ‘less afraid of losing’ one.

Have the skills and competences that can attract others, sure. But for all the noise about how unrealistic this may be, as an aspiration, it does not get better than: be unique. Maybe its knowledge, maybe it’s presence, maybe distinct view of the world. Maybe ability to put together A and B.

But expertise is not enough. It needs ability to make sense and share the expertise. Any answer that requires just a Googling trip can’t seriously be qualified as unique expertise. Finding your own way to the library, digital or otherwise, is a skill, for sure. But try to sell yourself as unique Googler.

Expertise and some degrees of ‘uniqueness’ may come also with  the ability to cut across different fields, or even angles within a field in itself. Bridges and brokerage are a good source of that ‘unique expertise’.

What about making sense? Literally, make sense of the information jungle. Being able to separate the noise and the signal.

Routine tasks may be taken over by artificial intelligent machines, we are told. Even ‘thinking tasks’. Professionals today need to think what is unique that makes them strong and ‘indispensable, with how many qualifications to that word.

I don’t have a good answer.

But I have a good question for professionals: what would make you ‘less afraid to lose’, using the metaphoric meaning of an election campaign.  What would make you free?

The answer may be … complicated. But it’s a good question.

And old sticker said

This is a situation in which I find myself very often:

1. Several corporate groups agree (vocally, explicitly, passionately) about the need to change or transform
2. Everybody is looking to anybody else to see who dares to start doing something.
3. Either
   (a) the whole thing collapses, and people continue to look at each other and vocally, explicitly, passionately, declare the need to do something
   (b) One of them starts without waiting for the entire corporate ecosystem to be enlightened or a Damascus trip.
   (c ) Then others move.
   (d) All claim leadership.

Its 2018. Corporations need to develop, evolve, transform, adapt (please add your own preferred words) and there is no time to enlighten the entire universe. Somebody needs to start in their own territory of control (division business unit, affiliate). This is leadership.

Do not invoke lack of readiness. It is a red herring. Nobody is ready.  Readiness is always a state of mind of people who have already started to move.

 

Beloit College, in Wisconsin, creates every year a ‘Mindset List’ ^[13] It shows a list of facts about a particular new class or colleague intake. On the ‘Class of 2019′, one can read things such as, they may believe that ‘Hong Kong has always been under Chinese rule’ or ‘hybrid automobiles have always been mass produced’, or ‘if you say “around the turn of the century,” they may well ask you, “which one?”. The list is sort of hilarious. It also contains ‘these people have never licked a stamp’.

Beyond the anecdote, there are serous points. A professor of Sociology there, puts it like this: ‘The Class of 2019 will enter college with high technology an increasing factor in how and even what they learn. They will encounter difficult discussions about privilege, race, and sexual assault on campus. They may think of the ‘last century’ as the twentieth, not the nineteenth, so they will need ever wider perspectives about the burgeoning mass of information that will be heading their way. And they will need a keen ability to decipher what is the same and what has changed with respect to many of these issues’. Amen to it, I say.

So, in our organizations, do we really understand the who is who of our segmented work force? My impression is not. We simply default to a superficial, unhelpful, anecdotal and infuriating comments on ‘The Millennials’ as our climax of segmentation. And then, so what with The Millennials? Well, they get the same PowerPoints, the same top down messages and the same Town Hall meeting as everybody else. Oh! But the Millennials are soooo different! Say the mostly male, mostly grown up, leadership team.

We need to understand the tribal nature of the organization, the real peer-to-peer networks of ‘people like us’, where the powerful conversations take place. And once we do, once we have segmented, we need to treat those tribal layers differently. Yep, harder than a top down, single communication tsunami.

The ‘what do the ones who have never licked a stamp say?’ should be one of the multiple tests. Claiming no idea, is not a good idea.

Continuous culture shaping within an organization equals social movement: large scale behavioural and cultural change, for a purpose, powered by a mobilizing platform and building lasting capacity. My mouthful definition of social change and culture change.

Life in any organization is not linear, not predictable, not extrapolate-able. It has ups and downs, boosts of energy and plateaus, near-death  moments and party times.

It has also magic thresholds. I call magic thresholds those inflection points, spontaneous or engineered, welcome or unwelcome, at the right time or at the wrong time, in which attention span is high and energy is concentrated. It may be in the form of a shock, or sense of anticipation, or intense curiosity.  They have a relatively short window of hearts and minds engaged at once. They are in front of you. They won’t last.

Grab them for a higher purpose. You may not have a clear answer but you can always have good questions:

What can we make of this crisis? Can anything good come out from this mess?
We have been in front page newspapers, and it’s not pretty? Is there a case to regroup the troops and come out of this stronger?
Something new, unrelated to us (to this division for example) is taken all the airtime. What if we took advantage?

Rahm Emanuel, at a point Obamas’ Chief-of-Staff, now Mayor of Chicago, once said: You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.

The ‘things you think you could not do before’ is the magic here. Not opportunity to adapt, opportunity to reflect, or opportunity to ‘learn from mistakes’. That is management speak. ‘Things you think you could not do before’ or the alternatives, you could not have imagined,  or were not in the plans, or two years ago we would not have even considered, is the magic.

The building of large scale behavioural and cultural change, for a purpose, powered by a mobilizing platform and building lasting capacity, is a journey. Not a project management plan. In that journey, you have to have a clear idea of purpose and legacy (the two ends), and a robust mobilizing platform that takes care of the rules of the game (including the non-negotiables) and the engagement of those ‘committed citizens’ of Margaret Mead [‘Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has’] who incidentally forgot the word ‘organized’ after committed.

In that journey, the best leaders I know, and I have known, are not the ones with the biggest mother-of-all-programme-management-plans, and with more ubiquitous, overpaid change-management-consultants in the office, but the ones  with purpose translated into practice. They are not the visionaries without a journey, the armchair leaders with more powerpoints, or the rebels with a great voice but without a cause.

Almost invariably they all see the magic thresholds and never let them go to waste.

No medium to large size company has a single culture.  No medium to large size French, or British or American company has a single French, or British or American culture. There are sub-cultures all over the place. Chances are you have a manufacturing culture, an R&D culture and, say, a San Francisco operating unit culture. Chances are you live in a Switzerland type organization not in a North Korean type one. Why so many leaders want a North Korean organization? It’s handy for them.

You have two choices: recognise this diversity and find a way to glue the organization under some magic that adds value to the whole, or desperately  try to ‘align’ and pretend that you have one uniform company, or that you can in fact dictate and have ‘one company’.

For years, the latter quest has been in place under an ill-formed idea of (global) leadership. ‘Across the board alignment’ has been promoted not as an organizational need but as leaders-at-the-top need. When I hear about sudden One Company Programmes, I hear more about the vulnerability and weakness of its leadership than a sort of collective cry for unsolicited uniformity.

If you want ‘one company’, the best thing you can do is not to say it, and work towards finding the glue and the reasons why people would want to have ‘that one’. The more you publicise ‘the one company’, the more you are saying you don’t have one. Not a good frame to start. Most ‘one company programmes’ I know of, are created for and by leaders who have not managed to create a sense of belonging. They now want  belonging by dictation.  Good luck.

Historically, my team and myself have been involved in such programmes, but the best results have always correlated with the speed we managed to stop talking about it and did our best to create a behavioural fabric which everybody could click with.

One of our first  projects, a few centuries ago,  started with the top leader in a large  R&D bombarding everybody with a clever ‘R&D is one word’. It meant, you research guys better align with you development guys. Or else.  And the more he said, the more it seemed that the distance was getting longer. On this particular case, for a number or reasons, we managed to create a structure that we called ‘New Products Incubator’. Behind the semantic twist it was the reality of new ways of working under a shared set of behaviours, new concept of risk, nee sense of urgency, new rules of the game and new sense of collective, bottom up identity and belonging. People literally queued  to  be part of it. Literally. And the leader stopped the mantra. ‘And he saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning-the sixth day’. (Unfortunately on the Seventh Creation Day the company was bought by a super-tanker, one which by the skillful hand of a Big Consulting Company,  seemed to have one single goal: to destroy all that worked well.  But this is a story for another day.)

As in all examples of this miniseries of ‘mistaken identity’, when inputs and outputs get confused, this last one, number 5,  follows the same pattern. If you want ‘one company’, treat that as an outcome of what you do, not as communication input, as something to be injected, a magic coin for the slot machine that will deliver the goods in the receptacle at the bottom.  Or, in simple terms, if you want One Company, don’t ask for one, make it.

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

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

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

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

RIP

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.

As Dr Leandro Herrero is away, the Daily Thoughts will be taking a short “pause” this week. In the meantime, Daily Thoughts HQ has picked some of the top posts on social movements for you to enjoy. The following post was first published in March 2016…

Scholars of social movements have noticed and described how people often create a stronger and faster sense of association and belonging when they are united not necessarily by high purpose strategic goals but by tactics. For example, there are people who ‘like’ demonstrations, or strikes, or mega-mailing campaigns, or a particular type of community activities, or digital campaigns on ‘anything’.

Said like that it sounds like an offense to the high purpose, a way of dismissing the overarching narrative. But this is of course not the intention. On the contrary, it is healthy to accept that ‘the cause’ may in fact attract multiple motivations. It is naïve to think that there is a full, single alignment ‘on topic’ in any given social movement.

The case of street demonstrations, not a social movement on its own, of course, is a good example. An ‘anti-war’ demonstration will host anti-war people, anti-capitalists (perhaps), greens (perhaps), genuine people wanting to reform society, people who have not much to do that day, angry-with-the-government people, and people who join pretty much any demonstration available.

‘United by tactics’ is the misunderstood other side of the coin of ‘united for a cause’.

We see this micro-scale inside the organization. There are people who thrive in some presentation rituals; people who are very prone to meetings, and, in general, people who have the ‘what and how’ to do at a higher level than the ‘why’.

In particular, the rituals of monthly reviews and reports, fixed time staff meetings, budget cycles, review boards and overscheduled conference calls, tend to take over organizational life, and become very stable (because they are effective glue-rituals even if not very efficacious). A significant number of people in the organization are connected by the dynamics of the cyclical presentations and other tribal activities, and get ‘hooked on them’, the organizational equivalent of the ‘hooked on tactics’ of collective action in the macro social world.

‘Collective action’ is always a surprising laboratory of human dynamics. Within the organization, our process-rituals, needed as they may be, tend to suck energy and resources. But also people, ‘hooked on the process’.

Only our good dose of emotional and social intelligence could come to the rescue, not to destroy those processes or tribal rituals, but to identify them and, at the very least, be very clear on what they are supposed to do, why they were created in the first place, and how effective and/or efficacious they may be.

I have described before the role of managers in many ways, often pointing to the risk of becoming ‘information traffic wardens’. The ones managing the valves of the pipes that carry information across the organization. Sometimes they open the valves and the stuff flows. Sometimes the close them, or a little bit, and the information gets stuck.

Indeed this is a pejorative view, but nonetheless a frequent representation of the reality. Valves open or closed, we all are a sort of ‘information traffic warden’. The question I often ask myself is whether in the effort to ‘share’, the sharing itself, a mechanism of the type I-do-because-I-can, takes over the meaning or even the intention of some sort of impact.

Jessica Helfand, designer, artist, academic and  author, struck a cord when reading her beautiful book ‘Design: The invention of desire’. In one of her chapter she says:

And just what is it we’re sharing? Regurgitated content produced by others? In many cases, we  don’t share; we re-share, positioning ourselves not so much as makers but as carriers, aligning ourselves as the purveyors of so much trivia, supporters of the eminently forgettable, participants in a spontaneous assembly line, a delivery mechanism of any number of random things—for what is more  terrifying than being alone, staring at a blank screen or empty page, peering head-on into a creative void? Far easier to redesign and retrofit, to appropriate and go from there.

The figure and the concept of ‘the carrier’ made me think. We all are carriers of ideas (good or bad) or behaviours (good or bad). We all share, certainly, as Jessica says, re-share. The alternative is vegetative status, or, in today’s world ‘non participant’. Perhaps a modern version of the idiot, a word that in Old Greece meant ‘non participant’ (in the public life), as opposed to ‘the citizen’, before it degenerated into something related to intelligence.

Moder professionals, idiots we are not, participants and ‘sharers’, yes sir. But what do we carry? How much re-share or the share we do?

Are we carried away by that effortless possibility at the cost of original thoughts? Just wondering.

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

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

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

My professional life is largely focused on helping organizations, public and private, to create large scale behavioural and cultural change, to organize internal social movements that bank on the combined power of non negotiable behaviours, peer to peer influence (the power of social imitation I describe in Homo Imitans), the informal day to day interactions, storytelling and backstage leadership. Those are the ingredients of the Viral Change™ Mobilizing Platform. ^[14]

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

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

• You can fight the command and control centre of the so called Caliphate. (Being born in Spain where we had 800 years of our history under Caliphs of some sort, I can tell you that most of them would be horrified of what is happening today under that name). Here is where all the political, economic and military interventions reside. Certainly I look at them as an anxious observer with zero expertise.
• You could fight the ideology. Ideologies are epidemics of ideas. You don’t fight a bad idea/behavioural epidemic from within. You need a counter epidemic that takes over. It needs to be orchestrated. I look at this with more expertise. Until we see this as an infection model, not a rational discussion or an argument-counterargument issue, we will never win. ‘Defending our values’ is creating an epidemic of them. Incidentally, if you give me 100 units of energy to spend between ‘understanding the causes’ and ‘creating a counter epidemic of the opposite’, unapologetic, I would  give 1 unit to the ‘understanding’ and 9  to the orchestration of the counter epidemic.
• You can fight the network at its granular roots. This is where specific, concrete behaviours are cooked, copied, imitated and reinforced. It’s not as glamorous and headline grabbing as sending the troops or cyberattacking the system but it is incredibly effective. It banks on the universal power of peer to peer influence, proven again and again as the engine behind the shaping of cultures, the creation of fashions or the crafting of revolutions. The greatest source of influence is the tribe. The horizontal, ‘people-like-me’, patient to patient, consumer to consumer, ex-gang member to gang member, ex-dysfunctional family to dysfunctional family, ‘youth to youth, granny to granny’ (I use this expression in Homo Imitans ^[15]). Politicians, imams, priests, rabbis, social workers, police officers, elders and wise men (‘not people like me’ the terrorists say) jumping in to help, can’t even start to compete with the power of ‘tribal members’ (‘people like me’) which, in the case of terrorists, means ex-terrorists and/or people of the same age, religion and culture with alternative views. And guts. I can’t expand on the how in this space but this is the goal. It is peer to peer or it isn’t. We need battalions of those same age-religion-culture that can interact and confront.

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

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

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

PS. Here some previous Daily Thoughts on these principles:

A behavioural epidemic can’t be fought from within. It needs a behavioural counter-epidemic to take over ^[16]

Don’t fight an epidemic of bad things. Create a counter-epidemic of good ones. ^[17]

Counter-fundamentalism secret weapon is yet to be deployed fully. Homo Sapiens drops bombs. Homo Imitans changes minds ^[18].

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