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

Scale It – Introducing 1 of my 40 rules of change

When creating effective change in any organization, there are 40 rules that, in my experience, are the key between success and failure. Today, let me tell you about one of them – ‘Scale it’.

In organizations with thousands of people, traditional change management solutions could be hosting lengthy training sessions, with endless PowerPoints or individual coaching sessions – left wondering why their culture is not improving.

The answer is: These are methods for small scale. To create change at scale, across a whole organization, we require completely different mechanisms. If you want to reach your whole organization, you are in the business of infecting people – not of communicating, coaching, training…

Let me explain more in this short video.

 

[1]

 

So what? What can we “scale”? 

In short, we can scale behaviours – behaviours that will create the organizational culture we want. If business is the mission, culture is the strategy. If you have non-negotiable behaviours and the knowledge of how to scale these across your organization, you’re ahead of the game.

If you want to hear more about the rules, my team and I have a great opportunity coming up very soon. Let us know if you would like to know more here [2] or via [email protected].

‘Powered by Viral Change™’: A Social Transformation Platform for the organization of the 21st Century

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Behavioural Change,Building Remarkable Organizations,Change, Leadership and Society,Employee Engagement,Mobiliztion,Organization architecture,Scale up,Social network,Transformation,Viral Change | No Comments
When we started to work on Viral Change™, as a way to create large scale behavioural and cultural change, and we did so informally around 2000, and formally in 2006 with the publication of the book, the language of a ‘change methodology’ was inevitable.

People asked how Viral Change™ compared with another, say Kotter, methodology. But today, many years later, the focus on ‘change methodology only’ would be misleading. Yet, we are still using the word change, even if it is so contaminated that it is increasingly difficult to have a meaningful conversation around it. But there is a different emphasis.

After years of successful implementations in industries such as Pharmaceuticals, Vaccine manufacturing Financial Services, Transportation, Public Government and Oil and Gas, and other Viral Change™  has become, and it’s better described, as a social platform to mobilize people at scale.

A platform is more than a method to go from A to B. It is a map of a transformation or a journey with key principles and, yes, a methodology behind. But it’s not a ‘change methodology’ per se, or not only, unless we call change anything that moves.

Viral Change™ is a people’s mobilizing platform for the organization.

Viral Change™ is in fact the orchestration of a social movement and not a ‘linear’ process such as the Kotter steps, whether the original sequential 8 steps or the ‘you can have it all in parallel’ after his 2012 Damascus Revelation and consequent Late Vocation and conversion to non-linearity, ‘to accelerate things’.

Our Viral Change™ programmes may not have Viral Change™ title. They are not a programme or project, strictly speaking. Although the language is also sometimes inevitable. They are specific organizational transformations to solve organizational problems.

Viral Change™ is the engine-solution to an organizational pain that entails large scale behavioural change across the board.

Viral Change™ is in fact a social transformation platform with specific ways of doing, track record and outcomes.

As a Social Transformation Platform, it has/it is:
  • A set of principles around behavioural primacy and bottom up drive
  • A particular view on, and conception of the organization as a non-linear structure which is closer to an organism than an organization
  • Five pillars: behaviours, peer-to-peer influence, the informal organization, storytelling and backstage leadership
  • A specific well crafted methodology to be adapted to each business situation. Challenge A solution, ‘powered by Viral Change™, not Viral Change™ method first, fitting the problem second.
  • Built-in mechanisms of rapid adaptation
  • An emphasis on change-ability as opposed to change
  • An entirely innovative ‘operating system’ for the organization
  • A new and permanent model of Employee Engagement based upon internal activism
  • An internal ‘tempo’ in which cultural-like transformations happen fast
  • An ability to host, tackle, address, operate both on traditional A to Z change (traditionally understood as a one off event, or ‘project’) and unconventional ‘change-inside’ (‘Viral Change™ inside’ mode) – AKA ‘culture’

Much more to come….

A Better Way To Create Large-Scale Behavioural Change

Large-scale behavioural and cultural change is the new generation of change management in organizations and society.

We all know that articulating your unique space in the world, and the culture you want to create for your employees, is vital. However, how do you make it stick? How do you activate it in a way which ensures it resonates with all employees regardless of function, hierarchy, or expertise? How can you make sure employees live and breathe your culture?

Watch on-demand now. [3]

[3]
 

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

Stickiness: the highest, inconvenient management challenge

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Accountability,Building Remarkable Organizations,Communication,Communications,Critical Thinking,Marketing,Scale up | No Comments

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

The answer lies in the differences between the Push and the Pull mechanisms that I have described in Homo Imitans [4]. The Push, fundamentally informational, loses power as it is cascaded down. The, Pull, mainly behavioural, scales up. In behavioural terms, that means some people start doing something, other people follow, and eventually some critical mass appears.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Most conspiracies of silence and coverups in our organizations are not even consciously orchestrated

Posted By Leandro Herrero On In Accountability,Activism,Agency,Behavioural Change,Corporate pathologies,Culture,Leadership,Scale up,Values | No Comments

And those which are maybe less dangerous than those who aren’t.

In an old 2005 study, which findings are very similar to others of the same type, 84% of medical doctors in a particular set up had seen other health care colleagues taking dangerous shortcuts but did not say anything. 88% of doctors said they worked with people who showed ‘poor clinical judgement’, but they did not say anything. The percentage of clinical staff, including physicians and nurses who called out these things and confronted colleagues did not reach 10%.

In my consulting experience with financial services, I have seen data that showed that some ‘internal tribes’ in a particular banking institution (and I have reasons to believe that, at that time,  it was similar in others) run on an unspoken silence scheme. In particular the ‘trading desks’ that functioned as an institution within the institution and crossed the ethical borders as easy as getting a sandwich for lunch, with many co-workers seeing it but never escalating the issue or even flagging it.

Although in many instances of institutional child abuse the cases remain tragically private, it is clear that also in many cases ‘people knew’ but kept quiet. History contains multiple examples of widespread atrocities that although perpetrated by an elite of some sort, were well known by a silent large population.

You can get as psychoanalytic as you want and present a deep and complicated theory of complex repressed sexuality (child abuse), or a theory of hidden collective hatred (holocaust, crimes against humanity), or collective relinquished responsibility, or a conspiracy, or coverup (traders, health care) but, as far as I am concerned, it all has a common glue word: power. And a tag line: and getting away with it because its reinforced daily by silence.

It’s not sex, it’s power. It’s not ‘lack of training in ethics’, its power. (At some point a large financial institute announced with big media noise that it was sending thousand of executives to a well known business school to attend courses on ethics. Fascinating!).

Those who abuse power also abuse people. Those abused have usually little power. But everybody else ‘who knows’ has the power to call out, to challenge the toxic attitudes and behaviours. As behaviours, these interventions would be contagious, would be copied, imitated, spread. All it takes is for somebody to start.

I have given this recommendation a million times: don’t do it on your own. This is where it gets very hard and fails to spread. Challenging the boss, the colleague, the elder, the senior, the expert, the never challenged, etc, may be heroic. Very simply, don’t play hero here. Join forces with others, even if very small. Maybe a duo, a trio.

The problem with silent minorities is the silent majority they live within. And there are silent minorities who are power-abused in our business organizations, in the Church, in the macrosocial arena, in private homes and public spheres, in the entertainment industry and in the non-entertainment industry. Everywhere.

But all it takes is to challenge those toxicities. It’s pure behavioural change, not conceptual indoctrination and training. If you want leadership, spread the ‘speak up’ behaviour.

The obvious but overlooked fact that connectivity and collaboration are not always good.

Posted By Leandro Herrero On In Behavioural Change,Models and frames,Scale up,Social network,Viral Change | No Comments
  1. Increasing the connectivity of people, who will benefit from enhanced collaboration ,to achieve good things better, faster, differently, is a good idea. We need to augment that connectivity and incentivise collaboration.
  2. Increasing the connectivity of people who are slow, sloppy, substandard, uncommitted or combinations, will achieve mediocrity faster and at a bigger scale. So, not a good idea. We need to decrease connectivity and disincentivise collaboration.
  3. Hyper-connectivity and hyper-collaboration of good committed citizens, corporate or otherwise, is desirable. We need to incentivise connectivity.
  4. Hyper-connectivity and hyper-collaboration of terrorists, extremists and anarchists is undesirable. Unless of course for people in those baskets.  We need to disincentivise connectivity.
  5. Digital connectivity can enhance grassroots collaboration for the uprising against dictatorship, and also can enhance its rapid quash. A twitter revolution is also a twitter contra revolution
  6. In hyperconnected structures, bad ideas travel faster and reach more people.
  7. In hyperconnected structures, innovation may be faster by involving more people.
  8. Hypoconnectivity is not a God. It’s a blind tool, an empty highway that doesn’t know, does not care, who is travelling with anything from altruistic behaviours to suicide vests.
  9. A popular network of connections (digital platform) with heavy user presence, will get more popular and will attract more use, even if the objectives or content are mediocre.
  10. A non popular network of connections (digital platform) with poor user presence, will get less popular and attract less use, even if the objectives or content are fabulous. Don’t let good ideas dwell in poorly populated (curated) digital platforms. These ideas will die because their credibility is associated with the low membership or participation.

At least a few of these should make you think, or at least read twice, or at least irritate because it’s counterintuitive. At least half challenge the conventional, unconscious view that connectivity and collaboration are always good and always deserve a place in corporate values.

Behaviours are blind, neutral, amoral. Their consequences never are.

 

Organizational culture, Counterinsurgency Field Manual (1 of 5): What to do with toxic people.

Posted By Leandro Herrero On In Accountability,Activism,Corporate anthropology,Corporate pathologies,Culture,culture and behaviours,Models and frames,Scale up | No Comments

Toxic people. A sample. The top 12 to watch:

  1. The bully who is not challenged
  2. The bully who is not challenged because he does not mean it, it’s Peter, come on, you know him
  3. The professional skeptical
  4. The conspiracy theorist who sees hidden, Machiavellian, cunning intentions in anything the leadership says or does
  5. The defeatist who profess ‘we will never change, we are what we are’
  6. The powerful who exercises indiscriminate power
  7. The powerful who exercises indiscriminate power and is secretly admired for doing so
  8. The negative, half empty, depressing, sky is always falling
  9. The just-in-time-moral-ground-cum-high-horse arriving to save everybody.
  10. The tyrannical, disruptor, usually narcissistic, psychopath team member, boss, Vice President or chief receptionist.
  11. The sceptical, cynical, sarcastic, who usually thinks he is very clever and funny
  12. The professional victim (probably the most dangerous)

Remember, they all do exist ONLY because they have an audience, big or small. They are reinforced by all of us by doing nothing, nodding, giving them airtime, putting up with them on behalf of peace, let alone agreeing with them, sometimes secretly.

Toxic people with an audience multiply toxicity. Toxic people with no audience have stomach ulcers.

Model one: challenge. That may not work in itself. It all depends on the symmetric power between you and the toxic. But sometimes, the never-challenged toxic gets shocked when challenged for the first time. Tip: don’t do it alone, bring others with you. Not millions, just a few. It’s a way to both protect a bit of yourself and show that it’s not a personal war.

Model two. There may be around more than one of those toxic people. You may not be able to challenge one by one, or being in front of them. If there is an epidemic of nastiness, craft a counter epidemic of goodness. Never fight a negative behavioural epidemic from within. Craft a counter-epidemic powerful enough to take over. Michele Obama’s ‘if they go low we go high’ is spot on. Go high in mass, that is. If the toxic go low, you don’t discuss their lowness nastiness in public. That gives airtime to low and nastiness, whilst zero time to goodness. Your public airtime is precious. Use it with the positive. Yes, it may annoy the toxic because they expect the fight , particularly if they are in moral superiority mode. Which is pretty normal for them.

There is no contradiction between model one and mode two. One is individual confrontation. Two is group counter-epidemic. You then work in those two fronts, the individual ‘node in the network’ and the ‘positive critical mass’ that will attract others and others. The Law of Preferential Attraction in networks is on your side. Enough density of a positive network (in epidemic, expanding mode) will attract more and more positive people. But you need a critical mass.

PS: Never reply to a nasty tweet. Don’t do nothing either. Tweet twenty good things. Overwhelm with positive charm to the Toxic Group. Recomend Proton Pump Inhibitors (anti-acid drugs) to the lonely Toxic.

Organization’s arithmetic continues Part 2 (of 3). Sorry to be a pain but, how many have the real power?

Posted By Leandro Herrero On In Activism,Communication,culture and behaviours,Peer to peer infuence,Scale up,Tribal,Viral Change | No Comments

Yesterday Daily Thoughts started some Organization Mathematics for dummies. [Training is to addition what culture change is to multiplication] [5]Believe me, I am talking about me. That is why I take extra care to understand anything that has to do with numbers in the organization. If I get it, anybody can.

Cultures are thought  and imagined by homo sapiens but are shaped and maintained by homo imitans [6]. What we see around us, from clothes to unwritten rules, is what influences our behaviours. It’s a pull mechanism – we are pulling each other’s behaviours, whether we like it or not; whilst top-down communications is always a push system. In culture terms the game is clear:  peer-to-peer one, top down communications nil.

The peer-to-peer influence (ideas, behaviours, unwritten rules, social norms, emotions) is  a fact of life, unavoidable. Traditional management has paid no attention to it, other than to vaguely acknowledge ‘peer pressure’. There is plenty of evidence today about this hidden power.

If so, then surely the next question is, does anybody (in the non-hierarchical, peer-to-peer informal arena)  have the same power to influence? Even without needing to go deeper into ‘types of influence’, network theory comes along and whispers: excuse me, remember, it’s a network; in a network your position in it , and your connectivity, matters more than anything. Highly connected ‘peers’ (people)  have tremendous power, (and perhaps they are largely unaware of) because, all things equal in terms of those unwritten rules, emotions, ideas, behaviours, social norms, etc, their influence will always be a multiplier. Low connectivity, low influence. We can go for ever arguing about classifications of influence. Trust me, keep it that simple.

You see? More arithmetic to come now. So, the logical next question surely is: how many of these do we have in an average organization? Is there a number? A formula? Is it random? A normal Bell distribution of…? Network theory has been listening to us since the above paragraph and, when network theory hears ‘Bell distribution’, it gets very, very upset. More whispering: excuse me, I  told you, it’s a network, we don’t do Bell distributions, sorry; it’s a Power Law!

A power what? Yes, a power law, logarithm distribution: few people have lots of something, and most people have little of that something. Which is what a frustrated  network theorist says when others don’t get it. Translation: in any organization we have in  fact a relatively small number of individuals who are highly connected, and therefore have the ability to multiply and exercise high influence. Full stop. And we have a large number of individuals purely connected and low influence. Second full stop.

Isn’t that good news, almighty leader? In World I, push mode, top down communications on workshopsterone, if you have 5000 people, that is your number. In World II, pull mode, if you have  5000 people, you may have as many as 250 or 500 who are highly connected and the rest are not. Of course all it depends on hows those 5000 are organized in terms of clusters, but, roughly, that’s it. I repeat, isn’t that good news, almighty leader? Imagine that you can magically engage those 500, on a mission. Surely very doable.

PS: I am not talking hierarchy here. Forget the organization chart. Amongst those 250 you may have Mary, the lady in charge of the post room, Peter the informal leader of the smokers club/tribe that disappear and reappear mysteriously, and Jennifer, the team leader with no direct reports, a team of 10,  and an informal reach of 100, because ‘she knows what is going on more than anybody else’.

There are more maths coming tomorrow. And a bit of the Bible: Matthew 13:12, for those curious; the most unfair network prediction ever made.

_____

Webinar: Company culture as a social movement [7].  Few seats left.

Clues to mobilize people inside the corporate tent, come from outside that tent.

Posted By Leandro Herrero On In Activism,Culture,Leadership,Peer to peer infuence,Scale up,Social Movements,Social network,Tribal | No Comments

People reading these Daily Thoughts may be used to common themes, indeed. After all, I am not writing about nuclear physics or holiday travel. My world is the organizational world. And you are reading this because it is also your world. OK, maybe not the only one. But many would have realised that, at the core of what we do at our company, The Chalfont Project Ltd, is the unashamedly stealing of insights from non-management-stuff-MBA territories that have a thing or two to teach us about mobilizing people and shaping common, collective sense of purpose. To be good at doing this within the corporate tent, we must look at what happens outside the tent. And, this is always so rewarding because the parallels and learning are there in front of you, all the time.

Here is a piece from the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, not necessarily a household name in the sources of insights for we, average mortal managers. Read it with a welcoming mind:

From ‘Predictors of Social Mobilization Speed’ (by Jeff Alstott Stuart Madnick Chander Velu. Working Paper CISL# 2013-04 March 2013

As social mobilization becomes increasingly influential, the ability to engineer and influence the dynamics of mobilization will become ever more important within society. The present findings provide a novel and nuanced understanding of the predictors of the speed of mobilization on social networks. These insights may allow for speed-optimization of social mobilization tasks, such as political campaigning, marketing, and others. The speed of recruitment can be increased by focusing on a number of simple elements of a mobilization task. For example, targeting all-female groups instead of all-male groups would lead to faster mobilization in a disease prevention campaign trying to quickly propagate best practices against a new virus. Encouraging specifically the young to recruit others, particularly those older than themselves, would accelerate the take-up in a new political campaign trying to rapidly build a base. Operating through family networks instead of work networks or mass media would speed up recruitment for a search and rescue operation. Encouraging participants around the globe to recruit largely within their own cities would hasten buy-in to a movement to build up a donations network in the wake of a natural disaster.

Such large-scale social mobilizations are becoming increasingly common and impactful, and often the speed of recruitment is critical to their success. For those organizing such mobilization tasks, a greater understanding of the factors driving mobilization speed can improve the odds of success. The predictors of social mobilization speed described here compose an initial set of relevant elements, and open the door for identification of additional factors.

End of reading!

A few things for us, for me, in the form of hypothesis. Just hypothesis. But, for me, fascinating ones.

  1. Involving female networks (eg. ‘women in leadership’) will be an accelerator for organizational cultural change. Fostering these internal women networks may be fantastic.
  2. The young employee tribe will be fantastic at (a) peer-to-peer activity ( a la Viral Change™ ) and (b) recruiting/influencing older colleagues. We are not actively and distinctively using them.
  3. The ‘family networks’ greater power than ‘work networks’ fit the ‘people like me’ Edelman Trust Barometer style as practiced by Viral Change™
  4. ‘Recruit within your own cities’ in our organizations means paying special attention to the local, the proximity, the strong ties of connectivity. Possible translation: sometimes an excess in our appeal to ‘the global company’ or ‘the global brand’ may not have the traction that we expect. Global stuff is great, I pay my mortgage locally, my boss may send her kids to the same school.

Every day that passes I am more convinced that the future of the business organization depends on our ability to erase a lot of traditional HR/OD/MBA conventional wisdom, not because there is anything intrinsically wrong there, but because it did reach a ceiling around year 2000, and this is a benevolent assumption.

Human behaviour laws are unfair. Positive or negative consequences are disproportionate to the causes. Get used to it as leader.

Posted By Leandro Herrero On In Behavioural Change,Building Remarkable Organizations,Corporate pathologies,Leadership,Performance,Scale up,Viral Change | No Comments

An old patient was concerned about her hair. A nurse came in at 7 am to put colour in her hair. ‘Nurses are saints’, she said. All nurses? That’s unfair. (A real example from one of our Viral Change ™programmes)

We have a reasonable level of trust between us. We help each other. But I have just let you down. Just once. Trust goes out of the window. This is unfair. How can trust be so vulnerable. (Because it is)

The doctor was hesitant, perhaps confused, maybe she had a bad day, but she missed a vital sign. Doctors don’t really know what is going on. There is a big problem in this hospital. You can see how everybody is so stressed. That is unfair.

Twelve nurses in the hospital ward were kind, attentive and considerate. One was terrible, uncaring, dismissive, awful. The nursing staff in this ward has an attitude problems. (All? But have just said…) That is unfair.

Again and again human behaviours and human emotions are not linear. We love unconditionally with very little objectivity. We hate deeply for perhaps a small feature.

These are non linear maths. We are stuck with them. These maths may take to (be see as running) run a brilliant organization out of a small set of positive behaviours or a dysfunctional organization out of a few bad apples. With these stats,’a few bad apples’ has no meaning. ‘Few’ is all you need to create havoc. In traditional, linear (organizational) maths, a few bad apples is just ‘a small proportion’ not to worry too much. In our day to day non linear world, those few bad apples need to be identified and addressed. There may be more than one way, but leaving it to the comfort of ‘it is a small number’ is a bad idea.

People who perform and live in Formal Org Land, and people who have make/break power: two different lists

Posted By Leandro Herrero On In Building Remarkable Organizations,Culture,Governance,HR management,Leadership,Scale up | No Comments

These 8, self-explanatory categories of people are the natural focus of traditional HR and management systems . They are needed for good governance. They all sit in the formal organization, similarly the traditional focus of those HR/management structures.

A list
High/medium/low performer
Talent pool member
Leadership (several layers)
(dis) engaged
Pre-retirement
Newly hired
Next generation leaders
Team leader/management position

The next  8 categories are off the radar of HR/management in a range that goes from ‘I don’t know what you are talking about’ to ‘I know some of these folks, what am I supposed to do?’ and anything in-between including treating them as good/bad anecdotes, necessary evils, curiosities and ‘ok, good managers know how to deal with them’.

B list
Mavericks and rebels, even without a cause
Deviants (positive). Do things differently, have another playbook and succeed
GPAs (General Pain in the Back Side; acronym non PC)
Contrarians, because they can
Nonconformists. Good ones, less good ones, but see things through glasses nobody else has
Sceptical for all seasons
Hyper-connected. Good or bad, they spread behaviours, role model at a scale, set mountains on fire and multiply anything they get their hands on
Hyper-trusted. Multiple reasons, it does not matter which ones

Neither list is good or bad, they are two categorizations of people. Whilst the A list refers to the visible and formal, and it’s crucial as governance and overall performance management, the B list has the potential to make or break anything.

Entire cultures are shaped by the B list whilst the A list watches the show almost hopelessly. An entire HR/OD/culture shaping/company building platform could be set up exclusively on the B list. There are tools and processes and systems to deal with the less powerful A list, but we treat the B list as an Amusement Park.

The B list is the Hard List.

The Stopping Rule in organizations, where the meaning of life may be 37

Posted By Leandro Herrero On In Behavioural Economics,Complexity,Critical Thinking,Decision making,Management Thinking and Innovation,Models and frames,Scale up,Value creation | No Comments

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy [8] by Douglas Adams, ‘the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, calculated by an enormous supercomputer named Deep Thought over a period of 7.5 million years, is 42′. The meaning of life is … 42.

Maybe in organizational life, the meaning of life is 37.

One of the problems we have in organizations is to decide when enough data is enough in order to make decisions and move on. In my organizational world, as organization architect, the teams I lead or advise, sometimes hesitate on the number of people interviewed, or the right number of focus groups, for example. Most people agree that there is an invisible threshold beyond which no more ‘new data’ comes in and the number of insights reach a plateau or even decrease. Whether market research, customer insights or employee insights, it’s always the same. Yet, many people keep going to ‘complete the study’.

Although in different worlds, it may be  useful to take into account ‘the 37% rule’, also known as ‘the secretary problem [9]’. You interview a finite number of candidates (to be a secretary). You rank each on their own merits. You then stop at 37% of the total numbers you plan to interview, and from then on, you select/hire the next one who is better than anybody else seen so far. It’s also known as the ‘Stopping Rule’ or optimal stopping.

It has been applied to dating! Why not? Date the first 37% and marry the next one who is better than all of the previous one so far. Don’t bother to continue dating.

The rule has multiple twists, applications, folk notions and theoretical mathematics behind it. Known from the 50’s, it was not written down until 1960. There is plenty of background you can explore asking Mr. Wikipedia.

All this applies to ‘selecting’ but, for me, it has a broader conceptual territory that is one of ‘optimizing’ your data sources and knowledge. It would be theoretically incorrect to apply the 37% rule to my focus group scenario above, but the issue of ‘when to stop’ remains a good one. (37% of them? just kidding)

This is very different from ‘statistically significant’ numbers of interviews and data points. For me ‘the stopping rule’, the stopping algorithm, is part of our natural heuristics, often translated as ‘I think I have enough of these’.

When to stop (in interviewing, sampling, asking people, accumulating data) is as important, if not more, as having a plan for continuing, for constantly extending your possibilities of data or insight sources.

Some kind of Stopping Rule, is overdue in our day-to-day management of the organization. Back to our heuristic brain, where else?

37, the meaning of organizational life is 37.

 

Most good clues about the culture of the organization can be found in the invisible, the unsaid. This is where serious culture work needs to start.

Posted By Leandro Herrero On In Building Remarkable Organizations,Culture,culture and behaviours,Language,Scale up,Work design | No Comments

Public sector health in many parts of the world has been financially squeezed. Committed health workers have continued to deliver care despite those constrains. It does not mean they are happy, or that they always do the right thing with patients. Financial squeeze or not, the public sees three things: what politicians say, what they personally, or their families, have experienced, and the fiascos. A fiasco, a mismanagement, a mistake, a blunder, a failure of care of some sort, will probably make the front page of newspapers, regional or national. What these newspapers do not report is the thousands of acts of kindness and widespread good will usually present. Some of those are true heroic behaviours by a nurse or a health care assistant. Often something hardly in their job descriptions. We don’t see them, hear them. Unless, scenario number 2, you have yourself been a recent user, somebody who has experienced those most of the time invisible human acts. Even then, the small negative and disappointing moment may take more memory space than the rest.

Even more biased towards what is negative is the Safety sector. The whole Health and Safety line of work is based by definition on avoiding incidents and accidents. That is the language, the processes, the training, the discipline. The parameters you see are the visible number of problems, less or more, or progressively less if things go well. Nothing wrong with this. But for each unsafe event there are perhaps thousands of safe ones. The system is not geared towards seeing them and learning from them, but how to avoid the negative. The negative takes the airtime, the positive is taken for granted.

This airtime taken over by the negative is inevitable. But, speaking with my hat on as organization architect, there is a whole line of rich work, cultural shaping, designing of better organizations, that is based upon uncovering the invisible and unpacking the goodness. In behavioural terms, you need to know what happens underneath those acts of kindness or those safe day-to-day practices. This is a much better source of insight and a much more fruitful strategy to scale up the positive behaviours.

Uncovering the invisible: social anthropology, cultural shaping, designing the new organization of the future. This is the first step of that Camino.

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

Posted By Leandro Herrero On In Behavioural Change,Building Remarkable Organizations,Culture,culture and behaviours,HR management,Identity and brand,Peer to peer infuence,Scale up,Workplaces Of The Future | No Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

Most problems with cultures come from decoupling the idea of culture from ‘the real stuff’: operations, compliance, targets, performance. Culture is business. Business is culture. Stuck to each other with super-glue. Behaviours are the super-glue.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rule #3: Systematic use of sweeping generalizations is reason for dismissal

Posted By Leandro Herrero On In Accountability,Corporate pathologies,Critical Thinking,Employee Engagement,Language,Scale up | No Comments

OK, a bit harsh, but this is what I mean.

Some people are very good at this. ‘We have a big communication problem in the company’, ‘in this company, our employees are not engaged’, ‘our processes and systems are dysfunctional’, ‘we have a chronic problem of failure of leadership’, ‘we are completely silo-organized with zero connections between each other’ and ‘our culture is one of fear’, all these are potential candidates for sweeping generalizations. I have encountered all of them within a few clients.

All these clients have multi-thousand people on the payroll, so you would have thought that if the generalizations were actually true, these companies would be at the point of receiving a death certificate. But they all are well and thriving. What is it then that prompts people to produce these devastating pieces of assessment?

In all the cases, I know the companies well. One of them could do with improving communication but this is actually a real problem ‘only’ between Marketing and Sales. The ‘employees not engaged’ was expressed by a senior person based upon one single Town Hall meeting where employees did not ask any questions. I was there at the back of the room, and the presentation by the top leadership was actually pretty anaesthetic. Etc.

The problem with sweeping generalizations is that it gives the sweeper a sense of power, worthiness, and a de facto the title of Chief Diagnosis Officer. Problem two is that it is pretty toxic and spreads like oil. Problem three, if repeated and repeated, it creates a truth in itself, a false but pervasive picture of the organization. These chronic experts in sweeping generalizations should be ‘called out’. Ok, reason for dismissal may be a bit harsh, but, frankly, I am sometimes this close to recommending it.

So, what’s Rule #1? Critical thinking is vital, part of your job description

Rule #2? If your are going to generalize, please bring the statistics

Rule #3? The one in the title.

Although in the Critical Thinking arena there is a distinction between sweeping generalization (‘using some statements in an all-inclusive way without allowing for any exceptions’) and the reverse, hasty generalization (‘drawing a general rule from a single, perhaps atypical, case’) both are examples of poor thinking. We all do that from time-to-time. Our mind likes that sense of control. The systematic use, however, is the problem of a faulty mind. And it’s toxic.

Those who systematically make them in any meeting, any forum, all the time, any company cafeteria, should be confronted by any other mortal who may see some of the symptoms but would be horrified to extrapolate.

Why are the generalization sweepers still on the payroll? Because nobody confronts them. Start with an ‘excuse me, this is not how I see it’, and you may start a revolution.

Unchallenged little nastiness is killing entire cultures.

Posted By Leandro Herrero On In Activism,Behavioural Change,Change, Leadership and Society,It’s Personal!,Scale up,Social Movements | No Comments

Those people in the corridor and the cafeteria are very good, and successful, at saying, very vocally: ‘we will never change, we are too bureaucratic, too much of an engineering culture, we have little hope’. Nobody says much. One person says, I agree. About five are nodding. About ten or so seem to be talking about this, and more nodding. Nobody seems to disagree.

Those two managers have just said: ‘Culture of safety? My eye! Tell that to my boss; tell him that safety is before profits, and before meeting targets! Nice talk from the guys at the top, nobody believes it’. And people hearing that, the next table in the company canteen, are a mixture of nodding and getting on with the spaghetti. Certainly nobody challenges that.

That Director has, again, referred to a female colleague in a derogatory, sexist way. Not terrible, not outrageous, very ‘consistent with the (macho) culture’, and, for sure, for sure, for sure, with no bad intentions. Because he is a nice guy. So he would say that. It’s not the first time. People around smile and raise some eyebrows. Some seem embarrassed and look away. Others laugh . ‘He is so straight and politically incorrect!’, somebody says. ‘That’s Jim, he is how he is’.

These three vignettes are not theoretical. It’s daily life. Daily life and daily behaviours that remain unchallenged. If anything, in behavioural terms, constantly reinforced by the nodding, the smiling, the silent approval. That’s why they scale up all the time.

How outrageous, untrue, painful or ‘unacceptable’ do these have to be in order to be challenged? How ‘big’ for people to stop them right away: ‘excuse me…’. How bad?

The power of those ‘innocent comments’, ‘expressions of (free) opinion’, friendly-smart-sexist remarks, and other similar situations lie in their apparent benign nature. So people can get away with it. So we continue with our business. ‘Battles not worth fighting’, a senior female journalist from the Daily Mail, a British right-wing tabloid, said recently on prime time television, responding to another female journalist who took issue with sexist remarks on social media.

Why do silent majorities remain silent when silent minorities are offended? How many years have to elapse before we say enough is enough? A ‘No Irish, no dogs’ sign was common in Britain not many years ago. How many generations were needed to declare that insane? Was it ever, ever, funny?

I am not speaking from a position of moral authority. I have had my fair contribution to nodding and silence. But I regret every one of them.

In the sixties, my late father was very close to emigrating to Germany. Spanish workers then were treated there as second class human beings. Progressively, they worked harder than anybody else, made money, brought property, became middle class, and passed the baton to the Turkish. The cycle started again.

Yes, I am sure there are also excesses in political correctness. Some sound silly. But what is the threshold between silliness and denigration of a human being? Between a joke and an insult? Between thin skin and emotionally hurt?

Those little epidemics of negativity and benign nastiness can only be tackled by a counter-epidemic of people speaking up. Stop it and challenge it. You may be surprised how many people may follow. Silence is not an option.

Why and how some initiatives scale and others get lost in oblivion

Posted By Leandro Herrero On In Culture,Management of Change,Models and frames,Scale up | No Comments

‘Daily Thoughts’ is in pause mode for a few days and will resume with new content on Monday 4th of April .

You may have missed some of these topics below.  They have created some traction Here is a quick way to catch up and continue some fresh thinking during the pause.

The scale of the #hellomynameis campaign is extraordinary and to the credit of the not less extraordinary Dr Kate Ranger, a terminally ill cancer patient, and medical doctor herself. I wrote about this here: The #hellomynameis campaign deserves all attention and support [10]. Take a look and pass it on. If you have an extra moment, think of the reasons why this movement has grown as it has, and it is still growing.

In fact, that discussion of scale-ability is one of the pending and pressing ones in the area of management and I did write about this very recently: Scale or not scale? This is the Shakespearean culture question [11]

Explore these topics and if you can, bring them to your own teams, or clients.

In fact, the best way to compile your own ideas for your team is to search within the search box [12] or via the ‘Other articles by categories’ in the site. These Thoughts are written for that purpose, not to ‘agree/disagree’, but stimulate fresh thinking coming from…you. Experiment with this, create your own collection. Pass it on.

These back reflections will continue until Monday 4th, when the Daily Thoughts will resume with fresh daily content. The best way to ensure the daily prompt to these topics is to subscribe to the daily email, via my personal site [13]. I know we are in the era of inbox cluttering but many people still find that these daily crafted messages are worth appearing that way in front of you.

If you find them helpful to you, they may be also helpful to others: friends, colleagues, team members, clients, your staff. Suggest to them to subscribe. Pass them on.