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

Can We Rescue DEI From Its Trap (The Label)?

Most of the problems and challenges in organizations, together with most of the solutions, are behavioural in nature. It’s about what people do, not about what they are thinking of doing, or just thinking. People, however, naturally focus more on processes and systems because this is what is usually at the forefront of the corporate citizen’s mind, in their day to day life. That relegates behaviours into the ‘consequence’ basket, what happens after, a bit of an afterthought.  But the problem is that behaviours create cultures, not the other way around. They are the input, not the output, not the day after, but Patient Zero. It’s where it all starts (what are the behaviours we need for A?), not the endpoints (declare X, Y, Z and you’ll get these behaviours).

If you think of most of the themes currently on the table of the organization these days, they all are behavioural, and yet, the attention is somewhere else. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) is a good example.

It focuses a lot on ‘the function’, which not surprisingly automatically requires a ‘Head Of’.  Then, on what needs to be changed structurally (e.g. more representation of minority groups). And finally, on the associated communication and training. There is usually not a lot of behavioural granularities here.

But if there is not habitual diversity of thinking and of ideas in the behavioural DNA of the company (which would mean that we value diversity per se, at a very granular level, foundational, not as an application), other applied ‘diversities’ (gender for example) could just become a quota to reach, a target, and, in the process,  possibly killing all the beauty of the never exploited primary diversity.

Some DEI warriors don’t like this thinking and tend to dismiss it as ‘general diversity’, not the real diversity which for them is mostly a question of quotas. There is no question that creating the conditions for diversity (providing seats at the table, seeking different experiences, transcultural, for example) is fundamental. But this cannot simply become management by ratios for the purpose of ticking some boxes.

For example, you can obtain a great deal of sustained diversity by having, say, 30% of your people this afternoon asking the questions: Is there a different way to solve this? Who else needs to know about this? Who needs to be involved? Or by always bringing 3 options to a decision, at least one of them unconventional. And this is not the whole list. We do this in our Viral Change™ [1]  programmes with great success. It may sound simplistic, but it is very powerful at scale, across an organization.

When this kind of primary diversity is widespread and entrenched as a habit, any other ‘particular diversity’ will already be finding a good home. Unfortunately, this is not the standard way. It’s easier to look at ratios and quotas and showcase them.

The re-presentations (as psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist [2] would put it) have taken over the presence. He often jokes about the question ‘how does one become a Buddhist?’ Easy – some people say – sit on the floor, cross your legs, wear orange, and close your eyes. My analogy is, have a Function, call it Diversity and showcase some people from minority groups in the leadership team.

By the way, there is little logic in grouping D, E and I into a construct called DEI. Even from a financial performance perspective, it makes little sense, as the superb professor of Finance at the London Business School, Alex Edmans [3], has demonstrated.

Mirror arguments can easily be made in areas such as ESG (another construct), Health and Wellbeing, Psychological Safety or even the whole ‘Future of Work discussion’, where the hybrid/non hybrid/remote/office ‘debate’ has taken over the airtime. The latter being the wrong end of the stick: workplaces are in cultures; cultures are not in a workplace – we have mistaken the content for the container. Debating the number of days in the office is like debating the number of commas in a Shakespeare play.

So, what about training? For example, DEI training.

Again, this is another ‘easy default’ that tricks us into adopting a relatively easy way to implement a ‘solution’. Training has more than a legitimate place in corporate development, serving well awareness and skilling. Unfortunately, it has limited power in cultures. These are largely un-trainable and shaped by the day-to-day (behavioural) interactions of people mostly following unwritten rules and social copying what is around them.

Sending bankers to a business school for a course on ethics, to become more ethical- a real example in the UK after the ‘banking problems’ – is either a commendable good intention of extraordinary naivety, or a bad joke.

The fact that people may ‘get’ the intellectual and rational side of something, does not mean that they will change behaviours. Rationally, people agree that smoking is bad, driving when under the influence of alcohol is bad, and ditto for not wearing a seat belt. If awareness and safety training were enough, most of these and other problems would have been eradicated ages ago. When compliance leaves the room, the real culture shows up.

Similarly, the success of so called Bias Training, is largely underwhelming, not because it’s wrong in itself but because people wrongly expect behavioural change from a bunch of lectures or presentations only. The emphasis is on the only. We attribute powers to training that it does not have in the behavioural arena.

Behavioural change at scale (and you would have thought that DEI advocates would want that, not just the awareness and enlightenment of a small part of the company) can only be achieved by a bottom-up ‘social movement’ that equally touches the Board and the front line.  That needs to be orchestrated carefully. Training is then a good comrade in arms. The combination of a top-down communication push-system and a bottom-up behavioural pull one is fantastic. I have described this in Homo Imitans [4] as the World I and World II working together and it’s at the core of our Viral Change™ methodology

The tragedy of DEI is that it may progressively die of terminal corporatization. A recent, ‘epidemic-like’ round of dismissals, of (relatively recently appointed) Chief Diversity Officers has been described in the US. People often report that ‘it was mission impossible’, a monumental task that was naively addressed by creating a corporate function.

All that is corporatized, eventually melts in the air, or in the pages of an Annual Report.

My intention is far from discouraging the tackling of the reality of diversity, equity and inclusion (or any other set of cultural drivers, which I am happy to group in trios if you wish – what about Performance, Engagement, Belonging?), but I am making a plea to take them seriously by being very critical about the ’labelled solutions’.  Those solutions for me are behavioural in their roots and therefore require a behavioural-cultural approach. Corporate is very good at wrongly providing structural solutions (a new Function) to behavioural problems and is applying the same medicine to the recently acquired DEI. No surprises here.

Using the lenses I use, I can tell you that DEI can be rescued from its hijack to truly realize the value of diversity of thinking, of ideas, of inputs, of participation, and equal treatment and involvement of people. The Viral Change™ mobilizing platform [5] provides the scaffolding to address the culture goals in an incredibly powerful way. It’s behavioural DEI, powered by Viral Change™. Just a conversation away if you wish. Reach out to [email protected] [6].

How you can rescue DEI from its hijackers – some recommendations:

Don’t address DEI in isolation, as a distinct entity of some sort
Blend it with broader culture change and evolution. Otherwise, the organization becomes a playground of competition between acronyms and their meaning. Many people who quote ESG have no clue what the letters mean. The more you label, the less you get it.

Go down to the granular side (behavioural) as much as you can
What is diversity? How do you recognise it in terms of what people do, not a label in the management structure. Translate into behaviours. (Hints: Opening the door to somebody is a behaviour; being courteous is not. Diversity as a mindset means nothing since it would mean different things to people).

Don’t rely on training only
Intellectual understanding, even emotional reaction to it, do not always trigger new behaviours.

Above all, don’t use the victimhood card
It never helps real victims. The DEI world is saturated by it.

If you care about diversity, have the courage to say that it starts with ideas, opinions, points of views, cultures, experiences
And, even more courageous, to say that it is intrinsically good as a value. ‘Employee engagement’ has killed the intrinsic value of work. It has been presented as a utility to deliver performance. What if ‘engagement’ (with your own work, with others, with a collective effort in the organization) were good in itself, regardless of how much performance ‘you get’?

Diversity of the human condition, and in our business organizations, based on the intrinsic value of the dignity of work, is too important to leave it in the hands of any label
The ultimate goal of a DEI corporate function should be to become irrelevant as fast as possible.

If you are broadly in agreement with the principles of this article, and if you care about the behavioural and foundational aspects underneath diversity, but feel that the conversation has been hijacked, forward this article around your network.

Join the conversation on LinkedIn [7]

Culture change is not long and difficult. But we make it so…

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Backstage Leadership,Behavioural Change,Change, Leadership and Society,culture and behaviours,Culture Change,General,Peer to peer infuence,Social Movements,Viral Change | No Comments
I suppose the question is how long is long and how difficult is difficult? In general, business and organizational consulting have always overstated the time needed to create cultural change. This is simply because we have been using outdated toolkits and methods.

We have treated cultural change as ‘a project’ and applied the mechanics of project management. It looks like this: Dozens (if not hundreds) of consultants land on the corporate shores, workshops multiply like mushrooms and a tsunami of communication comes from the top: ‘change is good, this is what you must do, do you get it? Cascade down the message’. Kind of.  So it takes six months to figure out what to do, including a cultural assessment (of course), a couple more to present findings, another to launch and you start doing something at month 6. If you’re lucky. Then, you start with the top (of course) and cascade down one layer, then another one, peeling the organizational onion with lots of messages and workshopsterone. You don’t see initial results until, say, year 2 and you need another couple of years to see more. See what? Well, good question, err, a different culture? How do you measure that? What do you mean? I told you, 20 senior managers workshop, 150 middle management and… Hold on, this is activity, not outcomes. Oh!

In traditional change management, you start with the top and cascade down one layer, then another one, peeling the organizational onion with lots of messages and workshopsterone.

The following is an example of non-workshopsterone-led fast cultural change: A new CEO said ´enough of meetings, I am not having them.´ 6 months later they had a 60% reduction in meetings, significant increase in direct communications, better fluid collaboration, the sky did not fall, business is booming. Guess what, employee engagement scores are up.

I am not bringing this case as an example of how cultural change should be done, but as a representation of a situation where culture change and culture re-shaping take place in a short period of time.

As I have repeated ad nauseam, organizational culture change is bottom up, behavioural based, peer-to-peer, using informal networks and with a particular kind of leadership that is movement-supportive (we call it Backstage Leadership™ ) I am of course defining Viral Change™, no apologies for the reference. Viral Change™ is orchestrated like a social movement, not as a management consulting programme.

Learn more about Viral Change™ [1]

 

Successful cultural change is not top down, not workshopsterone-fuelled, not an information tsunami, certainly not long, painful, super-expensive and ending in a fiasco. Hold on! The example of the meeting-hater CEO was top down! Yes, the trigger was at the top but the Anti-Meeting Movement took place with no meetings (about not having meetings), no workshops and no communication plan. It was Homo Imitans in real life, viral and behavioural spread by massive social copying.

Can we say that the Emperor of the long, difficult, herculean, massively complicated, information tsunami, unpredictable organizational cultural change has clearly no clothes whatsoever? Yes, we can! Given the time this has been going on, he must be freezing.

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Only behavioural change is real change

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

Start your journey here. [9]

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

A Cheat Sheet To Create A Social Movement Tip = to shape organizational culture since both are the same.

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Activism,Backstage Leadership,Behaviours,Building Remarkable Organizations,Culture,Employee Engagement,Grassroots,Mobiliztion,Peer to peer infuence,Social Movements,Storytelling,Transformation,Viral Change,Workplaces Of The Future | No Comments
Mobilizing people. This is another of the Holy Grails (how many have I said we have?) in management. Whether you look at this from the angle of productivity, employee engagement, or any other, the key is ‘Mobilizing People’. Actually, I propose to change the word ‘leaders’ to ‘mobilizers’. Mmm, I won’t win this one.

How do you create a social movement? Perhaps a good start is to look at – well, social movements. OK, you don’t see this as a ‘standard management practice’. I do. The answers to better management, exciting management, and new, innovative management in 2023 are at their best when distant from ‘management science’. Old toolkits are gone! Where are the new toolkits? They need to be reinvented.

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

I could go on for hours on this topic. It’s one of my favourites, full of hope and expectations, but I said this is a Cheat Sheet, so I will have to send the Bullet Points Brigade.

1. (Re)frame the narrative. Acknowledge a spectrum of motives. Example: Take Obama to the White House (2008, 2012 movements), Fix health care, Decrease Inequality, better Human Rights and Justice, for example, were co-existing narratives. Not one. Corporate listen to the one, single, overriding, all-singing-the-same-song narrative. Have different frames, no one. ‘One only’ is a mistake.

2. Acknowledge the above differences, so accept also different, co-existing types of fellow travellers and frames.  However, agree on non-negotiable behaviours. This is the universal bit. Don’t compromise with it. Get it wrong, no glue, no movement, all in different directions.

3. Define the tribes. Peer-to-peer, bottom-up, self-organizing- whatever you want to call it in the organization, is tribal. Influence is horizontal. I did not say teams, divisions, functions or Task Forces. I said, tribes. If you don’t know your tribe, hire an anthropologist. Or us.

4. Fix coexisting expectations. Get them in the open. Brief and debrief. Define the rules. Activism is to act. Clicktivism is to click and say ‘like’. Donate is to donate. Advocacy is to say ‘I endorse, this is good’. Corporations are notorious for mixing up concepts and pretending that they are all equal. Nope. If you like clicking and we are here all for acting, this is not your social movement, sorry.

5. Engage the hyper-connected. If you want to infect (behaviours, values, ways), you’d better find the nodes of high connectivity. It can be done. We do this in our organizational work. You miss the hyper-connected, but you have a bunch of passion, forget it. I know it is not much of a PC statement, but it’s true. (Please don’t ignore ‘passion’, but between a bunch of poorly connected passionate people and a group of highly connected and influent dispassionate, I choose the latter for the work and the former for the bar)

“Backstage Leadership™ is the art of giving the stage to those with high capacity of multiplication and amplification, the hyper-connected.”

6. Focus on grassroots. Organise grassroots. Learn about grassroots. Became a Grassroots Master. The Obama campaigns focused on ‘it’s all about you, guys, not the one with the speeches’. It is grassroots, or it isn’t. Many Corporate/Organizational development groups haven’t got a clue about grassroots. They think it has something to do with the gardens.

7. Practice Backstage Leadership™. The key type of leadership in social movement making/organizational culture shaping is Backstage Leadership™, not Front Running Leadership with PowerPoint. Backstage Leadership™ is the art of giving the stage to those with high capacity of multiplication and amplification, the hyper-connected from grassroots, very often a rather invisible and not very noisy bunch, as compared with the ones with the Communications Drums.

8. Track progress. Set indicators. But these are not the traditional KPIs. Before creating measurements, ask yourself a simple question: what do I want to measure? What do I want to see? Which is different from ‘what I can measure’, and ‘what everybody measures. In Viral Change™ for example, we measure the progression of behaviours and stories, quantity and quality.

9. Master a fantastic Storytelling System that has two opposite origins meeting in the middle: top-down from the formal leaders (yes, we have formal leaders, you have formal leaders as well) and bottom-up from the grassroots. In the job structure, make sure that whoever is in charge of Storytelling’, is ‘the best paid’. It pays off to pay him/her well. Storytelling is the glue of change.

10. Go back to number one and down again.

Learn more about Viral Change™ and its applications here [10].

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

A culture of safety or a culture of training in safety?

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Accountability,Behavioural Change,Behaviours,Communication,Culture,culture and behaviours,Peer to peer infuence,Performance,Reputation,Safety Training,Social Movements,Values,Viral Change,Viral Safety | No Comments

Cultures are created by behaviours becoming the norm.

Safety is at the core of many industries. Significant budgets are allocated to safety training in major corporations. One death is too many. Accidents can be avoided. The cost of time lost due to incidents is considerable. Safety training is needed, but it does not necessarily create a culture of safety. Cultures are created by behaviours becoming the norm. A culture of safety is not one of well-trained (on safety) people but one where safety behaviours are the norm. These two things are not the same.

Safety communication and training usually follow a top-down approach where facts are presented, guidelines and procedures exposed, tasks explained, and threats of noncompliance declared. It is a rational and emotional appeal cascaded down across all information channels of the organisation. It suits ‘information’, but it does not suit ‘behaviours’. Behaviours can’t be taught in the same way as a three-step process can be explained.

Behaviours spread via imitation of others. Behaviours travel via social copying and emulation, sometimes unconsciously. Training and communications on safety are needed – and major corporations usually have very good educational programmes. But cultures are created outside the classroom and the auditorium, in the day-to-day life of individuals ‘doing things’. Cultures develop – sometimes very fast – by the power of person-to-person influence.

“Training and communications are needed. But cultures are created outside the classroom and the auditorium, in the day-to-day life of individuals ‘doing things’.”

The most powerful influence in the organisation is not hierarchical; it is peer-to-peer; it is the conscious or unconscious emulation of ‘people like us’. The Health and Safety personnel teach the rules of safety, inspection, safety implementation and improve processes and systems. However, the day-to-day social copying of good safety behaviours in the workplace, plus conversations in the canteen (that is, informal conversations with people one trusts), is what creates a culture of safety in real life.

Viral Change™ is a way to create a fast and sustainable culture of safety which does not rely on the rational understanding of hundreds of people attending safety training workshops.

In Viral Change™, we identify a relatively small set of ‘non-negotiable behaviours’ which, when spread across the organisation, have the power to create a behavioural fabric, a DNA of safety. We also identify a relatively small number of individuals who have a high level of influence with peers, who are well-connected, and whose behaviours are likely to have an impact on others in a multiplying mode. These people may or may not be in specific management layers but occupy various jobs across the organisation. We organise and put together these components, behaviours and influences, in a well-designed format. We let the spread and social infection go, and we back-stage the management of it. We engineer an internal social epidemic of safety behaviours that can be observable and measured.

We do not ask to stop the ‘push’ of training and development! We do, however, orchestrate the ‘pull’ of connected and influential individuals and their role-modelling behaviours who engage with peers in conversations and real-life ‘doing’ and engage others in a viral manner. Viral Change™ is the only way to shape a culture of safety and maximise the potential and the investment of training and communications.

Viral Change™ LLP is currently leading programmes focused on the creation of a safety culture in the way described above. For example, using these principles and methodology, a global company – which has state-of-the-art, award-winning top-down training systems – has engaged us to create a culture of safety virally, reaching and engaging 50.000 people across the world.

Learn more about Viral Change™ and its applications here [10].

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

3 self-sabotaging mechanisms in organizations

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Behavioural Change,Building Remarkable Organizations,Change, Leadership and Society,Culture,culture and behaviours,Culture Change,Employee Engagement,Leadership,Management of Change,Organization architecture,Social Movements,Viral Change,Workplaces Of The Future | No Comments
Organizations, like organisms, have embedded mechanisms of survival, of growth and also of self-sabotage.

These are 3 self-sabotage systems to be aware of:

1. Inner civil wars

Internal fighting is a potential feature of any complex organization, business or not. We see the caricature of this, and its high cost, in political parties or social movements. Usually, we see the features of the inner civil war in newspaper headlines or on our television screens. Often it triggers a feeling of ‘how stupid can these people be? they are killing it’ in us. And sometimes they do. In business organizations the mechanics of inner civil war are the same. The ones that worry me most are those that do not have 100% visibility: the hidden turf wars, the passive-aggressive reactions between corporate functions, the by-design unhelpful collaboration, the cynical comments expressed in the corridor, restrooms, by perhaps senior people, against senior people.

2. Employee disengagement

The industry of Employee Engagement (and there is one) tries to measure a mixture of satisfaction, happiness, and willingness to run the extra mile. Year after year the rankings, for whatever they are worth, are terrible. We know more about the diagnosis than the treatment. I have written about the difference between being engaged with the company or within the company. The within (doing lots of stuff to make people ‘happy’) is a distraction. However, you define engagement, running the system with high degrees of a ‘lack of it’, is pure self-sabotage.

Leaders need to spend time on this, but it’s not about ‘improving a ranking’ but about gaining a deep understating of the motivation and ‘the chattering in the corridors’. It’s seeing and feeling. Some leaders can, others meet budgets.

For more on Employee Engagement see my article here [11].

3. Dysfunctional leadership

For any functional and aligned Leadership Team I’ve met through my consulting work, there will be four or five dysfunctional ones. Most of them look like juxtapositions of people reporting to somebody, but not a single entity ‘collective leadership’ type. It’s a journey, though. You don’t achieve high levels of sophisticated leadership in a week. But you have to work on it. I don’t have a big problem encountering dysfunctional leadership teams, but I do worry when six months later they have not moved a bit. Or it seems they have via multiple changes and ‘musical chairs’.

These 3 areas – the inner wars, the hidden or not-that-hidden disengagement, and dysfunctional top leadership – are particularly toxic. The sad part is that they tend to come together like brothers and sisters in a dysfunctional family.

If any of this sounds familiar, to stop and think would be a great investment.

PS. Don’t try to correlate success. Some successful organizations are dysfunctional. Some functional ones are not successful. The issue for the successful ones working with high self-sabotaging levels is about opportunity costs; it’s about how more successful could they be.

[12]
Talking about behaviours and culture, this is a good opportunity to look at how you can reshape your culture, and we have a simple vehicle to achieve this.

Start your journey here. [13]

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

Tell what won’t change – Introducing 1 of my 40 rules of change

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Behavioural Change,Building Remarkable Organizations,Change, Leadership and Society,Critical Thinking,culture and behaviours,Decision making,Organization architecture,Social Movements,Transformation,Workplaces Of The Future | No Comments
In any change programme that any organization wants to start, they will start by thinking of the things that they want to change, that they want to improve.

Very rarely will they express what is not for change, which is just as important as working out what can be changed.

“Nobody says, ‘this will not change’.”

Let me explain more in this short video.

 

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Working out what cannot be changed

When creating organizational change, consider which factors must stay the same. Is it a value system? Is it a hierarchy? What is essential for your organization that cannot be changed? Knowing and expressing this – and having a shared understanding – will make the change journey more effective.

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 [15] or via [email protected].

 

 

My team and I wish you all a wonderful Christmas break and a happy new year. We hope we can create positive organizational changes with you in 2023.

Scale It – Introducing 1 of my 40 rules of change

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Behavioural Change,Building Remarkable Organizations,Management of Change,Scale up,Social Movements,Transformation,Viral Change,Workplaces Of The Future | No Comments
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.

 

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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 [15] or via [email protected].

Assets & Strengths Base – Introducing 1 of my 40 rules of change

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Behavioural Change,Building Remarkable Organizations,Change, Leadership and Society,Collective action,culture and behaviours,Employee Engagement,Management Education,Management of Change,Management Thinking and Innovation,Social Movements,Workplaces Of The Future | No Comments
For more than 30 years I have been involved in ‘change’ in organizations. Again and again, some fundamental principles, and often inconvenient truths were popping up all the time. Recently, I put them all together – resulting in 40 ‘universal rules of change’.

These ‘rules’ were emerging from the practical work that I was doing with my team, not from the theory of books or ‘change models’ or ‘change methods’. In fact, I have done a lot of challenging to the conventional management thinking in this area.

Let me tell you in this short video, why I think a focus on “assets and strengths base” is one powerful driver of successful (organizational) change.

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The business organization seems to be obsessed with deficit: what we don’t have, does not work, we are low in. Tons of energy is used in fixing, less in building.

Employee engagement surveys tell you what you are lacking, where your scorers are low. OK, also the high ones, but management attention is insignificant compared to the call to arms to investigate the lower-than-benchmark scores.

Quite a lot of (macro social) community development in society, starts at the opposite end: banking on strengths, focusing on what we have and how we use, what we are good at, where the energy is. Organizations can learn from that.

If you want to hear more about the full set of rules, my team and I have a great opportunity coming up very soon. Let us know if you would like to know more here [15] or via [email protected].

We need teaming up, not more teams

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Behavioural Change,Building Remarkable Organizations,Change, Leadership and Society,Social Movements,Social network | No Comments

‘Meetings’ and ‘teams’ are two different things. Team equals meeting, is a cancer. Our language has been perverted. ‘Let’s bring this to the team’ usually means let’s put it on the agenda of the next meeting. But the best team is the one that never meets. Does not need to meet.  It’s a 24/7 affair. For a true team, meetings are an add-on, not the essence.  Tip: team, as a noun, is a structure. Forget managing nouns. Manage their verbs.  Translation: we need teaming up, not more teams.

Teamocracy may be the worst form of people collaboration except for all those other forms that have been tried from time-to-time. Churchill said that of democracy as a form of government.

Our organizations have become teamocracies. Teams appear like mushrooms and stay for ever. Our default ‘concept-form’ of human collaboration is the team.  We have equated team to a structure, which components and org chart can be powerpointed. Worse, we then equate the whole ‘team-concept-structure’ to a ‘meeting’. ‘Let’s bring this to the team’, often really means ‘let’s bring this to the meeting’. ‘Team equals meeting’ is a cancer. Team and meeting are a forced marriage. The best team is the one that does not need to meet.

In the glorification of ‘team-the-noun-the-structure’, we have forgotten the verb teaming-up. We have been trapped in the structure ‘team’ for too long. We don’t need more teams, but we need more teaming up

‘Team concept’ feels very much at home in the sports arena. Also in the military and other places. But not all that collaborates and joins up is a team. Jesus Christ did not create a team of 12 apostles, not a high performance team certainly with a bunch of rather hopeless fishermen.  There is no such thing as a team of monks in an abbey.  Or a team of a mother, father and 3 kids. We usually don’t refer to the family as a team. Except when the mother has left the father on his own with the 3 kids for the weekend to go and visit her mum, and the father and the kids welcome her back with ‘we are a good team’. Which means we have just survived.

A sales team may be the least of a team you have. But the label accredits a bunch of possible individualistic employees, possibly paid by their individualist performance, with something bigger and glorious. Oh! Teamocracies! They rule the organizational and business world. We love them.

But here is the truth. Teamocracy is exhausted. But it does not dare to admit it.  I suggest we give teamocracies a break, perhaps a sabbatical, dare I say prepare a retirement party.

There is plenty of evidence that a lot of good stuff takes place in the informal networks of the organization, not in the teams. If teamocracy is looking for a retirement package, networcracy comes in. It’s the network stupid!

‘We need a team to do X’, is the wrong start. ‘We need to do X, what behaviours do we need to have in place for that to happen?’, is the right one. Then, who needs to get involved, (which includes skills). Then processes. Then structure, with an open mind: from a bunch of people teaming up, to a network across the company, to (include) individuals tackling X with limited connectivity, to, yes, maybe, a new team. The team must not be the default, automatic pilot answer without critical thinking.

Can we put a moratorium on automatic new teams?

Trapped by the structure, freed by behaviours. Start with behaviours, and you will have a greater chance to decide if you need a team. Start with team, you’ll be a prisoner. There is a choice: team, the noun, the structure, or teaming up, the verb, the behaviour.

__________________________________________________

Our Team Management and Development suite of interventions are designed for any organization that requires novel, differentiated, innovative and highly effective organizational development and change techniques and tools.

They are not team building games or management training exercises or courses. They invite people in organizations to shape their world through real work focused on the specifics of your challenges in your organization. But this is done in a fast, sharp, focused and efficient way and in a surprisingly short period of time.

 

And, yes, in doing so, you create a common sense of purpose and align the team as well!

For more information please Contact Us [15] or email
[email protected]. [18]

Find out more about our short term Team and Management interventions:

Listen, people. I’ve got good news! The company is now fully prepared for the past

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Change, Leadership and Society,Social Movements,Viral Change | No Comments

This is my rephrasing of ‘The army is now fully prepared for the previous war’, inspired by John Gall [24], in his reference to historian Arnold Toynbee.

This is very relevant to our organizational world today. How many times we find ourselves rethinking, redoing, restructuring, reshuffling, reskilling and re-everything as if the reality had just stopped for us. Hi there! I am going to stop time so that you can catch up. Look at all the benchmarking data, all the trend reports, all the rankings of the Most Admired, the Most Followed and the Most Saint of companies, do your re-something, and then, Me, God of Time, will push the button again.

Really?

Many re-re of Product Development involve the refining of the machine, the addition of a better oil and the change of a few pieces here and there. Not many look at a new product development that may break the rules and jump the curve.

Many HR/OD/People stuff practices and processes still try to re-skill and hire for skills on an old skill set (and competence system that seems created by a quantum physicist) that worked in the past. Being there, done done, come along and repeat with us. Not many are courageous enough to look at what may be needed for the future, including people with zero experience in your area of expertise.

Many consulting approaches are still aimed at providing comfort to the client, (and the consultants’ bank managers) as opposed to providing restlessness; much more inconvenient and stressful.

Yes, I am afraid, much of what people do in organizations is to get the company fully prepared for the past.

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The Chalfont Project Academy

 

Sometimes in business, it feels like we are stuck.

We try to solve the same old questions – how to sustainably change the culture for good, how to serve the customer better, how to attract and retain talent – with the same, ineffective tools. We keep playing the same broken record.

But there is a better way; the right tools exist. The Chalfont Project Academy [25], our new Online Learning Platform is here to enable us to share our many resources developed through the work of Dr Leandro Herrero and The Chalfont Project, enabling you to gain a greater understanding of topics around large scale change, leadership and organizational design – all based upon our unique approach. Read, watch, absorb, then share, enhance, enlighten the world with what you learn, observe and engage with.

You can take our flagship course: Mobilize! Masterclass [26]Enter the world of organization architecture and acquire a complete blueprint for mobilizing people whether you are working on change, transformation or shaping culture.

Or start with a comprehensive collection of learning resource packages which include videos, webinars, papers and book extracts.

You’ll be able to choose from:

 

Find out more… [25]

For every ‘I have a dream’, there are thousands of ‘are you serious?’

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Change, Leadership and Society,Social Movements | No Comments

For every community struggling to achieve something, and deciding to launch some form of collective action; for every minority that tries to survive or thrive by starting a campaign or a movement; for every organizational group that decides that enough is enough (of inertia and bureaucracy) and decides to ‘change the place’ without waiting for a formal ‘change-the-place-change-management-programme’, there are dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of people saying ‘are you having a laugh?’, ‘are you kidding?’, ’you can’t be serious’. Followed by one or more of these:

Combinations, permutations, edited alternative versions.

It’s not just a collective answer. We all have our inner voices inside our minds telling us: don’t bother, why expose yourself?, not the right time, it’s crazy, your reputation may suffer, are you sure?, come on, get real.

I want to picture Martin Luther King on August 27, 1963, saying to others ‘I have a dream, and I am going to tell everybody tomorrow’. And his people around saying ‘what? so you have a dream, eh? You serious Dr King? Are we into dreams now? The last thing we need is dreaming’.

Of course this did not happen. Amongst other things because the ‘I have a dream narrative’ was not in the script in the speech prepared the night before.  He threw the prepared text out of the window at the last minute and spoke from his heart.

Any impossible becomes possible just a day after you start moving. Inner voices of ‘don’t take risks, don’t expose yourself, it won’t work’, start fading by the time you start walking. Don’t move and your risk adverse inner voices become a choral symphony of un-readiness.

Of course I am not advocating for (managerial, personal, professional, political) suicide. Any social movement (and any organizational cultural change is a social movement, or it isn’t) needs to plan for success, or it would fail the very people whom the movement tries to help. In my world, that plan is a Mobilizing Platform that ensures success, sustainability and legacy. That is what Viral Change [1] does.

But planning is not Waiting for Readiness. It is 2021. It is not ‘get ready, then act’, it’s ‘act, you’ll see how ready you were’.

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The Chalfont Project Academy – Launching Tomorrow

Now you can act….

 

We are very happy to announce that The Chalfont Project Academy [28] launches tomorrow. The flexible online learning platform enables us, for the first time, to share with you, our resources and insights based on our work as Organization Architects.

You can learn at your own pace and choose from a variety of different resources. You can take the in depth Masterclass on Social Movements with CEO Dr Leandro Herrero or choose between various Learning Packages on topics like: Viral Change Principles & Key Players, Leadership Principles & Key Players, and Organizational Design.

To find out more go to The Academy [28].

 

Not even bottom-up. Certainly not top-down. Lasting organizational change is a polycentric social movement, or it isn’t.

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Organization architecture,Social Movements,Viral Change | No Comments

In organizational life we are used to the dichotomy ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom up’, for example, when we talk about change. Clearly, there is some truth in this. There is an assumption that if you want the opposite to top-down it has to be bottom up. But in organizational terms, and even more as soon as you consider the organization as a social network, the true alternative to an exclusively top-down approach, which is one-centric, is poly-centric. (Exclusively bottom-up would be as uni-centric or uni-directional as top-down).

It’s not just playing with words. It is significant. Successful political campaigns are poli-centric. The 2008 and 2012 Obama campaigns, for example, were ones with heavy emphasis on the grassroots ‘centres’.  The ‘localised’ number of these ‘centres’ was significantly greater than on the Republican side. But there were other ‘centres’: fundraising, central political party leadership, Senate and House members etc. None of these ‘centres’ working in isolation would have led to victory.

Viral Change™ [1] in organizations, as my team has pioneered, takes place by orchestrating a polycentric approach.  With the organization as a pyramid – and it could be a big pyramid or a flat (er) pyramid – statistically, there are more highly connected and influent people at the bottom of that pyramid. That is why a great majority of ‘champions’ or ‘activists’ come from the lower layers.  But Viral Change™ takes place at different layers (to continue using a wrong two-dimensional concept) and ‘designed’ peer-to-peer activity (conversations, engagement, activists role…)  is also taking place at different layers and from different ‘centres’.  This is how a social movement works, whether spontaneously, or, very often, truly orchestrated. Although the term grassroots is used (and we do use it as well, indeed) it still gives, on its own, a false sense of uni-direction.

In Viral Change™ [1] we say that ‘we orchestrate large scale behavioural change to create a social movement’. Business organizations may not be used to the term ‘social movement’, but this is what it is. I sometimes have a little bit of extra work to do explaining to clients what we mean by this. Still, ‘social movement’ is heard as something alien to the ‘inside’ of the organization, something more appropriate to what one sees on TV screens and in sociology books. But once explained, the logic is powerful.

I understand that, mobilizing people and creating ‘a movement’ – something that political and marketing campaigners do for a living – has not figured very highly in organizational life or management thinking. We need to change this.  But we need a trans-disciplinary approach, as we have in Viral Change™ [1]. No single discipline can explain and master large organizational change today.

In our consulting work, when it comes to large scale behavioural and cultural change, we have learnt more from the history of social movements, and from the study of political campaigns, than from traditional ‘management thinking’. Then add network theory, behavioural sciences  and other key ingredients…

Certainly, ‘social movement’ was not a term to be found in any of my MBA materials, moons ago. Another change needed on the list.

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THERE IS A BETTER WAY WITH

THE CHALFONT PROJECT

 

Join me for a series of webinars, as my team of organization architects and I, explore the future of organizational life. We will explain how the 3 Pillars of The Chalfont Project’s [29] Organizational Architecture – smart organizational design, large scale behavioural and cultural change and collective leadership – work together to create a ‘Better Way [30]‘ for organizations to flourish in the post-COVID world.

 

REGISTER NOW [30]

 

REGISTER NOW [30]

 

REGISTER NOW [30]

 

The Irish Health Service’s silent culture revolution was driven by ‘if-not-us-who?’ employees

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Change, Leadership and Society,Social Movements,Viral Change | No Comments

Four years ago, starting in the Midwest of Ireland and replicating to other parts of the country, a bottom up social movement, ‘Values in Action [31]’, started to shape the culture of the Irish Health Service (HSE) . On top of their day jobs, employees joined in to create a system of peer-to-peer interactions and joint commitments to make nine behaviours live and multiply. They were conscious that behaviours create culture. No more words on paper, real behaviours in real life.

They trusted each other. They trusted our external help. The Leadership trusted everybody. Staff nominated the peers that they thought should lead the initial work as Champions. There were all hierarchical grades involved. These hierarchical differences, traditionally very strong in any health care system, did not count here. They all had in common, their love for the Service and the shaping of a collective future. They had a sense of higher purpose and grabbed the opportunity.

They did all this on top of long hours and the often, stressful situations of the day to day health care delivery. They beat the cynical and the defeatist. Some media were sceptical, even mocking (‘workshops on caring’) but nobody stopped. Some outsiders may have thought that culture was not a priority. These employees thought exactly the opposite. So did the leadership of the HSE.

Staff surprised managers and colleagues. They surprised themselves. They started to change their workplace and told their kids about it with pride. When, after two years, many initiatives in any large organizations are gone or fading, ‘Values in Action’ continued to show quantifiable advances that have changed the ethos of the place.

Our part in the process has now concluded but culture will never be ‘done’. The social movement continues. Nothing stopped these HSE employees from taking charge of the shaping of the culture for the future. They simply said ‘if not us, who?’ Agency at its best. Changes in structures and process may take place as any evolving public service may require, but this grassroots movement was determined to continue its often silent growth to ensure a behavioural fabric where anything good can grow.

As a lead on the small external team helping the movement, providing the Viral ChangeTM Mobilizing Platform, I followed the evolution with a sense of enormous privilege. One thing is for sure: I am not surprised in the slightest about its success. It’s hard to find any other place where employees were so committed to their work with a sense of purpose. They often see themselves on the front page of newspapers when something is wrong. They don’t often see themselves making the news when their 24/7 commitment changes or saves the lives of patients. They may not see their ‘Values in Action’ social movement as front-page-able. But no one will lose sleep about that. Their children, their families, their patient’s children, won’t thank them because of the front pages, but because of the collective place and space of pride, hope and service.

The leadership of the Service has often been in the media as a focus of criticism. Public servants know that this is part of the job. My experience of the local leaders involved who supported the ‘Values in Action’ grassroots is that they were exemplary. The top leadership of the Service, past and present, has made exceptional efforts to support the grassroots culture movement without dictating or interfering. Not a bit. Clear and simple, the past Director General made culture a priority and then trusted all of us. Many top leaders of local hospitals and community care have done the same.

In unsettling global times, the sight of people taking charge and shaping their destiny, is as good as it gets. After all, ‘if not them, who? If not now, when?’

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For an understanding of Viral ChangeTM and how it can be applied read…

12 Rules to Manage the Covid-19 pandemic [32] with a behavioural counter-epidemic using Viral Change™ principles. An epidemic of the right behaviours, at scale, is needed.

Read Dr Leandro Herrero’s in-depth, thought provoking article which 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.

12 Rules For A Behavioural Counter-Epidemic To Deal With Covid-19   [32]

Now available in Spanish.

 

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Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project [29], an international firm of organizational architects. He is the pioneer of Viral ChangeTM, 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 available for virtual speaking engagements [33] and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project [15].
His latest book, The Flipping point – Deprogramming Management [34], is available at all major online bookstores.

 

12 Rules For A Behavioural Counter-Epidemic To Deal With Covid-19

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Behavioural Change,Behavioural Economics,Communication,Communications,Social Movements,Viral Change | No Comments

In the short term, the health of all of us depends largely on people following public health rules (masks, distance, hygiene, group gathering etc) and also, eventually getting the vaccine.

The Covid-19 virus spreads exponentially and we need to address the desired behavioural change in the same exponential terms. Anything short of that won’t be enough to tackle the epidemic and progress towards normality.

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 practised by the Viral Change™ Mobilizing Platform for the last 20 years, in the area of organizational change.

Viral Change™ is a way to create large scale behavioural and cultural change (a) by the power of focusing on a small set of non-negotiable behaviours, (b)using peer-to-peer influence, (c) mastering the informality of connections in social networks,  (c) accelerating  with a well-crafted storytelling system, (d) and providing a type of leadership that we call Backstage Leadership™. Viral Change™, combines the power of top down, push, hierarchical and communication systems, which are very limited in power in their own right, with the significant power of bottom up, pull, behavioural scale up.

Click here for the full detailed article [35]

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project [29], an international firm of organizational architects. He is the pioneer of Viral ChangeTM, 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 available for virtual speaking engagements [33] and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project [15].
His latest book, The Flipping point – Deprogramming Management [34], is available at all major online bookstores.

 

Solidarity as a form of organizational culture is both a soft label and a secret weapon.

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Behavioural Economics,Building Remarkable Organizations,Change, Leadership and Society,Collaboration,Social Movements | No Comments

At some people’s request, I am revising an old Daily Thoughts on ‘solidarity’ in the work place.

Solidarity is one of those terms that can be used in many ways. It often brings a connotation of sympathy or an aspect of unity under threat, such as the 80’s Solidarity movement in Poland.

In traditional Catholic Social Teaching (a powerful set of loosely connected positions on social matters, solid, I insist, regardless of your religious beliefs), solidarity is about ‘valuing our fellow human beings and respecting who they are as individuals’, the website says [36]. The same website, that is,  in which some missing-the-point-completely webmaster has attached a picture of two high level bishops, a Catholic and an Anglican in forced ‘high five’, to the box of the definition of solidarity. I confess my embarrassment as a Catholic. A Catholic and an Anglican bishop in ‘high five’ mode is the last thing that comes to my mind on this topic.  I bring in the Catholic connotation because my original post was triggered by an invitation to speak at a Catholic forum and that forced me to imagine that ‘solidarity in action’.

Years later, it seems to me more pertinent than ever to go back to imagine a workplace where all those elements of unity, empathy, collaboration, cohesion and everything else in the thesaurus dictionary, could be at the core of culture. Yet, I don’t find many places (business organizations) where the term sits prominently in a value system, let’s say, compared with empowerment, ownership or accountability.

My hypothesis is that this is because empowerment, ownership and accountability are ‘things given to you’ (and taken or not), that is top-down created,  whilst solidarity is something that is not given to you, it is created by you and others, collectively, bottom up. And most value systems are dictated from the top and cascaded.

In any case, I am convinced that solidarity has more glue power than anything else.

In my previous, old Daily Thought I imagined what a ‘culture of solidarity’ may look like:

  1. There will be a strong sense of interdependence in the place.  This is contrary to a culture of Social Darwinism, with excessive internal competition. ‘My safety is your safety’ or ‘my success is your success’, for example, would be wonderful examples of this achievement.
  2. It will require a great deal of Social Intelligence: listening, putting oneself in other people’s shoes. Something organizations desperately need and that has become a topic of much conversation in recent years.
  3. It will engender a sense of ‘the collective’. Suddenly, questions such as ‘who needs to know?’ and the subsequent action and sharing, will make real sense.
  4. It will spread a sense of accountability and responsibility. You need to know what you and others are responsible for, to be able to contribute. Vagueness will not be supported.
  5. It will also create awareness of the impact of my actions (of my work with others) on individual and collective commitments.
  6. It will foster genuine co-operation, beyond connectedness. Connectivity per se is not collaboration.
  7. It will go far beyond a defensive attitude (I can be hurt, I am likely to be a victim) to reach the proactive ‘we are all agents (of our destiny) here’.
  8. It won’t feel like ‘theory’ or just good works. It will be action (the word activism contains the word act).
  9. It will require authentic leadership that supports all of the above.
  10. It will generate trust. Vulnerability is OK—‘I won’t be punished, we are all in this together’.

So there you are. Solidarity may be the above package; far more than people with placards. ‘We are all Charlie [37]’ is a show of sympathy. ‘We are all in this together, we depend on each other, and we act collectively, without organizational chart barriers’, may be the expression window of a  ‘solidarity culture’.

If you have one of these, you have a community, not a company. And this, believe me, it’s not bad at all.

Or should I say, tremendous, it is tremendous. #tremendous.

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Continue the conversation…..

Thought leader, keynote speaker and author, Dr Leandro Herrero is available for virtual speaking engagements. Find out more [33].

 

Leandro Herrero is frequently voted ‘Best Speaker’ at conferences worldwide. He also speaks to Boards and Leadership Teams, participates in other internal company conferences as a keynote speaker, and is available to run short seminars and longer workshops.

The topics of Leandro Herrero’s presentations and workshops relate to his work as an organizational architect.

Each organization has specific needs to be addressed.  Contact us [38] to discuss your needs and to create the most appropriate virtual session for you.

 

 

What do I do with a resistant manager? Find five non-resistant colleagues, then…

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Agency,Behavioural Change,Behavioural Economics,Building Remarkable Organizations,Change, Leadership and Society,Collective action,Corporate pathologies,General,Leadership,Management of Change,Social Movements | No Comments

A CEO asked me recently: what do you do with a manager who does not embrace or support change, in fact, who is an obstacle? My answer is always the same, only adapted in tone to the circumstances such as how well I know that CEO. I say: ‘you put that manager in a room with another five managers who do support and embrace change.’

I am careful that this is not received as superficial, or a trying-to-be-clever answer. But this is the truth. Nothing equals the power of peer-to-peer influence. This is well above the boss convincing, threatening or brainwashing.

Most of our social positions are shaped socially, for better or for worse. Group pressure, conformity or influence, I don’t really care what you call it, can be used for good reasons. It works very well, when orchestrated well.

In a recent HR conference, after my keynote speech on Viral Change [39] ™ a manager came to me: but, is this not manipulation? My answer is always the same: ‘only if you call it manipulation when managing people, educating them, or dare I say, coaching them.’

Entire (change) management practices that are focused on the expectation that the individual will change his mind, attitude or mindset, via rational understanding or emotional engagement, or both, could be shifted towards group shaping of those changes, using peer-to-peer influence.

This is not to underplay the role of ‘individual agency’, something that leaders need to manage with their direct reports, for example, on a one-to-one basis. But when we’re talking change at a scale, it is impossible to work on a one-to-one basis only. The group effect is immensely more powerful. Individual seduction becomes group influence, or cultural change, for example, will never happen.

Traditionally, we have underestimated the power of social copying inside the organization. We have talked about the existence of peer-to-peer influence, or group pressure, as something that is there, in front of us, but we don’t quite know what to do with it. Peer networks have shown us that it is far more powerful to use them in order to shape cultures, create behavioural change, establish new rules or a style of working, and anything that has to do with the building of a particular culture. That is, large scale behavioural change.

The answer to individual resistance is often one of a social transplant. Dwelling in a new place of non-resistance cures far more, than hours of convincing that resistance is bad.

Of course, I am bound to say that, it’s Homo Imitans [40], stupid.

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FEED FORWARD WEBINAR SERIES

The organization now, under new management

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

Leandro Herrero

 

Join Leandro Herrero and his team of organizational architects for the penultimate free webinar of the series – The Myths of Management – hear from them as they debunk uncontested assumptions and uncover the alternatives, whilst considering why this is even more relevant today in the current exceptional post Covid-19 environment. Register Now! [41]

All webinar attendees are eligible for a complimentary copy of Leandro’s new book: The Flipping Point [34].

 

10 shifts in the Remarkable Organization in the making (wishful ideas)

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Backstage Leadership,Behavioural Economics,Building Remarkable Organizations,Change, Leadership and Society,Corporate pathologies,Critical Thinking,culture and behaviours,Grassroots,Peer to peer infuence,Social Movements,Viral Change | No Comments

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

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

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

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Continue the conversation….

Learn how to successfully mobilize your people!

 

Do you want to learn how to successfully mobilize your people for a purpose and change culture? Culture is the key to the complex post Covid-19 future in front of us.  Join us on 16th July, 18:00 BST/19:00 CET for our free webinar on The Myths of Company Culture [41].

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

Register Now! [41]

 

Each participant who attends any of the live webinars of the Feed Forward series will be eligible for one copy of The Flipping Point [34].

 

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Contact us [15] to find out more about engaging Dr Leandro Herrero for speaking opportunities [15] with your company.

Segment, segment, segment. Add these three words to the dictionary of Internal Communications.

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Accelerators,Communication,Communications,Creativity and Innovation,Critical Thinking,Employee Engagement,HR management,Social Movements,Talent, Skills, Human Capital,Workplaces Of The Future | No Comments

If you look at political marketing, and the place to look for a serious PhD in communications and their segmentation is Obama’s campaign 2008 and 2012, for which there are plenty of books and papers, you’ll see that segmentation of the message is not even a question. You don’t go to them asking ‘do you segment?’ That would be the same as asking a restaurateur if he puts food on the table.

In these campaigns, the ‘data points’ per voter went into the hundreds. The entire communication system was tailored to segments of age, race, schooling, and another myriad of elements.

There is a wonderful clip on the web of Walter, a 90-year-old veteran campaigning via phone and a laptop, where a precise script is in front of his eyes, and a precise list of people to call. I have used this with my clients multiple times. We can only hear the voice at the other end of the phone, and it’s not one of a 25 year old. It sounds like one of his age or a bit below. Walter is asking for a vote but is not talking about an Iran threat, climate change, or education. None of it. It’s all healthcare. Nothing else.

When confronted with the clip, the first reaction by people in the room is ‘well, that’s obvious’. But then they have to suspend judgement about what may come after the obvious. I ask, when was the last time that you, in your internal, top down communication system, of the vision, the strategy, the ‘what’s next’ or the ‘what has just been’, segmented the message, a la Walter, versus one, single, monolithic, top down stack of PowerPoints shown at the all-people Town Hall meeting?

Invariably the answer is, don’t know, probably never. I think it is never.

The company, your company, probably, has Millennials mixed with Boomers, single mums and not, age bands with particular preoccupations, tribes (engineers, accountants, marketers etc.) speaking their own language, people in HQ and people outside, those feeling pretty OK and those worrying about the question mark over the site, passionate ones engaged with charities, super skilled and perhaps no skilled or very little, the secretaries tribe, the new in the company and those who have been there for years. Do I need to carry on? Why is it, for goodness’ sake, that everybody, I mean everybody, gets the same message, in the same format, at the same time? On behalf of what? Unity? Alignment? Democracy?

It’s simply crazy. Yes, you need a single, overall compelling narrative. But you need to segment, segment and segment the message. I know, this is not the conventional wisdom in ‘business’. But we, ‘in business’ are miles behind what happens in other parts of life where mobilizing people is the key. Perhaps this is why we have rather pathetic Employee Engagement practices.

Don’t transplant or import a successful management model; reverse engineer it, then pause

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Agency,Building Remarkable Organizations,Change, Leadership and Society,Complexity,Critical Thinking,Digital transformation,Leadership,Management of Change,Social Movements,Social network,Social Network Analysis,Strategy | No Comments

There is a big difference between copying and reverse engineering. Many people in business wish they could copy the great successes, the visible achievers. Perhaps not the Google, Apple, Amazon etc., but other models and ways. After all, we have been told for years that ‘Best Practices’ are the most important source of learning. In the old days, we were told we needed to copy the GE workouts, or the Japanese Quality circles, or the Kaizen ways. Today, other models such as Agility, or Holacracy and Zappos, or both, all in one, reach the headlines of the ‘latest in management’.

There is an intrinsic difficulty in many models: their surprising lack of transferability. Some are more transferable than others, but most of the time doing the transplant is a dangerous business.

I think that reverse engineering and pausing (deconstruct, unbundle, think critically about what you see) has greater merit than the ‘model transplant’. Reverse engineering allows you to find out the principles before the outcomes, the rules of the game before the endgame, the deeper human dynamics before the organization chart.

When I launched Viral Change™ [42] formally in 2006, we were already on a continuous process of reverse engineering people mobilization. And the two places to start the unbundling were unconventional (for management standards) : social movements and network theory. Close to 2008 and then until 2012 and beyond, it was obvious to me that we were missing the greatest source of knowledge for people mobilization: political (science, movement) marketing. You’ll recognise the milestones as the US presidential campaigns. Since then, we have been dissecting and reverse engineering the political mobilization platforms, including digital activism. This is what has given the Viral Change Mobilizing Platform the ability to host and provide an ‘operating system’ for things as diverse as ‘standard’ change management, employee engagement or cultural change. Viral Change is today a fully fleshed out mobilizing platform as opposed to a ‘change method’. (it has methods inside).

I see again and again in my consulting practice the presence of some organizational designs, in small or in big, that have been ‘installed’ in particular organizations with the hope that, being a mirror, or a copy, of what other successful people have done (typically in manufacturing) they per se will become the vehicle of success. Risky business, when deprived from context and culture. A good idea in A does not make the same good idea for B.

The old Best Practices and its sister Benchmarking were successful at pointing to what other people had achieved, but often created an illusion of solution by transplanting them or copying them. If I had to trace back my very early interest in the organizational world, coming from clinical psychiatry and academia, about hundred moons ago, I would say it was this question: how is it possible that organization A and B share more or less the same resources in size and market, similar culture, similar product portfolio, similar industry sector, but whilst A is extremely successful, B fails miserably?

Pretending to become A when you are B is the wrong way to approach it. Deconstructing success and reverse-engineering both, their success and our own failure, is a good start.

Tribal brands that teach us a lesson

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Activism,Building Remarkable Organizations,Change, Leadership and Society,Corporate anthropology,culture and behaviours,Mobiliztion,Social Movements,Social network,Social Network Analysis,Viral Change | No Comments

This is an anthropology report. We’ve found this tribe: the people all wear the same multi-coloured clothes. They paint their faces with symbolic colours before going to the battlefield. They sing war songs. They shout. The cheer on their warriors. Animal instincts are high. The sense of identification with the tribe is enormous, practically above everything else in their lives. When successful in the battlefield, the indigenous people get inebriated on mass and often lose control. When the battlefield expedition does not go well, there may be thousands of natives crying, men, women and children. In these circumstances, the tribe leaders are blamed even beyond the confines of the tribe.  This all works through a strict tribal, prime-animal, collective code. And the natives pay a monthly fee to belong to the tribe. This tribe also has a curious ritual: they sell their warriors to other tribes for astronomical quantities.

It’s a football club! (AKA soccer in parts of the world with less tribal traditions of this type).

Are football club brands the prototype of brands? The Mother Of All Brands? Judging by the emotions and the almost blind stickiness of belonging to a cause, surely they must rank pretty high in the Brand Cult System.

A few years ago, a Spanish club, not in the premier league, was going through a tribal bad patch, it applied modern social network analytical tools to master massive support across the tribe and beyond. It had the full components of a social movement, with the identification of influencers, their networks, their pull effect, etc. I know this, because the masters of the tribe contacted me after being told by external advisers that what they were doing was pure Viral Change TM [43]in action.

In my discussions with them, I found a level of understanding of ‘people mobilization rules’, knowledge of tools and network strategies, and clarity of purpose, which I wish I could find in the average business organization. Of course they are a business as well! But they are genuinely and seriously looking at the business as a social movement, tribal, mass mobilization and with full mastery of social network sciences. So far they are the best business anthropologists I have come across.