‘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.

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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 ^[3] or email
[email protected]. ^[7]

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

• Reboot! The Game Plan  ^[8]
• Applied Critical Thinking ^{[9]  [9]}
• Disruptive Ideas ^[10]
• InnovACTion! ^[11]
• Plot Your Position on the Attitude to Change Scale ^[12]

I am (in) IT, I work for X (company)
I work for X (company), I am in IT

These are not the same. It tells me where the sense of belonging is, where home is, where loyalty may be, or divided. Both are neither good nor bad. They express what they express. They are different.

Change IT for R&D, Commercial, Regulatory etc. if you wish.

But some tribes are particularly good at preserving their belonging. Medical doctors are one. ‘Being a medical doctor’ becomes part of some sort of special form of being that sticks. Lots of pages in social psychology manuals explain why, including one that made me think for many years, when I was briefly teaching Medical Psychosociology in University: the so called ‘access to your body’. The plumber, the engineer, the roof fixer, the driver or your manager do not have (usually) access to your body. They may have access to your time, your money or your emotions but usually not your body. That is an anthropological privilege when looked through those lenses.

In my many years doing time in the pharmaceutical industry, I was always struck by the medics, some reporting to me, who would always put ‘the medic’ bit before the company paying the salary. ‘I am a doctor, I work for X (company) as Medical Director’ was always, always, far more prominent than ‘I work for X (company) as a Medical Director, comma, I am a medical doctor’

Here, the order of factors does change the product.

Similarly, for a company composed of parts or business units or acquired businesses.

I am in Y (part of company Z, or we are just being acquired by Z)
I work for Y, now part of Z
I work for Z, they just bought us, Y

Here, as well, the order of factors does change the product.

Months, even years after an acquisition, some groups or individuals have not made the transition yet. They still belong to the previous entity.

Also, the more de-centralised, devolved, an organization is, the more it is acting as a host, as an umbrella. As such, the overall brand may or may not be stronger than the individual de-centralised branded units. We see this all the time. People are often more loyal to a product-brand or a service-brand, or, indeed a geography-brand, than ‘the firm’.

The issue is not whether the decentralised business units retain high levels of loyalty and belonging for employees (what is wrong with that?) but whether the parent brand makes the whole thing even more attractive. The more decentralised, the greater the need for an overall glue, a neat common home to be. The onus to be a good magnet is on the host/umbrella/mother/father. Not on the children.

Let me share a piece of our own research that has just come up from the oven.

In a 1200 people, pan European company, in the financial sector, we have compared the power of the five person Leadership Team, in terms of messaging and engagement, reaching other people, with the power of the top five Viral Change™ Champions, defined as top influencers and hyperconnected in the organization.  The analysis has been done blind and anonymously. All staff were asked a series of seven questions to try to identify the colleagues whom they would trust and reach out to, in order to obtain some real information, or the ones who usually reach out to them for the same communication purposes.

We analysed three steps (or ‘degrees of separation’) that can be understood like the immediate layers of connections. One layer or step equals your immediate network, second step the connections of that immediate network, third step, the connections of those connections.

The results are revealing. By step one, the Leadership Team had a reach of 21 people whilst the Viral Change™ Champions  had 104. Step 2 (connections of the immediate connections) Leadership Team 100, approximately, and Champions 3 times more, around 300 people. Step 3, 250 for the Leadership team and 450 for the Champions. By step 3, the five person Leadership Team was able to reach (tap into) 27% of the workforce, whilst the five top Viral Change™ Champions reached 49%, almost half of the workforce.

The power of this data, gathered through the use of Social Network Analysis (SNA) is its inclusiveness (all people in the workforce participated) and its anonymity.

The results reinforce the well established principle in Viral Change™ ^[1]  that hierarchical power is limited when compared with the one of highly connected and influent people (Champions or Activists, in the Viral Change™ methodology). Of course these Viral Change™ influencers need to be found, identified and eventually asked for help to shape a cultural transformation of some sort.

Finding the real influencers inside the organization is vital to orchestrate a bottom-up, peer-to-peer transformation (‘change’, ‘culture’, new norms, etc). It does not get better than this. Many organizations naively think that this pool of influencers match existing pools such as ‘Talent Management’, for example. This is not the case. Inside the organization, the importance of particular individuals, not in the hierarchical system, is clear. Internal, influence of the few, is well and alive.

Backstage Leadership™ is the art, performed by the formal leadership, of giving the stage to those real, distributed leaders who have approximately twice as much power as the Leadership Team when it comes to influence, messaging and communications inside the firm. Similarly these influencers shape behaviours and culture.

Our data is consistent with Edelman’s Trust Barometer that places the category ‘people like me’ (peers) twice as high as the CEO/hierarchical power.

Burn those organizational charts! Other than being a sort of Google map for who reports to whom, they don’t say anything about the real organization. Social Network Analysis ^[13] does. Then, Viral Change™ takes over to shape a culture.

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Continue the conversation…..

Join me and my team for our final webinar in the ‘A Better Way’ series as we look at collective leadership:

Build and enhance your collective leadership capabilities

At The Chalfont Project, we prefer the use of the term ‘practicing leadership’ to ‘developing’ it to emphasise the real life essence of leadership. So much has been written that the world is full of recipes and techniques, examples and role models. The rich plethora of available answers obscures the need to have good questions. Reflection and introspection seem like logical ingredients for being a good leader, yet our business and organizational life treats them as luxuries that have no place in our ubiquitous ‘time famine’. Busy-ness has taken over business and leadership has been commoditised to a series of ‘how to’. Yet, there is hardly anything more precious in organizational life than the individual and collective leadership capabilities.

Join us on 17th June at 1730 BST/1830 CET to find out more.

REGISTER HERE ^[14]

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Do you want to know your REAL informal organizational networks?

For many years the need to understand formal and informal connections has been well understood. Now, we have turned organizational network science into real practice: we uncover your networks with no pain, efficiently, fast and with absolute confidentiality.

To understand your informal social networks in your organization we can work with you using our product 3CXcan – see here to find out more. ^[15]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watch our webinar Can you put your organization through an MRI?  ^[16]

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

What attendees said:

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

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

WATCH NOW ^[16]

There are two opposite and wrong reactions to Employee (engagement/satisfaction) surveys. At one end, there is the ‘ignore the findings’. I use the term ‘ignore’ as a host of different meanings: ignore-ignore, pretend that you don’t ignore but ignore, dismiss, justify, or sweep under the carpet. Included here are all the ‘cognitive dissonance’ mechanisms: ‘Of course the results are not good, it was done just when the reorganization was announced’. Or, ‘We have just gone through a hell of a journey with the hostile takeover’. Or, ‘The weather has been really, really bad recently’. Most management teams will not ‘ignore’, but may pretend to ignore a little.

In my consulting experience, this end of the spectrum is not as problematic as the opposite. At the other end, there isn’t ignoring but over-reaction. A need to address point by point, score by score, graph by graph and do something, or, more importantly, being seen to do something, sometimes without a lot of reflection. Work-life balance low? Let’s have focus groups to find the 3 best initiatives we can have to improve it. Trust in management low? Let’s have a cascade down system of workshops by mangers with their staff. Etc.

I often see a temporal organizational paralysis trying to deal with the graphs and numbers. I know of a Big Plc Board that has ‘ordered’ a tsunami of meetings across all geographies to make sure that ‘people are engaged’. I see more benign forms of reaction to items, but not much overall reflection in search of overall meaning.

Incidentally, I have never seen a Reaction-Workshop-Chain focused on high scores to see how we can keep them high. It’s always a Problem Solving of The Negative exercise. No wonder the climate of the Tsunami Reaction is negative/sad/Houston-we-have-a-problem.

My advice for people who don’t have proficiency in handling Employee Surveys is simple: don’t do them, you might get lots of results.

My views on these surveys is known:  In case you missed them, here are four recent Daily Thoughts on the topic:

Build your own Employee Engagement argument for free. You can’t go wrong ^[17]

If you want to increase employee engagement and employee satisfaction, increase your company performance (yes, the order is not a typo) ^[18]

The shortest Employee Engagement survey has one question ^[19]

Is employee engagement whatever is measured by employee engagement surveys? ^[20]

Employee Engagement Surveys are tools for conversation. Results, good or bad, are symptoms. Any symptomatic treatment is, well, symptomatic. It does not touch the causes.  Having low work-life balance scores treated with a package of ‘flexible working’, is giving painkillers to somebody with a fractured arm.

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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 ^[21].

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 ^[22] to discuss your needs and to create the most appropriate virtual session for you.

OK, at least you’re reading. Thanks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Surely not even the accountants can see this logic.

Choices!

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

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Here at The Chalfont Project ^[23] we undertake work with a particular peer-to-peer network of highly connected people through our Viral Change™ programme ^[24] and now we can help your business too, with our 3CXcan ^[25] product. This online survey which uses organizational network science software called Cfinder Algorithm, a tool for social network detection, will give you a profound understanding of your internal networks.

With 3CXcan ^[25] we have turned organizational network science into real practice: we uncover your formal and informal networks with no pain, efficiently, fast and with absolute confidentiality.

3CXcan  is a diagnostic tool which:

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

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

◦ GAINS INSIGHT on the specific solutions and interventions required

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

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

To find out more or book your free virtual consultation for a short walk through our demo – contact us now! ^[25]

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

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

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

Register Now ^[26]

Peer power: if managers say, ‘safety is first’, the impact may be relative. The dictation is totally expected. This is what they are supposed to say. If my peer says, ‘safety is first’, I’m beginning to pay attention. It’s not expected, we were talking football and holidays. (what is the matter with him?) But I hear it. Tell me more. Peer-to-peer is stronger than managerial top down.

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

I believe that most silo problems have names and surnames

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

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

Extracts taken from my new book The Flipping Point. ^[27] A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. The Flipping Point ^[27] contains 200 short vignettes exploring what ’deprogramming management’ may look like.  Read a recent review ^[28].

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

Join our second thought-provoking webinar in the series. This week – can we MRI the company & diagnose its health in terms of internal connectivity, communication and collaboration? Yes we can.  Join Leandro Herrero ^[29], Marieke van Essen ^[29] and Carlos Escario ^[29] on 2nd July – 18:00 BST/19:00 CET – to learn how 3CXcan provides this analysis using the highest scientific principles of network sciences.

Bring your critical thinking brain, switched on. It’s a serious business. It may also be fun.    REGISTER NOW! ^[29]

The snap shot of the company as pictured in an organizational chart, is probably one of the most fictitious works of management art.  Yet, it is a map of power and control that perhaps, in many cases, needs to be shown by the HR Cartography Department.

But the idea that the static display of boxes, reporting lines, solid or dotted, tells us anything about what is going on, is very naive. I don’t think many people would see it differently.

To understand what is really going on, you have to have a ‘live organizational chart’ and that could only be achieved with a live social network analysis.

For all technological advances we have at our disposal, we have a fairly prosaic, rather boring and uninformative ‘thing’ called an organization chart as a ‘representation’ of the company.  For example, it tells us nothing about three vital, fundamental components of organizational life:

Unwritten rules. The organizational chart may point to the written ones and only in so far as they are connected with the mechanism of power and reporting lines. For example, whom to escalate a problem. But not even when.

The natural influencers. The organizational chart is blind as to where in the organizational network a particular individual sits. There is no correlation between a hierarchical system and an influence system. Mrs Jones running the mail room may have three times more (cultural) influence and connections than Mrs Smith running the Strategic Unit.

The tribes. Every organization has tribes. Some are functional, and they may have their own organizational chart: IT, Operations, Finance etc. But many powerful tribes are not functional and they don’t have ‘their chart’: the youngest, the part-timers, the remote workers, the newly-acquired, the ‘women in leadership club’, the smokers or the runners/gym-lovers/wanting-to-die-healthy people. And if you don’t know about your tribes, or don’t know what to do with them, please note your Sabbatical has ended, come back.

The organizational chart is that lonely artefact that corporate archaeologists will find and frame, a relic from the divisional and Fordian organization, a Guide to Bosses for Dummies.

Although the reports of its death have been grossly exaggerated, the practice of  management as ‘organizational chart reordering and reshuffling’, is today in a rather poor state of affairs.

I despair when I see reorganization announcements solely based on new power distribution, or that say little about the possible excitement of the new structure in favour of that new chair showroom.

Some press releases are new furniture brochures, the new chairs and sofa collection. And a few beds.

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THE COMPANY IN A MRI ^[29]

Are you ready to do your organization health check? A must for the well-being of any organization. Join the conversation with us this Thursday July 2nd for our 2nd thought provoking Feed Forward webinar with Leandro Herrero ^[30], Marieke van Essen ^[31] and Carlos Escario ^[32] from The Chalfont Project ^[29]. 18.00 BST, 19.00CET. Register Now! ^[29]

Can we have a sense of the reality of communication, connectivity, and collaboration inside the company, a real sense, without simply using assumptions, or taking for granted what we see at face value?

Maybe get confirmation bias out of the window and have a good diagnosis of what is going on, whether we like the outcomes or not. It can be done. And it may save you millions in reorganizations or reshuffling that may not be needed. Or, yes, it validates your intentions.

Let’s put the company in an MRI and find out so that any course of action is informed. (Would you have an operation without X-rays and perhaps MRI?).

Each participant who attends any of the live webinars of the Feed Forward series will be eligible for one copy of Leandro Herrero’s new book: The Flipping Point ^[27].  Read a recent review ^[28].

Our traditional management education has almost 100% focused on the formal organization, the structural fabric of teams, divisions, groups, committees and reporting lines. The informal organization, often also called the ‘invisible organization’, has always been a ghost: you know it’s there but can’t see, can’t manage, can’t measure, so I don’t do anything about it. Not many years ago many leaders considered the informality side as a waste, a detractor from the core and formal, that is, doing your job. It seems yesterday when a friend of mine, a very successful business owner, spent a lot of time writing (hand writing for his secretary to type) memos to staff about how not use email for personal reasons, or the internet for that matter. Forget that online shopping and Ticketmaster deal. Not in his company.

Today, the role of the informal organization is more recognised. But still it is important to remind ourselves of what the informal social networks inside the organization, the web of connections, the largely (but not totally) invisible side does, and why it is inexcusable for leaders today to ignore it, or even treat it as an anecdote.

1. Connectedness (= network) Obviously! The issue here is fluidity. Informal social networks inside the organization could become non fluid if you attempt to formalise them, ‘convert them into a team’ or corporatize them. They then become clubs (women in leadership, expats) which have their own utility, but they are not strictly speaking an informal network. The real connectedness dwells in the informal organization, well above the ‘forced connectedness’ of teams and task forces.
2. Information traffic and communication. The travel, the social life of information, uses two highways: the top down hierarchical system of communication (the pipes) and the informal network (chatter, rumours and all versions of Chinese whispering). You can’t exercise a role, or example, as Internal Communications without mastering the social life of the rumour. So you need to know how the invisible organization works.
3. Clustering. In the internal social network, people who know/does/did X, also know/do/did Y. There is an entire social cartography that can be considered. The informal organization loves clustering. Find an element, chances are you’ll fine the others. It’s ‘people like me do this’.
4. Listening. Receiving feedback. The informal organization/internal social networks are very good at listening and closing the loop with people. If you see the organization as a listening organism, then you need to focus on the informal organization, not the structural and formal of teams and committees. What the formal organization hears is then listened to in the informal one.
5. 24/7 Q&A. The informal organization is a 24/7 Q&A system you can tap into. The 24/7 Q&A knows no boundaries. The fluidity and use of the informal organization and its clusters of (informal) social networks allows for the bypass of a formal ‘expert system’. It is literally a ‘can anybody tell me about X?’, assuming that everybody is a possible ‘expert’. You don’t need to catalogue them anymore.
6. Ideas generation/crowdsourcing. Tapping into intellectual capital, idea generation and fast idea qualification requires the entire network. Internal crowdsourcing is only possible if the fluidity of the social networks is respected.
7. Ties. The social network is the generator of ties, strong or weak. The more weak ties, the greater the potential for innovation. Strong ties are more predictable (you already guess what your team members John and Peter and Mary are going to say) and less good for innovation. The informal network hosts the weak ties, which are often the most powerful ones.
8. Social capital. The network is a constant creator of relationships, a self-configuring one. It is therefore the strongest social capital builder; social capital defined as the sum of qualitative and quantitative relationships.
9. Host of conversations. The true conversations take place outside the straitjacket of the team meeting.
10. Stories. The informal organization is a big campfire for stories to be told. Their nodes in the informal organization (you and me) are raconteurs. The employees in the formal structures are more on the information traffic side.

Leaders should be curators of the informal organization, masters of the invisible world and keepers of the fluidity, avoiding any attempt, from anybody, to corporatize or formalise it. It is the art of unmanaging to reach full potential.

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THE COMPANY IN AN MRI ^[29]

Can we have a sense of the reality of communication, connectivity, and collaboration inside the company, a real sense, without simply using assumptions, or taking for granted what we see at face value?

Maybe get confirmation bias out of the window and have a good diagnosis of what is going on, whether we like the outcomes or not. It can be done. And it may save you millions in reorganizations or reshuffling that may not be needed. Or, yes, it validates your intentions.

Let’s put the company in an MRI and find out so that any course of action is informed. (Would you have an operation without X-rays and perhaps MRI?).

Join Leandro and his team on July 2nd, at 18:00 GMT, 19:00 CET for the second Webinar in the Feed Forward series (back to normal may be tricky, normal is not waiting for us). Register now! ^[29]

Each participant who attends any of the live webinars of the Feed Forward series will be eligible for one copy of Leandro Herrero’s new book: The Flipping Point ^[27].  Read a recent review ^[28].

The old view of the organization is something close to the old concept of a medieval city, where citizenship was defined by inhabiting and dwelling within an area defined by the walls of the castle. The new view of the organization is similar to the concept of a modern city, where citizenship is defined by moving around a network of communications (in multiple directions with multiple connections) with very permeable borders, if any. Nodes in this network are both destination and point of departure at the same time.

The ideogram of the old city is the enclosure; the ideogram of the old organization is the organization chart.  The ideogram of the new city is the underground map, the rail network or the highway chart; the ideogram of the new organization is the network.

The citizen of the old organization lives in a box on the organization chart, only occasionally getting out of the box to talk to another resident in a bigger box called ‘team’.  The citizen of the new organization is a rider of the network, moving around and talking to other loose connections, some of them with stronger ties than others. Three ‘B’s reign in the old organization: boss, boundaries and bonuses. Three ‘Is’ reign in the new organization: influence, inter-dependence and innovation.

Having acknowledged that the hierarchical organization with its functional silos (which can be visible in companies of 5,000, 500 or 50 employees) had a bit of a problem in cross-communication, but not willing to kill the power silos altogether, the invention of the matrix as a cross-functional way of working was inevitable. It became a language key (we have a matrix system) and a clever hierarchical plot (I have two bosses: one local the other global). And the matrix became a very, very large petri dish for team meetings.

It was invented as a way to force people out of their dwellings to work together with other people (who were also forced out of their own dwellings). It sometimes seemed that the conversation between them was just temporary and just long enough for somebody to look at his watch and exclaim: “Oh, my God, so late already! I need to get back, bye!” And back to their boxes they went…

Let me make a blunt statement. We don’t need more team players. We need riders and navigators. Big time! Riders of the network navigate through connections inside and outside the organization. They lead from their own connectivity and ability to imagine their world as a vast space, mostly undiscovered. They are relationship builders, not team builders. They may not have a problem with teams and may even belong to some. But they tend to regard teams as the new silos.

Riders have meetings as well: 365/24/7 meetings. They are ‘meeting up’ all the time. It is their very ‘raison d’être’. Riders want networkracy, not teamocracy. These new leaders will take the organization to territories where ‘the answers’ might be found and will do so via relationships, not through processes and systems. They are socially intelligent: a rare characteristic, often invisible in many layers of management or even in top leadership.

This is how you advertise for Riders:

-We’ve done the team stuff. We have lots of them and they operate quite acceptably, thank you.

-Before we implemented the matrix, we had seven divisions and seven silos. After implementing the matrix and creating the multidisciplinary team structure, we have seven non-silo divisions and 35 new team silos. We never solve the problems here; we just trade off between them.

-We are looking for (socially intelligent) people able to establish a web of both internal and external relationships. Management has promised to keep a relatively low profile and let them roam relatively freely.

-We acknowledge that, from time to time, we will have the temptation to declare some of them ‘a team’, but we promise we will refrain.

-We are looking for people who can demonstrate they can build relationships.

-We have a special interest in people who founded a club at 11, created a football team at 17 and put together a bunch of friends to explore the Amazon at 21. Or something like that.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Can we MRI the company & diagnose its health in terms of internal connectivity, communication and collaboration? YES we can. Join Leandro and his team for our next webinar on 2nd July – learn how 3CXcan provides this analysis using the highest scientific principles of network sciences. Register now! ^[29]

In the current environment it’s important to base the recovery and the post Covid-19 organization on a full understanding of its formal and informal connections, communication channels and internal collaboration. Suspend judgement about your assumptions and find the truth. This webinar will show real examples of this kind of diagnosis performed in real companies. Understanding the real organization, which may or may not be the one you assume it is, will show a completely new baseline upon which to navigate the future. Join us! ^[29]

Each participant who attends any of the live webinars of the Feed Forward series will be eligible for one copy of Leandro Herrero’s new book: The Flipping Point ^[27].  Read a recent review ^[28].

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. Hyperconnectivity and hyper-collaboration of good committed citizens, corporate or otherwise, is desirable. We need to incentivise connectivity.
4. Hyperconnectivity 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.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Continue the conversation – join our free webinar on Thursday 2nd July – 18:00BST/19:00 CET. Register Now. ^[29]

Can we put the company in an MRI? Can we diagnose its health in terms of its internal connectivity, communication and collaboration? ^[29]

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

Our Feed Forward Series of free, live webinars continues – find out more.   ^[29]To change to ‘the new normal’ we must think and act differently in the management of our organizations.

Each participant who attends any of the live webinars of the Feed Forward series will be eligible for one copy of Leandro Herrero’s new book: The Flipping Point ^[27]

Spot the difference at the dinner party or barbeque. So, what do you do Joe? [You must start with ‘so’ if you are in some kind of technology role yourself]

‘I am in IT, I work for Techno’ vs. ‘I work for Techno, I work in IT
‘I am a medical doctor, I work in PharmaTer’ vs. ‘I work for PharmaTer as a medical doctor’.
‘I am a hedge fund manager, I work for InvestSmart’ vs. ‘You know InvestSmart? I work there as a hedge fund manager’
‘I am an accountant, I work for GoodsMart’ vs ‘I am work for GoodsMart, in finance, I am an accountant by training’
‘I am a lawyer, I work for BankGlobal’ vs ‘I work for BankGlobal as a corporate lawyer’.

Imagine many other alternatives on any other function. The differences are not simple anecdotal ways of expressing the same. The expressions are not the same. In one type, the dominance is the professional tribe (IT, medic, hedge fund, accountant, lawyer). In the other type, the company (Techno, PharmaTer, InvestSmart, GoodsMart, BankGlobal) is the dominant source of belonging. Both are compatible, for sure. But, if I were the CEO of any of these companies, I’d rather have my people referring to the professional tribe after, not before referring to the company.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with the tribal-professional sense of belonging. But when projected upfront as my real persona, it means that its power, significance, and identity is stronger than those of the employer’s itself. Tribe 1, company brand nil.

I have found two types of clients. Those who don’t get this, (‘don’t see the problem’) and those who care about ‘the order of things’. The latter are the ones who also care about culture. Since senior leaders, and therefore CEOs, are curators of their culture, it’s clear which ones ‘see’ the differences and have a preference for the company brand.

‘Seeing’ is the first step to interpreting and then doing something. Do you know what Joe, from your company, says when asked? I wish the Employee Engagement people included this…

The traditional thinking about divisional and functional structures within organizations, which were born of the need for specialization and a clear division of labour, is that these divisions, functions, or structures are well defined. The presumption is that people will have a clear understanding of the borders between them and a clear agreement of roles and responsibilities. Cake divided, all clear.

But take a modern organization. Let’s say it is a multinational business with territorial presence and multiple support functions across the board. Nowadays, other than the geography (if you are in charge of France and not, say, Italy, this is as clear as it gets) many other boundaries are far from clear.

Support functions have often far less clarity and more question marks around their identity. Corporate PR and Communication functions are challenged by Marketing. ‘This is our territory’, they may say, ‘we don’t need you’. These functions then challenge Marketing on brand communications. “We are the ones who know how to communicate’.  Social media comes along and challenges everybody. ‘Where do I sit, guys?’ Internal communications is challenged by modern HR and HR is in turn challenged by Internal communications on Employee Engagement. ‘It’s mine’; ‘no it’s mine’. R&D and Corporate or Business Development are often parallel competitors for The Product. ‘We will make it’ says R&D. ‘No, we will buy it; it’s cheaper than paying your salaries and we get a more decent return’. If your corporation has a Strategic Function, the Business Units, may say to that function: ‘Who do you think you are?’ In a multinational client, last year, I counted seven distinct functions who, during my interviews, claimed to me to be in charge of Strategy.

We are spending a lot of time on the ‘this is mine, this is yours’ game, because the borders are open and there is no point any more in appointing Border Guards – nobody will take them seriously.

Since there is no right or wrong, only capabilities, my suggestion: Occupy The Street!  Plant your tent, light the fire, display your banners. After occupying, behave like occupiers with a mission, and quickly start delivering.

When I push my clients on the idea of ‘occupy the space’ – and, believe me, I do – I often hear ‘ but surely, it is not up to us; they must tell us what space we can occupy’. ‘They’, the magic corporate ‘they’, is usually those guys on the Executive 10^th floor (who, the assumption goes),  have all the answers. ‘They’ either don’t tell you, or play a strange guessing game. But the main reason why ‘they’ don’t tell you, is because ‘they’ don’t have a clue (because nobody has, because there is no right or wrong, because these rules have not been written).

One thing ‘they’ (and, incidentally, you as well) don’t like, is empty space. My unwritten Law of Corporate Thermodynamics says that ‘Any free space will be filled so that all the little boxes in the organization chart can take care of everything and deliver comfort to leaders’. So, before the Law is applied, occupy the space, occupy the street, take charge and show the value of getting things done. ‘They’ may not have the appetite to send in the troupes to take the tents down. Who knows, ‘they’ may even welcome the whole thing and showcase you as an example of ‘taking accountability’.

Occupy it! If you don’t, somebody will.

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™ ^[33] 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.

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 ^[1]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.

Arriving at the clean and clinical Stockholm airport, my pre-booked taxi is failing me. I have some time to spare until this is sorted.

Next to me in arrivals there is a family of three or four young Swedish girls, a young boy and their mother. OK, I don’t know if it was their mother, but she looked like their mother. So I declared her their mother.

The oldest (apparently) sister comes up from immigration with a huge backpack and very tanned. It seems like it was a long journey back home. What followed were scenes of tears, tsunami intensity style, and long, very long hugs, one by one. Highly emotional.

But the mother had remained detached, four or five meters away, capturing it all on video on her iPhone. This was very visible. She would move one meter here, one meter there to make sure she had it all captured, like an experienced reporter. Finally, it is her turn for the hugs and tears, and the iPhone is passed onto the son for the continuous capturing.

And I thought, how sad! How sad the she was not the one jumping towards the exit gates and getting and giving the first hugs, and wetting the floor with the first flood of tears. Instead, she was capturing the reality, grabbing those moments, encapsulating the emotions, recording the experience, reporting for a possible future. And the present went. It slipped through. She can’t re-take it, re-live it, rescue it, reclaim it for a ‘take two’.

This was my first chain of thoughts. My second was, who am I to make a judgement and decide what is good or bad. Is my moral ground related to my frustration with the unseen taxi driver? What do I gain with my unexpected socio-anthropological observation? Do I feel better?

There is a case however, a broader case, of all of us capturing a reality that is already gone. The odd photograph is now substituted by the epidemic of selfies, in this Era of Narcissus. We grab space and time digitally and Instagram it, or Snapchat it obsessively. There is a case for reflection here. It’s obsessive and it’s done, mainly, because we can. We are in love with the duplication of us.

I still feel a bit sad. No matter how much my inner self tells me to get a life and wait for the taxi, that it’s not my business what that Swedish family does, somewhere inside still feels that the video is not the reality, the selfie is not the self and that we are missing the point. I feel for a second or two, perhaps more, that I am missing something myself jut by seeing others missing it.

The point being, grab the real stuff, not its memory.

The point being, what are we going to do when the entire world has got its selfie looking more ridiculous, with overgrown lips and sending virtual kisses?

The point being, I need a digital sabbatical.

The point being, forget that taxi, it’s not turning up. Let’s go to the rank.

A social movement is not a bunch of people, even hundreds, or thousands, moving socially. A social movement needs a purpose, people joining it, and doing things together, usually until the goal is reached, or everybody gets tired, or whatever comes first. Social movements have their own life cycle. Some of them make it, some don’t.

Businesses and organizational life have discovered the language and is ready to incorporate it. But there are some misconceptions that could kill the concept in corporate life.

I have been an armchair scholar of social movements for a long time. With my behavioural sciences and consulting hats on, my interest is in people mobilization at a scale. And the world has plenty of examples, so no shortage of insights. There is, however, one area of human collective behaviour and mobilization where the social movement frame has been historically absent: the company. The size of the company may be huge, but nobody has ever been interested in seeing its functioning and its people mobilization as a social movement. Until now.

Yes, this is changing now, slowly. In my consulting activity, we certainly see it like this, and see our client’s challenges through these glasses. If you want accountability, customer-centrism or, say, agility, it does not get better than creating an internal social movement that can deliver accountability, customer-centrism or agility. Not a ‘change management  programme’. When we use these glasses, all the logic of the social movement, the things that work and the bits that don’t, are there, in front of us. And we orchestrate this.

But, some warnings. We need to distinguish the real social movement from lots of people, making lots of noise socially. A social movement needs a platform, a mobilizing platform. One that creates long term capacity for the movement, not one that simply facilitates the interaction of people during one-off large events. Large events that create high motivation, high commitment and high energy, are not social movements, no matter how large these events are, unless there is an ongoing continuity and activity with check points and recalibrations days, weeks or months after ‘the event’.

I have written before that there is a crucial word missing in Margaret Mead’s ^[34] famous quote: ‘Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has’. The word missing is the word ‘organized’, as in organized, committed citizens.

There is a lot of writing these days about using the ‘people movement’ model of actions to solve lots of organizational and business problems. And it usually comes with the warning that it will be, will have to be, messy, emergent, chaotic, un-managed. Apparently, some good will then come of it.

I could not disagree more. The movement needs a mobilizing platform. It will not be messy, it will be organised, and will have to be managed. There is fear in some quarters that these three characteristics are against the idea of the social movement in itself. But the only thing that these three characteristics are against are irrelevance and premature death.

The chaotic element of the social movement is usually ‘explained’ by historical examples such as the human rights movement. But Luther King did not have a twitter account. Not that I am suggesting the difference today is only social media. The point is that today we have mechanisms for the social movement to work faster, better and in more innovative ways, whilst leaving behind a legacy of how people can organise themselves and join in for a cause. It’s the platform that makes the difference. And it works exactly the same outside organizations in the macro-social world, and inside organizations, as we do with our clients via Viral Change™.

Nothing is a movement until it proves that it moves. Until then, it may be a festival, a social media frenzy, thousands in the streets, a protest group, an issues media campaign, a series of one-off large events that are good at creating awareness, corporate flash-mobs in a Sheraton or Holiday Inn.  All of the above. But not a movement. In social movements, we move, we don’t only sing and powerpoint each other.

“A good organizer is a social arsonist who goes around setting people on fire.”—Fred Ross ^[35]

Fred Ross (1910-1992) American community organizer was behind many modern social movements in the USA and also behind the organization of many labour and civil rights activities. Fred was a formidable figure in American grassroots social organization, together with Saul Alinsky ^[36] (1909-1930), the latter well known beyond his activism by his book ‘Rules for Radicals’, a left wing ‘how to’ book that no serious political movement, left or right has ever ignored, either to follow it or to counter it.

I have spent time reading around the history of social mobilization, which the USA leads in quantity and quality. As I have said before, the USA, more than anywhere else, has been built on social movements. Most of them follow a well studied pattern of struggle, success and exhaustion. Others will remain for longer as public platforms aided by the digital world.

History and personal education aside, I found the title of ‘social arsonist’ fascinating. I was not aware of the term until recently, despite the fact that we use it routinely in our Viral Change™ Programmes, where we use the metaphor of ‘the mountain on fire’ to explain how from a few areas of fire (arsonist?) the fire spreads and suddenly the mountain is on fire. That is, cultures, movements, and organizations themselves.

We say, once the mountain is on fire, it’s on fire. No point going back and dissecting ad nauseam whether it was the quality of the trees, the weather or a few arsonists, or combinations of. Deal with the fire!

People mobilization is, by definition, at the essence of leadership . Happy to adopt the ‘social arsonist’ concept, for the Viral Change™ glossary!