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

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

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 [1].

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

Write a script, not a strategic plan

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Behavioural Change,Building Remarkable Organizations,Communication,Critical Thinking,culture and behaviours,Framing,Management Education,Management Thinking and Innovation,Organization architecture,Storytelling,Viral Change,Workplaces Of The Future | No Comments

If you care about the journey and the place, you need a story. If you have a good, compelling one, there will be lots of good people traveling with you.

“A year from now, you all are here standing in front of the CEO and you say: we screwed up! Write the script for that year, what happened to take you there.”

“A year from now, you all are here standing in front of the CEO and you say: we succeeded! Write the script for that year, what happened to take you there.”

Vey often I run these exercises (‘Success and Failure Scenarios’ ) with parallel sub-teams of Boards, top leadership teams or management teams. Literally I ask them to write those scripts down or at least find all the pieces and assemble them as a script would have been constructed – novel, film, short story… People are incredibly good at writing these scripts (the failure scenario is invariably faster …) and can relate to them much better than an account of goals and targets as written in the Strategic Plan. The storytellers inside all of us seem to enjoy the questions and the production of answers.

A long time ago, in my work with clients, I have switched from ‘Mission & Visions’ to ‘Space in the world’ and ‘Compelling narrative’. It’s not a simple change of terms. The questions are different. The emphasis is ‘What do you want to be remembered for?’ and ‘What’s the story, your story, perhaps your unique story?’ I also insist on writing down the headlines my clients would like to see in the newspapers in year one, or two, or whatever the time frame. A couple of lines, that’s all. I have seen more Executives surprise each other in this exercise than in many other times of interaction. These visual narratives are very powerful. They bring the authentic part of us to the surface.

Another method I use is to ask people to answer (all in writing, again) a question posed by their children (or other children if they don’t have of their own): ‘Dad/Mum/Sir, what do you do exactly?’ The exercise always starts with some light jokes until it gets really serious. Try to articulate ‘maximize shareholder value’ to your 5 year old.

It’s scripts, narratives, stories, not targets, numbers and earnings per share. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with targets, numbers and earnings per share, but the signposts are not the places themselves. If you care about the journey and the place, you need a story. If you have a good, compelling one, there will be lots of good people traveling with you.

[2]
Learn more about our Leadership and Culture interventions here [3].

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

A mobilizing platform is the human operating system of the company. You need to install your HOS.

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Activism,Backstage Leadership,Behavioural Change,Building Remarkable Organizations,Change, Leadership and Society,culture and behaviours,Management of Change,Storytelling,Viral Change | No Comments

I said previously [4] that large scale mobilization of people (AKA social movements, AKA company culture) needs a platform. They don’t need a ‘change management method’ . Viral Change™ [5] is our mobilizing platform.

So what is a platform? An ecosystem of rules of the game, social algorithms (logic, as in idea-logic or ideology) and communication mechanisms that together form an operating system. A mobilizing platform is an operating system.

It contains (or hosts) at least 10 components

  1. An overall compelling narrative that glues the whole thing and that is also divided into several narratives all relevant to different segments of the population (e.g, don’t talk to the 25 year old about pensions and 60 year old about unemployment.  Believe it or not this is precisely what we do in corporate life; we have close to zero segmentation).
  2. Behaviours: Translate as much as you can into them. No behaviours, no currency.
  3. Peer-to-peer networks: the most powerful form of teaming up. Forget teams, we have enough of them.
  4. No multiplication, no social movement. It’s about how many people you engage and how many of then in turn engage with others.
  5. Focus on the highly connected people in the network (yes, you need to find them).
  6. Clarity of roles: an advocate is not an activist; an activist is not an ambassador; a volunteer may or may not be either. Champions may be anything until you define them. This area is conceptually messy, and it should not be.
  7. A healthy 24/7 storytelling system must dominate the airtime.
  8. Leadership support, including Backstage Leadership™ (tip: how to lead people who do not report to you and without PowerPoints).
  9. Metrics and Insights (AKA knowing what the hell is going on).
  10. A strong core team orchestrating all from the back, no apologies for the words.

Now you can test your ‘change management methods’ and your eight steps against this.

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Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project [6], an international firm of organizational architects, and the pioneer of Viral Change™ [5], a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers sustainable, large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations, which creates lasting capacity for changeability.

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

An international speaker, Dr Herrero is regularly invited to speak at global conferences and corporate events. To invite Leandro to speak at your conference or business event contact: The Chalfont Project [7] or email: [email protected]. [8]

Storytelling wins wars whilst everybody else is fighting battles (1 of 3): the ingredients

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Language,Management of Change,Storytelling | No Comments

Today, we are in front of daily wars of narratives: political, social, models of the world, futures, concept of Man.

In The World As It Is [9], a memoir of Obama’s White House by Ben Rhodes, who held several roles including Speechwriter and Deputy National Security Advisor, there is an episode in which the President seems to place storytelling  at the very top of his job description, extending it to those close to him. Literally he quotes: ‘Storytelling, that is our job’. And he was not referring to the function of speechwriting, as we know one that requires almost an alter-ego transformation to write what the leader wants to say, but not even himself knows it.

Over the years, I have become very curious and fascinated about the function of ‘speechwriter’ in USA presidencies, a function which has been held by incredibly smart people, on both sides of the USA American spectrum. Obama was a good storyteller himself, who very often would set aside the proposed speech and would hand rewrite it himself. The only thing that interfered with his storytelling abilities (did his anthropologist mother influence that?) was the strong ‘lawyer within’ which tended to put a premium in ‘explaining the logic’ and, in doing so, driving many people around him truly mad.

Storytelling wraps up intention, emotions and behavioural triggering in ways that no other leadership arsenal does. People remember stories, not bullet points.

Reflecting on storytelling as one of the five pillars of Viral ChangeTM, I can see that there are some characteristics of a story-leadership narrative that work brilliantly when used in combination. These are my experiential views, not a piece of ‘scientific research’.

Compelling: convincing, attention grabbing, impossible to dismiss, it wakes people up
Surprising: there is something unexpected, unusual, unpredictable, refreshing
Not  neutral: people may like it or not, agree or disagree, but they can’t be neutral about it
Pulling: it seems to produce some traction, perhaps a sense of belonging (‘I want to be part of that’, ‘I wish I could be part of that’). People feel some attraction, the opposite of a push: I feel the weight on me, a bombardment
Aspirational: It has a future underneath, it points to the future perhaps anchoring in the past. That angle is not entirely clear in historical narratives that tend to ‘explain the past’ to perhaps justify a present but often fall short of making clear sense of a future. Entire nation narratives have been built upon stories of ancestors crossing rivers that never existed, descending from lands that were fictional and settling in territories where they never left behind any archaeological footprint
Unique: if you can take this in. I know it’s difficult but nevertheless an aspirational feature. The test is simple: does this sound like my next door neighbour? (read competitor)
Human: since humanity is not a given anymore, this feature is not to be taken for granted

BTW, as anything else in leadership, it gets better with practice.

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12 rules, based on my proven Viral Change™ methodology [10], to counter attack the Covid-19 pandemic. An epidemic of the right behaviours, at scale, is needed.

Downloadable PDF versions in English and Spanish available.

 

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Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project [6], 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 [11] and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project [7].
His latest book, The Flipping point – Deprogramming Management [12], is available at all major online bookstores.

 

 

Heroic corporate stories build motivation for a future. Routine stories of achievement show that the future is already here.

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Storytelling | No Comments

Corporate storytelling has been largely dominated by heroic stories, referring to extraordinary circumstances, handled by extraordinary people. They make for good headlines in the newsletter and it shows the corporate tribe is alive and kicking. They point to a future of possibilities and, as such, they are stimulating and motivating. But their effect is limited and rather ephemeral. The average employee can’t relate to them. It’s not extraordinary people in front of extraordinary circumstances. ‘Most of the time’, you and I belong to the category of  ordinary people doing ordinary work. Yet, through this day-to-day work, these employees, achieve significant outcomes, but not of the type that make headlines and most infuriating, many people keep them secret.

Good stories of success are mostly non-heroic ones (often anti-heroic) that have the power to trigger in others: it could be me, it could be my team, we could do that. That kind of effect. The more contagious the better.

In Viral ChangeTM we use a particular kind of story that is, as above, quite prosaic sometimes, but it is always a show of success (individual or group) and always connected with the behavioural fabric that Viral ChangeTM wants to embed. We avoid the heroic (nothing wrong with them) as we avoid the simple ‘naked testimonial’ (nothing wrong with them either) that is not directly connected to a set of values or behaviours.

Storytelling has become a (consulting) industry and a reservoir for many different things, not all effective even if under the banner of ‘story’. The key is to visualize the effect that you want to achieve and then plan backwards for the kind of stories that will lead you there. In that journey, many ‘good stories’ may need to be left behind.

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Continue the conversation….

To change to ‘the new normal’ we must think and act differently in the management of our organizations.

Watch our Feed Forward Webinar Series [13], now available on demand, as Dr Leandro Herrero and his team of organizational architects, debunk uncontested assumptions and uncover the alternatives, whilst considering why this is even more relevant today in the current exceptional environment.

 

Have your critical thinking brain, switched on. It’s a serious business. It may also be fun.

 

  1. The Myths of Change [13]
  2. Can you put your organization through an MRI? [13]
  3. The Myths of Company Culture [13]
  4. The Myths of Management [13]
  5. High tech, high touch in the digitalization era [13]

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Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project [6], 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 [11] and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project [7].
His latest book, The Flipping point – Deprogramming Management [12], is available at all major online bookstores.

 

Not all high caffeine shots of motivation work well. Inspirational stories have pros and cons

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Behavioural Economics,Communication,Communications,culture and behaviours,Storytelling,Viral Change | No Comments

Business loves inspirational stories. The world of entrepreneurship and leadership constantly draw on stories. Many people love sports analogies. Some admire the individual resilience, the going solo in the Atlantic, the Himalayan climber who almost died, the Paralympian making extraordinary efforts, the jungle survivor, the janitor turned multi-millionaire, Self-Help empire owner.

We need these stories. But we need other types of stories as well. In large scale behavioural and cultural change programmes (Viral Change  TM [14]) we use a special type of storytelling. Our stories are far more modest, sometimes almost insignificant, certainly not heroic. They have to meet a criteria. One of them is transfer-ability. I need these stories to trigger ‘It could be me doing that’, or ‘my team could be in that situation’, or ‘perhaps I should do the same’.

Non-transferable stories may still be motivational. If this is what you need, fine. They are caffeine-rich shots of energy, and most of us could do with some from time to time. But a constant flow of heroic stories in the organization sends the wrong signal. I don’t want for my clients an organization of heroes or super heroes at the cost of ignoring the invisible anti-hero who is achieving great things with his team, in his corner of the world.  Business life, and any life for that matter, is made up of day-to-day, sometimes mundane leadership and followship.

Heroic stories may simply switch people off: ‘that’s not me, it could never be me, I will never be in a position to do that kind of thing’. However the small stories of success, particularly when they are linked to the behaviours that we consider the DNA of the organization, do wonders.

These, still inspirational, perhaps non-heroic stories, which show how we are progressing, and that trigger dozens of  ‘that could be me, or my team’, are the best. Between a high caffeine motivational, but non replicable story, and a transferable, with less caffeine, that infects many to act now, my choice is clear. Act is first.

Lead in Poetry, manage in Prose

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Accountability,Agency,Building Remarkable Organizations,Communication,Communications,Language,Leadership,Storytelling | No Comments

I am of course paraphrasing Mario Cuomo’s [15] ‘You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose’.

Cuomo (1932-2015) was an American lawyer, a Democrat, a devout Catholic, a Governor of New York (1983-1994) and very fond of phrases. He did ‘Poetry’ a lot. He once said: ‘I talk and talk and talk, and I haven’t taught people in 50 years what my father taught by example in one week’. Mario Cuomo did talk. Perhaps the Italian genes.

For all his visible and memorable ‘Poetry’, the Poetry of ‘Yes-We-Can’ and ‘Hope’, Obama, another lawyer, had to be coached and coerced into Poetry by his formidable team of political campaigners. Believe it or not, Obama was (is?) more comfortable with Prose. It’s the lawyer within. He would much prefer to give long and articulated explanations of the reason for a particular policy, than summaries and power-lines; driving his Communicators and Advisers nuts.

He was asked to be concise many times during the 2012 campaign, in particular, and he failed miserably at the beginning, for example in his first TV debate with Romney. He had to be reminded again and again (and to the point of people around being close to resigning in desperation) that, as leader, he needed to continue with the Poetry.

After the elections, he used to complain to David Axelrod, [16] his key campaign architect saying: ‘I am not campaigning anymore!’, meaning, I can leave the Poetry and get into the Prose – his long Harvard lawyer explanations on social justice for example. He was told, as firmly as a friendship of many years could handle, that he was very wrong. ‘You are campaigning all the time’, Axelrod shouted at him. (David Axelrod, ‘Believer’, Penguin Press 2015)

It would be a mistake to equate Poetry with spin. ‘Poetry’ means here, inspiration, purpose, drive, making sense, driving commitment, inviting to a place, a dream, a goal, elevating the logic to a higher purpose. Leadership Poetry can be (must be) sincere and honest, but has to elevate the narrative to a place of destiny; I don’t mind small d or big D.

The same honesty and sincerity applies to Prose. Prose means the day to day managing, governing, making things happen, driving to results. After all, ‘manage’ has its roots in the Latin ‘manus’ (hands). Hands on things happening, that is.

The problem arises when a natural Prose-person holds a top leadership position, and when a top leader Poet is sent to manage the troops. I know, I know, this is too black and white, too binary, particularly for those who always say ‘you-have-to-have both’ (a Deus Ex Machina we all have handy when we want to kill a good debate). But it makes the point for me.

As leader, never stop the Poetry. Small p, big P, it does not matter. Even if you are also comfortable in the War and Peace side of writing.

Prose makes things happen. Poetry explains why.

Management ‘post-hoc fallacies’, but damn good stories!

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Accountability,Behavioural Economics,Communication,Communications,Creativity and Innovation,Critical Thinking,Employee Engagement,General,HR management,Management Thinking and Innovation,Peer to peer infuence,Rituals,Storytelling | No Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A 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,Agency,Antifragile,Backstage Leadership,Behavioural Change,Building Remarkable Organizations,Change, Leadership and Society,Collective action,Critical Thinking,culture and behaviours,Grassroots,HR management,Leadership,Social Movements,Storytelling,Viral Change | 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, or Employee Engagement, or other, the key is ‘Mobilizing People’. Actually, I propose to change the word ‘leaders’ for ‘mobilizers’. Mmm, I won’t win this one.

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

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

I could go on for hours on this topic, 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. Fix healthcare, Decrease Inequality, better Human Rights and Justice, for example, as co-existing narratives. Not one. Corporate listen: the one, single, overriding, all-singing-the-same-song, narrative works in North Korea. Have different frames, not one. ‘Only one’ 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 tribes, hire an anthropologist. Or us.

4. Fix co-existing expectations. Get them in the open. Brief and debrief. Define the rules. Activism is to act. Click-tivism is to click and say ‘like’. Donate is to donate. Advocacy is to say ‘I endorse, this is good’. Corporate is notorious for mixing up concepts and pretending that they are all equal. Nope. If you like clicking and we are all here 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 it in our organizational work. You miss the hyper-connected, but you have a bunch of passionate, 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 dispassionates, I choose the latter for the work and the former for the bar).

6. Focus on grassroots. Organise grassroots. Learn about grassroots. Become a Grassroots Master. 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 the  PowerPoint. Backstage Leadership™  is the art of giving the stage to those who have the highest capacity to multiply and amplify, the hyper-connected from the grassroots level, very often a rather invisible and not very noisy bunch, 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 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 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 go down again.

Talk a lot, meet a lot, converse little. Time to call Socrates back

Posted By Leandro Herrero On In Communication,Critical Thinking,Culture,Language,Storytelling | No Comments

Semi connected reflections:

[1] We talk a lot, email a lot, reply a lot, post a lot, say ‘I agree with you Peter’ a lot. I am not sure all of that is real conversation where people listen and talk, at least in equal measure.  MIT Professor Sherry Turkle’s 2016 book ‘Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age’ is a reminder of our era.

[2] In its Latin origins, conversation meant art of living or place of dwelling; also keep company with, live among, be familiar with. All before it became discussion or exchange. So, interestingly, it has those origins of intimacy and closeness.

[3] We complain a lot about too many meetings (I do) but perhaps we would complain less if we could extract real meaning of all of them. When we lose purpose, we get busy-ness. Getting booked on Outlook until next summer is actually not that difficult . Whether by that summer we would be better off, better professionals, better human beings, it’s not clear.

[4] In the old days ( and to some extent still today) in my home country, Spain, and other places of Spanish influence, we used to  have something called ‘tertulia’. It was a scheduled but informal gathering of people discussing art, politics, or current affairs, probably over coffee, probably in the afternoon, probably in a bar, probably in a place called ‘casino’ (nothing to do with the other casinos).  It was a place and space to listen and talk, to debate, as Emperor Tertulius would have inspired. Tertulia and ‘have a tertulia’ became a sort of recognized art for a protected  space.

[5] In our business organizations we have always struggled to find the right dose and format for those ‘conversations’. We often have tedious recycling of information by people around a table. We complain about waste but people often struggle to find meaningful alternatives. We really need to install the Socratic method [17] in our business/organization conversations. A way to elicit arguments, spot contradictions, use critical thinking. One of the key investments for leaders should be learning and supporting critical thinking in the form of ‘the art of asking questions’.

[6] Socrates did not write anything. Wrting was for him a straitjacket for ‘the living, breathing discourse of the man who knows’ (so let Plato write that to us)

Storytelling wins wars whilst everybody else is fighting battles. (2 of 3): leaders of organizations, are you listening?

Posted By Leandro Herrero On In Activism,Social Movements,Storytelling | No Comments

Friday 25 May, 2018. Ireland votes 66.4% in favour of repealing the Eight Amendment of its Constitution, inserted in 1983, which guaranteed the equal right to life of the unborn and the mother. Effectively most forms of abortions were banned. Not anymore.

People’s arguments were not new. They have been on the table for a long time. On one side, a rights issue: right to decide, right to own the body. On the other side the same inverse rights issue: no right to destroy an embryo, right to life. On one side a moral issue: the suffering of the women with no possibilities of abortion within the borders of the country, the shame inflicted by others, the need to travel abroad, mostly the UK. On the other side, a moral issue as well, the immorality of any abortion, the concept of  sacred life.

At some point in the pre-referendum process, there was a picture, and a story, that got a lot of air time in the media. About 20 or so young women walking in the street, one after another, dragging a piece of rolling luggage each, walking tall, looking determined, it seemed with a mission. The caption explained that there were Irishwomen living abroad returning to Ireland to vote. As many in fact did. They symbolized the firm desire to vote for the end of a long, unjust system. Except that it wasn’t. The picture was taking years before in London by an agency trying to highlight the traveling abroad of those young women to have a termination of their pregnancy. It did not matter. People saw what they wanted to see. Women coming in, not out. A  story of injustice and struggle in which the direction of the rolling luggage was a minor detail.

The pro-choice was the dominant narrative. There was a competing one of women who had a termination and then  regretted. But this narrative was tiny and felt patronising. It had no chance. The Irish storytelling on the side of ‘pro-choice’ competed asymmetrically with storytelling on the side of ‘pro-life’. Expressed like that, it may offend many who may see this as a way of trivializing the struggle. But my point is, whatever moral, legal of religious discourse, there was an overriding power in storytelling. Thar was the battleground.

Strictly speaking, the competing worlds were not even religious. The numbers don’t work.  As Fintan O’Toole, a well-known Irish writer elegantly put it, ‘The people at the polling booths on Friday and the people at the vigil in St Brigid’s (church) on Monday are not two tribes. They are the same people. Even more importantly, it is most likely that very few of them saw any contradiction in their behaviour over those four days’.

Storytelling managed the unthinkable in Ireland: to unbundle faith (private), religion (communal), and citizenship (public). Storytelling was a magnet that seemed to host many different motivations, including competing ones. Storytelling won.

Storytelling won the Irish referendum. Storytelling won Brexit. Storytelling brought and kept Trump.

If you are brave enough, and willing,  keep the moral, legal,  religious or political discourse aside for a minute, just a minute, and reflect on that power. Most of big wars seem to be won by storytelling. It’s about time that leadership in organizations understand this power. It can be used for the good of the company. Yet, it’s more complex than simple messaging.

‘What is our Story?’ should be the highest reflective task of leadership. Not what is our mission, vision or business plan. People rally around stories, not the bullet points of the Strategic Plan.

Great statesmen (as mentioned yesterday) were/are great storytellers. Great leaders of business and non-business organizations should seriously pause and find ‘The Story’. No Story, no  social movement. And leading an organization is leading a social movement, inside the tent, maybe outside as well, or it isn’t.

Storytelling wins wars whilst everyybody else is fighting battles (1 of 3): the ingredients

Posted By Leandro Herrero On In Culture,Language,Leadership,Storytelling | No Comments

Today we are in front of daily wars of narratives: political, social, models of the world, futures, concept of Man.

In Ben Rhodes’ ‘The world as it is’, an account of Obama’s White House by the then Deputy National Security Advisor (2009-2017), there is an episode in which the President seems to place storytelling  at the very top of his job description, extending it to those close to him. Literally he quotes: ‘Storytelling, that is our job’. And he was no referring to the function of speech-writing, as we know one that requires almost an alter-ego transformation  to write what the leader wants to say, but not even himself knows it.

Over years I have become very curious and fascinated about  the figure of ‘speechwriter’ in USA presidencies, a function which has been held by incredibly smart people, on both sides of the USA American spectrum. Obama was a good storyteller himself which very often would set aside the proposed speech and would hand re-write himself. The only thing that interfered with his storytelling abilities (did his anthropologist mother influence that?) was the strong ‘lawyer within’ which tended to put a premium in ‘explaining the logic’ and, in doing so, driving many people around him truly mad.

Storytelling wraps up intention, emotions and behavioural triggering in ways that no other leadership arsenal does. People remember stories, not bullet points.

Reflecting on storytelling as one of the five pillars of Viral Change™, I can see that there are some characteristics of a story-leadership narrative that work brilliantly when in combination. These are my experiential views, not a piece of ‘scientific research’.

Compelling: convincing, attention grabbing, impossible to dismiss, it wakes people up
Surprising: there is something unexpected, unusual, unpredictable, refreshing
Not  neutral: people may like or not, agree or disagree, but they can’t be neutral to it.
Pulling: it seems to produce some traction, perhaps a sense of belonging (‘I want to be part of that’, ‘I wish I could be part of that’). People feel some attraction, the opposite of a push: I feel the weight on me, a bombardment
Aspirational: It has a future underneath, it points to the future perhaps anchoring in the past. That angle is not entirely clear in historical narratives that tend to ‘explain the past’ to perhaps justify a present but often fall short of making clear sense of a future. Entire nation narratives have been built upon stories of ancestors crossing rivers that never existed, descending from lands that were fictional, and settling in territories where never left behind any archaeological footprint.
Unique: if you can take this in. I know it’s difficult but nevertheless an aspirational feature. The test is simple: does this sound as my next door neighbour? (read competitor)
Human: since humanity is not a given anymore, this feature is not to be taken for granted.

BTW, as anything else in leadership, it gets better with practicing.

Organizations have their own ‘People who like this, also like that’. Their ideology (idea-Logic) may be too crafted. (2/2)

Posted By Leandro Herrero On In Culture,Identity and brand,Ideology,Language,Storytelling,Tribal | No Comments

Part 2 of 2, first published November 2015

Yesterday I offered 10 types of people that challenge the status quo in organizations [18]. I also mentioned that our mind tends to protect us against ‘difficulties’ by saying don’t, conform, it’s OK. And its cousins: what is the point? Don’t fight those battles.

Dissent and challenge is more difficult when the overall narrative is strong; when there is a presiding, overall logic of ideas and their implications, nicely linked. Some narratives (political, for sure, but also macro-social and ‘micro’, such as ‘the company’) become semi untouchable. After all, in the political arena, that is the point of ideology. A dominant ideology (idea-logic) is self-reinforcing. More and more people ‘within’ will write or say something that is consistent with ‘the package’.

Have you noticed that those narratives come in (political) bundles? They follow the same principle you see in the online shops: people who bought this also bought that. So if you like this, you also like that, because otherwise it is a pick and mix, not acceptable. Which is  kind of another imperialistic narrative: with us in all or against us in all. So you may end up feeling guilty of agreeing with A but having reservations about B. It’s easier to agree with B as well.

Literally these narratives shut down the alternatives or the opposite. And often they blame each other for the same behaviour. A rather old, if still in place, Western, ex French Revolution ‘Left’ and ‘Right’, follows that rule: pick one, you get a bundle of idea-logic connections. People who like this, also like that.

Small state, don’t interfere with the market, the individual is the agent on the Right; the market needs to be domesticated, bigger role for government to the Left. But, you see, people who like this, also like that: so in the Left you also need to be pro-abortion rights, pro-redistribution of wealth and pro-suppression or reduction of social inequalities. Suddenly, you did not know, and have other things in the Left or Right package: gender issues, mums at home or not, believing in God and fox hunting. How did that happen? Well, it’s simple; people who like this also like that, so you are not going to be an exception are you? Etc. These are caricatures to make the point.

There are not a lot of differences in the organization even if we don’t talk about this in the same way. There is a narrative (whether you use the term or not) and it may be ‘all embracing’. And because of that you have halo effects that may even make you ‘the most admired corporation’, or not. Admired? On what? All 40 parameter? Wow! Can we unbundle please? No you can’t.

An artificial, if wonderfully pragmatic distinction between story and narrative looks as follows. Stories are self contained, beginning and end, that’s it. Narratives are open ended. They may contain stories but the narrative is constantly in creation. Narratives are journeys, stories are locations.

The Social Idea-Logic of the organization needs a narrative that allows for dissent, that is still open, that makes people feel they are crafting it, not imposed from the top.

Yes, people who like this also like that, but what if they didn’t? This is a leadership question.

 

 

Builders build, and build. Problem solvers solve, and need more problems. Choose.

Posted By Leandro Herrero On In Branding,Ideology,Language,Models and frames,Storytelling | No Comments

Unless we call ‘problem’ to any management activity, as many people do even without acknowledging it, and, in which case, the organization becomes a machinery of providing solutions, we will have to define ‘problem’ with some critical thinking attached. The cardiovascular system in the human body is a solution for bringing oxygen all over the place, but Medicine would hardily use this definition, a bit equivalent to ‘the brain as a solving the problem of thinking’. This is simply not a credible definition.

Yes, the language of ‘problem’ easily contaminates the narratives. The semantic trick of calling them ‘challenges’ and ‘opportunities’ may be useful at times but it does not solve the primary question: the essence of management and the essence of the organization. I am not talking about the reason for its existence, or the philosophical ‘what is a company for’ ( an old question in Charles Handy’s writings). I am talking about the mental frames that preside and override everything we do in everyday management.

This is getting too philosophical in itself, so allow me for a colossal reductionism. There are two types of organizations, the Problem Solvers and the Builders of New

The Problem Solvers produce solutions. They may produce fantastic, beautiful ones. They may be proficient at that. So proficient that, as I have written many times, they not only thrive on problems but tend to create internal ones . They behave like a mixture of management of intellectual challenges, hieroglyph deciphers or riddle competitions, and are composed by inhabitants of an Expert Nirvana. There may be technical problems, marketing problems, scientific problems, etc. But ‘problem’ is at the core of the language

The Builders of New, build new ideas, new concepts, create new spaces in the world. They surprise themselves, surprise the markets, and, in the process, act as a huge magnet for some people. In short, they build new stuff. They may solve problems as well, of course, like anybody else, but would not have this at the centre of the narrative, like ‘the brain is there to solve the thinking problem’.

This caricature in black and white serves the purpose of highlighting the importance of the mental frame and the language. These are important because they will inform everything we do.

I do push the envelope with my clients many times, getting them away from ‘the problem solving narrative’ as the main one. It’s hard work sometimes because they see managers as ‘problem solvers’. I do push to embrace the building narrative, because I know that solving problems will not be forgotten, anyway.

But I am quite fundamentalist about this. If you give most of the airtime to ‘problems’, you will shape a particular organization that may be healthy, and successful, but not necessarily ahead of the game.

It’s a caricature. But all mental frames are. Chose the one you want before the mental frame choses you.

I, for one, choose the builders.

I have to be honest: look how many things around are wrong. But let’s be positive.

Posted By Leandro Herrero On In Corporate pathologies,Disruptive Ideas,Language,Storytelling | No Comments

My son, I’ll be honest with you. You can become a successful person or an alcoholic. I have to be honest. Learn honesty from me. Also, you could be killed in a car accident. Your odds are  1 in 606. You never know, you could become a criminal as well.

That statistical truth does not help that son. Most people would settle for more positive outlooks. But the question is not so much these statements but the airtime. The above is an exaggeration. But it contains the seeds of a trend: we give surprisingly high time to negatives. Often on behalf of… honesty.

In the School of General Street Wisdom, you have to talk about mistakes, about things that went wrong. That did not happen, this was a fiasco, we screwed up that one. It is called … honesty. If you are not ‘honest’ – those with the Wisdom Qualification say – you are just hiding the truth. There is also a sense that this is the only way to learn how not to make more mistakes. You are supposed to learn from mistakes, by relentlessly talking about them.

In my School of How Behaviours Spread, airtime is what matters. Airtime is the Mother of All Reinforcements. Talk about mistakes all the time, chances are you will make more mistakes, not less. Give airtime to negatives, you won’t get many positives.

In media training they teach you not to repeat a negative for a reason. You can spot a media trained person easily. Journalist: isn’t it true that your product has a terrible reputation? Untrained person: No! It does not have a terrible reputation! (That is two ‘terrible reputation’ in 15 seconds airtime). Trained person: my customers keep growing all the time; we are proud of this.

Honesty and highlighting the negative don’t have to be married. Negative airtime is not a moral requisite.

In our Storytelling system within the Viral Change™ Mobilizing Platform, we insist on positive stories. We are not in Pollyanna mood but in the business of multiplying the perception of real good achievements. It does not make the negative ones irrelevant but you don’t gain anything with politically correct pseudo-honesty negativism at all cost.

My son, I’ll be honest, you could become a criminal and an alcoholic and be killed in a car accident. But, hey, be positive.

You don’t create an epidemic of goodness by discussing in depth the origins of nastiness.

You don’t bring hope of a bright future to people by highlighting everything that is wrong around them.

You don’t solve more problems by talking mainly about problems.

Airtime, to be honest.

There is a colossal world replay of the Asch’ conformity experiment, and you are part of it.

Posted By Leandro Herrero On In Critical Thinking,Ideology,Language,Storytelling | No Comments

It’s 1950.  Solomon Eliot Asch (1907–1996), social psychologist, runs a series of social experiments. In one, he tells students that he is running some visual perception tests. He shows them pictures with bars of different lengths. He asks them to decide which one in one side of the picture was of the same length as the one of the other side. The differences in length are obvious (there are many YouTube that you can find, from the original videos to new replicated ones). The trick was, from the 8 to 10 students in the room, only one is a real subject, the others (‘confederates’) have been instructed to answer by giving first a couple of correct answers, and then incorrect answers.

The real subject is sitting at the end of the row,  and always gives his answer after listening to the other (planted) students. I encourage you to see those videos and many others you can find if you search for ‘conformity experiments’, ‘Asch experiments’ or ‘conformity studies’.

The real subject (s) again and again, perplexed as he may look, agreed with the majority on a false answer even if the differences in the length of the bars  were obvious.

There are dozens of variations of this experiment that deal with size of the group and provision of answers, whether verbally and in public, or written down on paper. The variation of these results is of high interest in social psychology.

Asch was taken aback. He wrote: “The tendency to conformity in our society is so strong that reasonably intelligent and well-meaning young people are willing to call white black. This is a matter of concern. It raises questions about our ways of education and about the values that guide our conduct’.

It’s 2017. An unknown consortium of social psychologists has enlisted the new US administration to produce the equivalent of Asch’s bars. You, reader, are the subject of the experiment. The social psychologists have also taken the liberty of inserting other test lines in the experiment, from their own collection. I am told that they did a test run with the Brexit campaign in the UK, and were very encouraged, so then they decided to go big in this one. Here are the lines they have put to test in no particular order:

Yesterday there was a major incident  in Sweden (linked to his line on terror attacks in Europe),  the world is flat, Michael Flynn was just doing his job when talking to the Russians, the electoral college was the biggest since Reagan, millions voted illegally so that is why DT lost the popular vote, the BBC is fake news, global warming is a Chinese hoax, 2+3 = 7, terrorist attacks across Europe are not even being reported, ‘We had a very smooth rollout of the travel ban’ , ‘This administration is running like a fine-tuned machine’,  ‘The murder rate in our country’s the highest it’s been in 47 years, right? Did you know that?, Hillary Clinton gave all that uranium to Russia.

This is just one set. The experiment has been running for a while and the data has been accumulating all the time. The data so far suggests that  there are ‘millions’ who agree with all of the above, not only the few usual suspects at the source (White House) but millions of supporters across all states in the US. The experiment is perfect and very cost effective in its design because it does not even need a computer-generated set of lines, these are provided for free every day. The site PolitiFact runs a score of the US President feeds. So far, in terms of statements: true, 4%; mostly true, 12%; half true, 14%; mostly False, 20%; false, 33%; ‘pants on fire’, 17%.

The experiment continues .

PS1: The existence of this experiment has been questioned by some, but there is no proof that it is fake news. So, suspend judgement.

PS 2 Update. All the lines in the test-text above are plain lies, but the Swedish people in particular are having a ball trying to find the ‘major incident’ .

Post-Truth Era: organizational life, please close the windows; stay indoors.

Posted By Leandro Herrero On In Critical Thinking,Ideology,Language,Purpose,Storytelling | No Comments

Several articles in the British Guardian and Observer (Memo to the BBC: balance is not fairness when one side is lying, by Peter Preston; The Guardian, 12 June; The BBC’s fixation on ‘balance’ skews the truth, by Catherine Bennett 4 September) have prompted me to think about ‘balance’ of opinions in our organizations.

The articles mainly refer to what the authors saw as BBC obsession with ‘balance’ (of information) mainly in the context of the very imbalanced Brexit debate. Or the lack of it, in fact.

Prominent Brexit campaigners simply lied on facts and figures but were sometimes treated as people ‘entitled to have an opinion’. But they were lies.

So, I wonder.

A discussion on evolution does not need the ‘balance’ of people defending creationism.

Physics do non need the ‘balance’ of alchemy.

Astronomy is not ‘balanced’ with Astrology.

Good thinking does not need the ‘balance’ of bad thinking, but similar, different good thinking.

‘A different point of view’ to a solid, evidence base, scientific case, does not come from preposterous, made up, esoteric opinions.

As many people say, we are in the Post-Truth Era, when the digitalization of crap ideas spread at the speed of light. In fact the same speed as solid ideas, although the crap ones seem to have some advantage. Spread of X at the level of million hits, destinations, views or likes, makes no room for reflection.

Brexit (lack of) debate was an example of the Post-Truth Era. The Trump campaign in the US has mastered the discipline to the highest performance levels.

It’s not that the truth does not matter anymore. It is, it seems, that the more preposterous the un-truth (we used to call this lie) the more legs it seems to have.

Organizational life, usually with more constrains in the spread of information, smaller numbers of human bodies debating, and, theoretically, more check points, should provide us with some vaccination against the Post Truth Era epidemic.

But I wonder whether the contamination of TV news, online information and the 24/7 bombardment of headlines will make a dent in our own thinking.

I can’t begin to imagine the toxicity of a Post-Thruth Era percolated into organizational life. Could you imagine Trumplogic becoming the new black?

Shifting the narrative: one of the finest roles of leadership

Posted By Leandro Herrero On In Communication,culture and behaviours,Identity and brand,Language,Leadership,Models and frames,Performance,Storytelling | No Comments

One of the fundamental roles of leadership is to frame the narrative of the organization. This is easy to say but not many leaders are conscious of the importance of having an overall mental frame and overall compelling narrative that serves as an umbrella for everything. Worse, many leaders in organizations could not perhaps answer the question of ‘the narrative’. They may recite mission and visions but this is far from describing that overall big story.

There are decisions to be made about those narratives and, even more important, about shifting the ones in place.

Here are three examples:

  1. From a performance/execution narrative that is pretty much one of the efficacy and effectiveness of the organization, to a narrative of ambition, which goes well beyond high performance to high(er) and high(er) goals and possibilities.
  2. From a fixing/problem solving narrative in which problems and deficiencies are the focus, to one of building something new, creating some new culture, a new organization (in which those problems are addressed or solved)
  3. From a ‘management of change’ narrative, to one of change-ability, permanent state of change and shaping a culture’s DNA where change is not a project anymore.

We could go for hours on the listing of possible shifts. It does not mean they are obligatory (!) but the conversation about which narrative is in place and whether it is fit for purpose and for the future, may force us to look at alternatives. It is a vital exercise that impacts on language and action.

I suggest we unpack this carefully. The glasses we have to see the world, creates our world. The historical language of the organization may have intrinsic liabilities now. New, younger generations, for example,  may want to hear something different. Do we always know what?

 

 

 

 

 

Heroic corporate stories build motivation for a future. Routine stories of achievement show that the future is already here.

Posted By Leandro Herrero On In Storytelling,Viral Change | No Comments

Corporate storytelling has been largely dominated by heroic stories, referring to extraordinary circumstances, handled by extraordinary people. They make for good headlines in the newsletter and it shows the corporate tribe alive and kicking. They point to a future of possibilities and, as such, they are stimulating and motivating. But their effect is limited and rather ephemeral. The average employee can’t relate to them. I’m not extraordinary people in front of extraordinary circumstances. ‘Most of the time’, you and I belong to the category of  ordinary people doing ordinary work. Yet, through this day-to-day work, those employees, achieve significant outcomes, but not of the type that make headlines, and, most infuriating, many people keep them secret.

Good stories of success are mostly non-heroic ones (often anti-heroic) that have the power to trigger in others: it could be me, it could be my team, we could do that. That kind of effect. The more contagious the better.

In Viral Change™ [19]we use a particular kind of story that is, as above, quite prosaic sometimes, but it is always a show of success (individual or group) and always connected with the behavioural fabric that Viral Change™ wants to embed. We avoid the heroic (nothing wrong with them) as we avoid the simple ‘naked testimonial’ (nothing wrong with them either) that is not directly connected to a set of values or behaviours.

Storytelling has become a (consulting) industry and a reservoir for many different things, not all effective even if under the banner of ‘story’. The key is to visualize the effect that you want to achieve and then plan backwards for the kind of stories that will lead you there. In that journey, many ‘good stories’ may need to be left behind.

‘A rain dance is a ritual for me, ‘work’ for the one who dances’

Posted By Leandro Herrero On In Complexity,Critical Thinking,Culture,Rituals,Storytelling,Tribal | No Comments

I wish I remember the Anthropology book where I got this. I should, because these days I read 50% anthropology and 50% ‘the rest’.

Anthropology tells us that rituals have zero or low efficacy. There is even an argument that the best ritual is the one with zero efficacy. (The problem with ritual efficacy [20]) Dancing around the fire to produce rain has zero efficacy but it is a great ritual. Great rituals serve as a glue, cohesive force, binding system; and this applies to our organizations as well, not just to indigenous tribes in the South Seas or African desserts.

Obviously, for the observer, (that is, the one outside the tribe), particularly our kind of observer from Boston or Paris, that dance ‘does not make sense’.

Paradoxically, this is the most wrong expression that can be used here because, if anything, it produces a lot of sense for the dancers and the tribe. What it does not have is efficacy (OK, tell them this when it rains next week).

In our organizational life, we have plenty of rituals. Their efficacy is also zero or low. Their sense making is high. They are the company super-glue. And as such, they are hard to get rid of. In fact, you should not fight a ritual too much, unless you have a replacement.

Many off sites are rituals. They are not terribly efficacious, although there is a range. For some goals, everybody knows that there is a better way than putting everybody together in a Marriot for a day. But we do it. It’s not what it is achieved, it’s the ritual. And Marriot basements are the best anthropological fields across the world.

The declared function of a company process is to achieve X. If the process becomes a ritual, it may be that the ritual weight grows and the ritual takes over. If so, process X becomes a slave, and possibly a dysfunctional one.

Many Business Planning processes which start early in the year and suffer a series of cycles and reiterations with presentations prepared for people who have to make presentations to people, plus the associated budgeting game of guessing and bargaining, ending in a binder in December, are terrible processes in terms of efficacy, but wonderful rituals that nobody dares to change.

Homo Corporate loves Excel. They dance around the spread sheet, and, helas, you got a budget.