My recent Daily Thought (I’m now of an age when I only want to work with people who want to change the world [1]) has launched a stream of comments, Linkedin notes and personal emails. I don’t know well most of the people who wrote to me but all had in common one thing: count on me, let’s do it.
Many people feel isolated in their quest for ‘a bit of world changing’. They feel others would not take them seriously. Or that one has to be part of a political party or a major organization. But there are so many professionals, from individual consultants to corporate managers, who feel similarly about the need to step up the quest.
There are many fora and groups and associations of change agents and radicals and mavericks. These have a fundamental role in providing a home for the free agent, lonely change maker or the one to be. My fear is that they all could end up a bit inwards looking, obtaining the skills of carpentry without ever making a chair.
Micah White, co-founder of Occupy Wall street calls for something else in his ‘The End of Protest’ [2] book. And he knows a bit about protest.
The missing link between awareness, skilling, training, excitement about change, and change itself is a platform. A platform is more than a method. It is a mechanism for long term sustainability and to ensure success. That is why I feel so strongly about Viral Change™ being the Mobilizing Platform that not only ‘delivers change’ but creates the conditions for long term change-ability, leaving behind a new operating system for the organization.
Echoing Micah White and applying that view to organization, I would call for an End of the One Off Training, the End of the One Off Peak of change activity and the End of Busy-ness to create Change. Also, by the way, for the End of Readiness to Change.
Organizing or self-organizing for the long term is the end of the game. Protest is out, hard work long term ability to change is in. Method is out, platform is in. More in my next Daily Thought.