Ok, if you insist, here it is. Commercial or not, it’s also true. I need to share with you this.
Viral Change™ shifts the balance between the traditional ways of doing things in the organization and the new ways that the current environment requires, not by suppressing the former but by enhancing and emphasizing the later. Here are 10 fundamental shifts. Viral Change™ or not, reflect in the merits of the shifts. You make a call about their relevance.
- The ‘change method’ took you from A to Z, but perhaps did not leave any new capacity and ability behind. It would have to be repeated when needed. And repeated it was. The Viral Change™ mobilizing platform creates permanent conditions for change-ability, sustainable capacity, a truly new (people) operating system. A platform is more than a method, but has several ‘methods inside’. A method is a train from station A to Z with passengers and drivers. A platform is an scaffolding morphing into a building with people and rules of the game.
- ‘Change management’ has tremendous limitations. The complexity of changes and needs in organizations today require different glasses. The key today is ‘seeing and implementing’ as a social movement. Not a simple semantic trick but a quantum leap change. Unapologetically, my team started a long time ago stating ‘we create social movements’. We do.
- The traditional management has been a top down, ‘Push’ (communication, dictations, training, cascading of information). The new management continues with its ‘Push systems’ (they are needed) but needs to be significantly enhanced by ‘a Pull’: a grassroots, bottom up, behaviours based movement that amplifies and scales up the top down systems. Traditional management was largely Push. Viral Change™ works on a Push and Pull in sync. We train people to master the ‘plus’ between the two words.
- Processes in the organization are needed, but we have relied upon them too much. Changing processes do not guarantee changing behaviours. We can change them again and again, also structures ( ‘easy’ and lucrative for third parties). But it is no change unless there is behavioural change. The rest is cosmetics or commentaries. Expensive of course. Viral Change™ emphasises the behavioural side. And in the behaviour territory the key word is ’scale up’. Viral Change™ does not do small change
- The hierarchical system is not going away, no matter how many ‘sirens songs’ you hear. But it has to coexist with a far more powerful peer-to-peer system, the territory where things get done. The problem with hierarchies in organizations is not that they are intrinsically bad (in doubt, learn biology) but that we have been promised non-hierarchical nirvana that don’t work. In Viral Change™ we are not at war with hierarchy!
And tomorrow part 2.