Viral Change™: Our social movement platform plus ‘Operating System’ is 15 year old this year.
When we started to work on Viral Change™, as a way to create large scale behavioural and cultural change, and we did so informally around 2000, and formally in 2006 with the publication of the book, the language of a ‘change methodology’ was inevitable. People asked how Viral Change™ compared with another, say Kotter, methodology. But today, years later, the focus on ‘change methodology only’ would be misleading. Yet, we are still using the word change, even if it is so contaminated that it is increasingly difficult to have a meaningful conversation around it. But there is a different emphasis.
After years of successful implementations in industries such as Pharmaceuticals, Financial Services, Transportation, Public Government and Oil and Gas, Viral Change™ has become, and it’s better described, as a social platform to mobilize people. A platform is more than a method to go from A to B. It is a map of a transformation or a journey with key principles and, yes, a methodology behind. But it’s not a ‘change methodology’ per se, or not only, unless we call change anything that moves.
Viral Change™ is closer to an orchestration of a social movement than to anything ‘linear’ such as the Kotter steps, whether the original sequential 8 steps or the ‘you can have it all in parallel’ after his 2012 Damascus Revelation and consequent Late Vocation and conversion to non-linearity, ‘to accelerate things’.
Our Viral Change™ programmes do not have Viral Change™ title. They are not a programme or project, strictly speaking. Although the language is also sometimes inevitable. They are specific organizational transformations to solve organizational problems. Viral Change™ is the engine-solution to an organizational pain that entails large scale behavioural change across the board.
Viral Change™ is in fact a social transformation platform with specific ways of doing, track record and outcomes.
As a Social Transformation Platform, it has/it is:
- A set of principles around behavioural primacy and bottom up drive
- A particular view on, and conception of the organization as a non-linear structure which is closer to an organism than an organization
- Five pillars: behaviours, peer-to-peer influence, the informal organization, storytelling and backstage leadership
- A specific well crafted methodology to be adapted to each business situation. Challenge A solution, ‘powered by Viral Change™, not Viral Change™ method first, fitting the problem second.
- Built-in mechanisms of rapid adaptation
- An emphasis on change-ability as opposed to change
- An entirely innovative ‘operating system’ for the organization
- A new and permanent model of Employee Engagement based upon internal activism
- An internal ‘tempo’ in which cultural-like transformations happen fast
- An ability to host, tackle, address, operate both on traditional A to Z change (traditionally understood as a one off event, or ‘project’) and unconventional ‘change-inside’ (‘Viral Change™ inside’ mode) – AKA ‘culture’
Much more to come….