Sustainability of change, of cultural initiatives, of well intentioned corporate improvements is the key challenge. We are all quite energetic at initiating, creating a good push, setting great bonfires, and then quietly resigning to a prolonged fading. It’s the tyranny of the one-off, of the big push, of the country house/convention centre jamboree, the ritual of the entire tribe praying for rain.
All those are the easy part. The hard part is to develop, scale and sustain. As obvious as night follows day, we don’t pay a lot of attention to that.
In the absence of a good track record of ‘sustaining’ in the world of organizational change and transformation, it may sound silly to promote the ‘not too much sustainable’ idea. When we have zero, it seems stupid to promote a ‘please do not overdo it’.
However, it needs to be said. Sustainability per se, a great breakthrough compared with what we have now, is not a desired state either. Cultures that are too sustainable are rigid cultures, where written rules dominate and flexibility is poor. The ‘sustainability but not too much’ implies that a sustainable-like change has built in reboot mechanisms, reality checks, self-calibrating measures, and healthy deviations.
‘Healthy sustainable’ today is a beta state where stuff happens, things move, achievements take place, it’s not a rehearsal, but not everything is finished, done, accounted for, mapped and run like a piece of machinery.
The unfinished, beta, evolving, journey-like, state of the organization is a healthier one. The state of ‘sustainable but not too much’ needs to cater for slack, ambiguity, rapid reaction, experimentation, imperfection and emergent.
Plus a good supply of Valium for the old guard.
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Here at The Chalfont Project we have been creating ‘healthy’ sustainable behavioural and cultural change at scale for many years with a broad range of corporate and public sector clients through Viral Change™ [1].
Using the Five Disciplines of Viral Change™ we have developed Feed Forward. Why? Because post Covid-19 to combat the organizational impact of the pandemic, we’ll need a behavioural counter-epidemic inside the company. This can be done but requires a real social movement, not the traditional ‘change programme’.
FEED FORWARD
90 day programme [2] from The Chalfont Project, which will help you create sustainable behavioural and cultural change across your organization/team/department.
At The Chalfont Project [3], we have been orchestrating internal social movement in organizations for many years and we are ready to help you now, using the Five Disciplines of Viral Change™ [4]:
- 1. Behaviours (what are your key behaviours?)
- 2. Peer-to-peer networks (the greatest force in any organization)
- 3. Influence (identify your key influencers)
- 4. Storytelling (stories are more powerful than facts)
- 5. Leadership (which needs to own the ‘new normal’).
There is no change unless there is behavioural change. From supporting your business as you adjust to the ‘new normal’ to driving large scale cultural and behavioural change that is sustainable for the long term – we are your organization architects.
Contact The Chalfont Project team [5] to find out more information about Feed Forward, or to discuss how we can support your business.
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Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project [3], an international firm of organizational architects, and the pioneer of Viral Change™ [1], 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 [5] or email: [email protected]. [6]