List
Print This Post Print This Post

Normal service will be resuming shortly at Daily Thoughts HQ! But first, we wanted to share some of the best posts on Social Movements (a favourite topic of ours!) We hope you enjoy this week’s selection.

Clues to mobilizing people inside the corporate tent, come from outside that tent.

People reading these Daily Thoughts may be used to common themes. After all, I am not writing about nuclear physics or holiday travel. My world is the organizational world. And you are reading this because it is also your world. OK, maybe not the only one. But many would have realised that at the core of what we do at our company, The Chalfont Project Ltd, is the unashamed stealing of insights from non-management-stuff-MBA territories that have a thing or two to teach us about mobilizing people and shaping a common, collective sense of purpose. To be good at doing this within the corporate tent, we must look at what happens outside the tent. And, this is always so rewarding because the parallels and learning are there in front of you, all the time.

Here is a piece from the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, not necessarily a household name in the sources of insights for we, average mortal managers. Read it with a welcoming mind:

From ‘Predictors of Social Mobilization Speed’ (by Jeff Alstott Stuart Madnick Chander Velu. Working Paper CISL# 2013-04 March 2013

As social mobilization becomes increasingly influential, the ability to engineer and influence the dynamics of mobilization will become ever more important within society. The present findings provide a novel and nuanced understanding of the predictors of the speed of mobilization on social networks. These insights may allow for speed-optimization of social mobilization tasks, such as political campaigning, marketing, and others. The speed of recruitment can be increased by focusing on a number of simple elements of a mobilization task. For example, targeting all-female groups instead of all-male groups would lead to faster mobilization in a disease prevention campaign trying to quickly propagate best practices against a new virus. Encouraging specifically the young to recruit others, particularly those older than themselves, would accelerate the take-up in a new political campaign trying to rapidly build a base. Operating through family networks instead of work networks or mass media would speed up recruitment for a search and rescue operation. Encouraging participants around the globe to recruit largely within their own cities would hasten buy-in to a movement to build up a donations network in the wake of a natural disaster.

Such large-scale social mobilizations are becoming increasingly common and impactful, and often the speed of recruitment is critical to their success. For those organizing such mobilization tasks, a greater understanding of the factors driving mobilization speed can improve the odds of success. The predictors of social mobilization speed described here compose an initial set of relevant elements, and open the door for identification of additional factors.

End of reading!

A few things for us, for me, in the form of hypothesis. Just hypothesis. But, for me, fascinating ones.

  1. Involving female networks (eg. ‘women in leadership’) will be an accelerator for organizational cultural change. Fostering these internal women networks may be fantastic.
  2. The young employee tribe will be fantastic at (a) peer-to-peer activity ( a la Viral Change™ ) and (b) recruiting/influencing older colleagues. We are not actively and distinctively using them.
  3. The ‘family networks’ having greater power than ‘work networks’ fit the ‘people like me’ Edelman Trust Barometer style as practiced by Viral Change™.
  4. ‘Recruit within your own cities’ in our organizations means paying special attention to the local, the proximity, the strong ties of connectivity. Possible translation: sometimes an excess in our appeal to ‘the global company’ or ‘the global brand’ may not have the traction that we expect. Global stuff is great, I pay my mortgage locally, my boss may send her kids to the same school.

Every day that passes I am more convinced that the future of the business organization depends on our ability to erase a lot of traditional HR/OD/MBA conventional wisdom, not because there is anything intrinsically wrong there, but because it did reach a ceiling around year 2000, and this is a benevolent assumption.

Keep up with the Daily Thoughts

Twitter Email

Would you like to comment?

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

To search my website, please use the form below.

  Daily Thoughts

September 27th, 2023

Redefining Talent Wealth

The war on talent McKinsey consultants started it with a book of the same title. By focusing on what it […]

September 8th, 2023

What I Learnt From The Monks: A Little Anthropology Of Leadership And Space On One Page

My friends, monks of a Benedictine monastery in the Highlands, Scotland, spend most of the time in silence. I mean, […]

August 23rd, 2023

Can We Rescue DEI From Its Trap (The Label)?

Most of the problems and challenges in organizations, together with most of the solutions, are behavioural in nature. It’s about […]

August 10th, 2023

Restructuring to force collaboration, is likely to create more anxiety than collaboration. Structural solutions for behavioural problems hardly work.

Sometimes restructuring is done with the intention of solving a collaboration problem. ´A people´ don’t talk to ´B people´; if […]

July 18th, 2023

The ‘Impossible To Disagree With’ School Of Management

‘Good leaders have empathy, respect employees and set the example. If you want to change things, you need to have […]

June 29th, 2023

Large scale change is not small scale change repeated many times. Small wins repeated are lots of small wins.

Large scale change, as a series of cascading small scale interventions (often under the philosophy of ‘small wins’) has dominated […]

June 6th, 2023

Culture change is not long and difficult. But we make it so…

I suppose the question is how long is long and how difficult is difficult? In general, business and organizational consulting have […]

May 19th, 2023

Value is an overused term in business and, as such, it’s becoming meaningless

Value, as usually used, means transactional monetary value. Usually it doesn’t mean intrinsic value, or value per se. For example, […]

May 4th, 2023

The importance of ‘critical thinking.’ Your own critical thinking is more effective at making your workplace better than any generic employee survey.

Build your own Employee Engagement argument for free. You can’t go wrong. Here are three baskets full of concepts: Basket […]

April 21st, 2023

´Busy-Ness’ Is A Trap

I went to a big conference where I was introduced by the chairman like this: “Welcome everybody. Lovely to have […]

April 14th, 2023

Training and culture change. The love affair that ends in tears.

It seems to be very hard for people to get away from the idea that if we just put individuals […]

April 11th, 2023

Teamocracies and Networkracies have different citizens: in-Habitants in team-work, riders in net-work

The old view of the organization is something close to the old concept of a medieval city, where citizenship was […]

April 5th, 2023

3 Ways To Get Approval From Your CEO Or Your Leadership Team

Way number 1: My team has developed these three options, A, B and C. Which one do you want us […]

March 29th, 2023

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 […]

March 16th, 2023

Critical Thinking Self-Test: A 10 Point Health Check For Your Organization And Yourself. If any of these are a good picture of your organization, you need to put ‘critical thinking’ in the water supply.

Test yourself, and your organization. Do any of these apply? Doing lots, too fast without thinking. High adrenaline, not sure […]

March 9th, 2023

A culture of safety or a culture of training in safety?

Cultures are created by behaviours becoming the norm. Safety is at the core of many industries. Significant budgets are allocated […]

March 2nd, 2023

Empowerment is an output. If you can visualize it, you can craft it.

The real question is, what do you want to see happening so that you can say ‘people are empowered’? Employee […]

February 24th, 2023

A simple question will jumpstart your organization into change. It will also save you from months of pain spent reorganizing your people and teams.

The following line will short-cut months of (building) ‘alignment’, integration, reorganization, team building, coalition building, and any situation in which Peter, […]

February 20th, 2023

Lead Via Peer-To-Peer Networks – If you don’t lead via peer-to-peer networks, you’re only driving your car in first gear.

Peer-to-peer work, transversal, spontaneous or not, collaboration, peer-to-peer influence, peer-to-peer activities of Viral Change™ champions or activists, all of this is the […]

February 7th, 2023

Write a script, not a strategic plan

If you care about the journey and the place, you need a story. If you have a good, compelling one, […]

January 26th, 2023

3 self-sabotaging mechanisms in organizations

Organizations, like organisms, have embedded mechanisms of survival, of growth and also of self-sabotage. These are 3 self-sabotage systems to […]

January 10th, 2023

Who should be involved in culture change? All inclusive versus going where the energy is.

Many times, in my consulting work, I find myself facing a dilemma: Do I involve many people on the client’s […]

December 23rd, 2022

Tell what won’t change – Introducing 1 of my 40 rules of change

In any change programme that any organization wants to start, they will start by thinking of the things that they […]

December 16th, 2022

Scale It – Introducing 1 of my 40 rules of change

When creating effective change in any organization, there are 40 rules that, in my experience, are the key between success […]

December 5th, 2022

Assets & Strengths Base – Introducing 1 of my 40 rules of change

For more than 30 years I have been involved in ‘change’ in organizations. Again and again, some fundamental principles, and often […]

November 25th, 2022

Campaign It… is 1 of my 40 rules of change

When you filter out the noise, when you try to extract the core, the fundamentals, those ‘universal rules’ of change […]

October 31st, 2022

Hybrid or not hybrid? That’s not the question…

Culture is the new workplace If you want to have a conversation about the future of work, the nature of […]

October 24th, 2022

‘Powered by Viral Change™’: A Social Transformation Platform for the organization of the 21st Century

When we started to work on Viral Change™, as a way to create large scale behavioural and cultural change, and […]

October 14th, 2022

Corporate tribes, intellectual ghettos and open window policies

We talk a lot about silos in organizations usually in the context of Business Units or divisions. But these are not […]

October 7th, 2022

Peer Networks are the strongest force of action inside the organization

Peer-to-peer works, transversal, spontaneous or not, collaboration, peer-to-peer influence, peer-to-peer activities of Viral Change™ champions or activists, all of this is […]