Pause....!

I am taking a blogger leave from The Leader with Seven Faces for a little while. Follow me in sister blog www.viralchange.net; the home of conversations on Viral Change, the alternative to slow, painful and unsuccessful management of change in organisations. Viral Change and The Leader with Seven Faces are two of the four pillars of my work. The other two are Human Collaboration and Organisational Innovation. Take a look at our consulting website www.thechalfontproject.com for more information. Talk to you soon here again around October time!

Viral Change revisited

Since the first edition of Viral Change, Dr Leandro Herrero and The Chalfont Project continued to expand their experience in the field of viral change management, which they pioneered. This has now resulted in a second and revised edition of Dr Herrero’s book: Viral Change: the alternative to slow, painful and unsuccessful management of change in organisations.

I wanted to share with you the prologue that Dr Herrero wrote for this second edition:

“The terms ‘viral change’ or ‘behavioural change management’ have increasingly been linked to our work as any Google search for these terms will show you. And I am delighted that there is a growing interest - from many sectors of the business and organisational life - in understanding the viral model of change management that we pioneered and its applications.

Since the first edition, we have continued building on our Viral Change experience, both in large scale interventions and in its applications in medium-sized organisations. Additional work on viral leadership has also taken place and some extra notes on this topic have been added in this second edition. Viral leadership goes beyond communication (‘viral communication’) to engage others to champion the new idea, the new process or the new behaviours. We are so used to equating change to good communication that sometimes people think these two things are not just connected, but interchangeable. However, they are not the same.

I have also added some notes on influence mechanisms. In recent months, it became fashionable to question the true role of ‘influencers’, for example, in marketing. In this second edition, I have stressed how any virally induced cultural change recognises a combination of mechanisms: influencers (‘the opinion leader model’), the first followers (‘the early adopters model’) and the fact that a critical mass of ‘new culture practitioners’ (‘the critical mass model’) is powerful enough in itself to induce another critical mass, no matter what the initial trigger was. Social copying leads the way. This is incredibly important for me as a practitioner of Viral Change™ (as opposed to a simply theoretical advocate), because I am more interested in the infection of new ideas and behaviours being spread and leading to new routines within the organisation (‘new cultures’) than in the socio-arithmetical ability to measure whether 20% of those were due to mass social imitation or direct Change Champion, peer-to-peer work. The best (cultural, organisational) Viral Change^™ in action is the one that has used multiple mechanisms of influence.

Every day I encounter more and more people in organisational life who are tired of yet another corporate initiative with a change management angle. The mechanistic top-down model (push from the top of the organisation, get results at the bottom) is still what people think of: a burden you have to endure at some point, one way or another. This model is past its sell-by date. Making no apologies for stealing the slogan of a European mobile communications company, I’d like to proclaim that ‘the future is bright, the future is viral’. I really believe that the viral model of change is the only hope for a tired, overwhelmed, over-managed, predictable, commanded-and-controlled, straight-jacketed and initiative-inundated corporate life.

Leandro Herrero May 2008”

The second revised edition of Viral Change: the alternative to slow, painful and unsuccessful management of change in organisations will be available from 15^th July 2008. It can already be pre-ordered from Amazon UK, Barnes and Noble and meetingminds.

Net-work, not more teamwork ( and 3)

Following upon my previoous 2 posts in on my 'disruptive ideas' ( from the book of the same title), here is an idea summary........

• Measure people’s net-work wealth by the number of their connections (weak or strong) with others, inside and outside the boundaries of the company


• Measure your own net-work wealth by the number of people you could call for help in the middle of the night …


• Make social connectivity (outside teams) a key feature of the culture.


• Everybody should routinely cross the border of their divisions, groups or teams in pursuit of answers or to deliver input.


• Ask the following performance management questions routinely: how many people outside this (team, division, company) have you talked to in the last month? How many pieces of input have you given to people outside your department?

Net-work, not more teamwork (2)

Following form the previous post, what can one do? For starters, don’t oppose people spending some time networking inside the firm. If you have a formal IT system for that, you are well advanced. Many organisations are just beginning to come to terms with the idea that people are connecting and will continue to connect routinely outside the boundaries of the division, team or department. But is this not something that even traditional management wanted to do? Promote the idea that people should go ‘outside’ for questions and answers. ‘Outside’ may just mean inside the company, but in another division or affiliate. People should pick up the phone and be able to ask a colleague miles away, perhaps somebody they have never even met, how they solved problem A. Going beyond the natural boundaries should be the norm, not the exception. These are not behaviours reserved for one-off situations or annual internal company conventions, where so-called Best Practices are shared. This is not enough. We need real time sharing of those best practices or best ideas. We simply need the ability for somebody in sales in the South of the country to be able to shout, “Houston, we have a problem” and then get help/an answer almost on the spot, because he is reaching an entire network of potential experts for solving the problem. Not just his peers, not just his immediate team, not just his boss. And frankly, if you think this can be done via email, forget it. You need to accept that it is much messier than organisation chart management and a command-and-control style of leadership, but you can no longer afford people on the payroll who are only good at the internal dynamics of the team. Chances are you have lots of those already. You need net-working as a routine process and this is different from the standard networking: something that usually has the emphasis on the net, not the work.Teams are predictable structures. They are very good for operational delivery, but not so good for strategy or innovation. A certain degree of ‘groupthink’ is always present. Putting the net-work before the teamwork ensures the continuous flow of new ideas. If the old saying “If you have two people who think the same, fire one of them!” were to be applied to teams, the world population of teams would shrink by 50%.