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Viral Change is not Tsunami change

Have you been through significant structural change recently? Or implemented new IT systems perhaps? Have you undergone a number of clever strategic initiatives yet something is still stuck?  People aren’t quite doing what they need to?  The culture isn’t where you would like it to be?  Many of the best organisations we work with suffer from a blame culture where fear of failure and silo mentality is rife.  Others see a lack of ownership and an attitude of ‘it’s not my responsibility’.  And many are frustrated with the wasted time in meetings and not being productive and of course, the time it takes to make effective decisions and get things done.

If you are 80 per cent of where you should be – is that good enough? Of course not. That extra 20 per cent (like Pareto said) is difference between ‘also ran’ and blue oceans. Yet traditional management or change management programmes won’t get you there. But Viral Change TM will.

Viral Change is Not a Change Management Programme

Despite having ‘change’ in its title, Viral Change is not a ‘change management programme’. You may be familiar with most organisational change programmes: mechanistic, big, driven from the top, expensive, a big set of complex actions with lots of ‘push’ corporate style internal communications. Well guess what? It doesn’t work.  

‘It’s the old problem of rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic! Superficially, one can create the impression of making a lot of changes; but at the base level, nothing of significance may have really changed.’       Morgan, 1993

Remember what Gandhi said: “We need to become the change we want to see in the world.”  It is people who change other people: not processes, not systems, certainly not Village Hall corporate comms meetings! As a spokesperson at Pfizer told Dr Leandro Herrero, pioneer of Viral Change, “Change only happens when people see those around them changing” .

Creating Tipping Points

Viral Change is butterfly change (my words) – in that, like the butterfly effect, small changes at individual level end up having a far-reaching, ripple effect on the larger system. In Viral Change a small set of behaviours is spread, imitated, endorsed by a small network of people and this spreads new ways quickly through influential peer to peer .  The overall effect is sustainable changes created mainly by the internal ‘infection’ of success, and the achievement of tipping points.

Instead of focusing on processes and what is visible and manageable (the traditional linear, left brain approach), Viral Change recognises that the most important ways that change needs to occur cannot be controlled.  This is because an organisation is not a machine, it is a collection of individual human beings: a living system.  And living systems cannot be controlled like machines, not for long-term well being anyway, but rather have to be disturbed with impulses that will cause the system to react and make choices about what to do.

Living Systems Need Disruptions to Initiate Choice

Ever come across the concept of ’self organising systems’?  Rather than change being driven from the top down, individuals and their individual actions create big change in the system.  This way the system is self organising.  Watch how these starlings roost – it looks like chaos but small behaviours lead to massive system change:

Small impulses in these massive flocks of birds, are interpreted and acted upon by the system and, out of what looks like chaos, a single impluse (ie ‘roost’) initiates massive change that tips the whole system into roost. Viral Change approach directs meaningful impulses into the system to influence large and sustainable changes.  We’ll talk more about those impulses in our next post.

Please comment and contribute to this discussion by posting your own thoughts and comments!

Other posts you might enjoy:

• How to implement Viral Change TM
• Interview with Dr Leandro Herrero about Viral Change TM
• Cultural Change is behavioural change