Viral Change TM is a registered trademark

Viral Change™ is a behavioural based cultural change programme that is ‘designed’ so that a small set of behaviours is spread by a small set of ‘influential’ people (usually around 10 per cent of the workforce). If done wisely, with experienced Viral Change™ practitioners it creates an internal infection of success that is spread through peer to peer networks.

The Law of Influence

These influencers are not drawn from management, instead they are those employees with a large social network of ‘loose’ ties, those people who are natural influencers. (This could mean that your receptionist becomes your most ‘powerful’ leader – a pre-warning here to organisational leaders: Viral Change™ means letting go of control!).

In this respect Viral Change™ works with the natural law of influence : social proof.  People want to follow the lead of people just like them and people will do things that they see other people are doing. (Have you read Herd?). People are more motivated to follow their peers (people like them) than they are to ‘obey’ a command-control leadership (this is especially true of Generation Y’ers).

Make Best Use of Limited Resources

Rather than seeking to change the whole organisation, which is what traditional change management programmes typically do (of course, this is guaranteed to fail, as you will never have enough resource to achieve this). Viral Change™ makes best use of limited resources and, like a chemical reaction, assembles the key ingredients and uses a catalyst to causes a reaction and a rapid spread of change to create a ‘Tipping Point’ whereby the whole system becomes the change.  Bear with me if your brain is aching, it seems that leaders like things simple these days; but too simple and you really do miss the boat!

Designed Informality

The premise behind Viral Change™ is that organisations are not linear, mechanistic machines but complex, multi-centre organisms. The ‘designed informality’ of Viral Change™ takes the reigns of this complex organism in a remarkably simple way (at least from the outside looking in!), so that employees in the organisation become the catalysts of change and sell success internally.

Leaders Need to Let Go

Feeling uncomfortable? So you should! Because the biggest barrier to Viral Change™ success, is leaders who can’t let go. People at the top of organisations are used to being in control. But Viral Change™ is not lead by the people at the top; it is enabled by internal ‘leaders’.  Your admin person, service operator, salesman, these people become the ‘leaders’.  And you have to allow them.  You have to prepare them, support them, engage them … and then let them go.

All you have to do then is reap the fruits of their actions.  Which could be numerous: cost savings, reduction in duplication of work, improved processes and efficiencies throughout the organisation, better customer service, increased sales, reduction of waste and damage, increased safety, increased value added service for the customer … and on it goes.  This all adds up to improved customer loyalty, greater profitability and a more innovative organisation with a sustainble competitive advantage: an ongoing, fluid learning organisation.

Viral Change™ is not a ‘Change Management Programme’ – that dreaded ‘c’ word!  But it is the only alternative to the traditional, mechanistic, process driven, top down change management. It delivers sustainable change faster; it is a far less painful process and is by far more cost-effective.

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
• When it’s not working – go Viral ChangeTM

Comment, argue, get involved:  we’d love to hear your comments on this post!

1. Agree a simple, discreet set of non-negotiable behaviours: Understand your cultural baseline and where you want to be strategically.  Then, in a series of senior management team workshops, brainstorm which behaviours will get you there.
2. Select your change ‘revolutionaries’ or champions: This requires a tight profile against which to recruit people, the most essential characteristic of which is that these revolutionaries should, like all good revolutionaries, have influence.  At its most potent this influence is informal i.e. not based on power, or position, or status. 
3. Engineer the behind-the-scenes processes: that enable, facilitate, empower and support your change champions. 
4. Let go and harvest the fruits: Let them loose, let them do what they are good at and reap the fruits of their actions. This requires a leadership which is happy to ‘let go’ – and probably the hardest part of viral change given the nature of most ‘leaders’!
5. Reward, reinforce and recognise:  an intelligently constructed reward structure which does not have to be expensive, yet is based on rewarding output not input.  Most often everywhere we reward input – i.e. the amount of time put into a job (leading to the pervasive culture of ‘presenteism’) rather than the quality or creativity of the work.

This looks simple and actually IS simple AND cost effective: in the hands of an expert only.  If Viral Change (TM) is implemented by someone who only thinks they know what they are doing; it will fail. Make sure you use an accredited practitioner.

Other posts you might enjoy:

• Interview with Dr Leandro Herrero – pioneer of Viral Change
• Cultural change = behavioural change

Productive dialogue will accelerate business performance

Good business dialogue cannot be underestimated: it encourages collaboration and creativity and opens up individual and organisational learning and innovation. Dialogue, by definition, is obviously two-way, in that it is between one person and another, but it is also two way in that there is an inner dialogue that has to happen for the overall output to be effective. 

The human brain does not like ambiguity or conflict.  It naturally moves to make a choice: black and white. But often this leads to less effective ‘single loop’ learning, Chris Argyris in his various models of double loop learning, including ladder of inference and high advocacy/inquiry, encourages an internal challenge (an inner mental dialogue) to encourage us to constantly challenge the unconscious processes generate the conclusions and short cuts that our normal reasoning makes.

For example, you get into the office early to get on with some work and find your boss already there.  You try to make conversation, yet your boss is surly and abrupt.  You draw conclusions (in NLP this is part of the meta model ‘complex equivalent) about the ‘facts’ at hand – i.e. boss is surly=I have done something wrong. So you spend the rest of the day worrying and trying to figure out what it is that you have or haven’t done. Suddenly, through your interpretations and inferences about your boss’s behaviour, you are working on a different set of ‘facts’ altogether. And, in actual fact, the boss just feels poorly because he or she has a cold coming on; it is nothing to do with you at all.

This is a very simple example but shows how, with lightening speed of reasoning, the brain automatically makes these conclusions that end up running our lives.  Making us less effective and giving us less freedom of choice. So we need to train our brains to hold the ‘deep structure’ of meaning without running away with the wrong conclusions.

F. Scott Fitzgerald said: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” And he has a point.  It is ‘painful’ for our brains to hold different, possibly opposing, ideas about the same fact without jumping to one ‘right’ conclusion.  But by looking closely at the information on which we have built our ‘house of conclusions’ will help us to be more accurate and structured in our thinking and then our dialogues and conversations will be very powerful.

So this requires some detective work.  Much of our thinking is based on the conclusions we have drawn (as part of this automatic and unconscious process). Chris Argyris in his ‘Ladder of Inference’ recksons it goes like this:

1. We have ‘data’ presented to us – statistics, a reaction, words, expression
2. We select the data to use as part of our thinking – a comment, information etc
3. We interpret this data and add meaning to it
4. We draw conclusions from these interpretations – this helps our brain to put a label on what is happening (and boy, do our brains like labels!!), which helps to explain it and propose action from it

This is a ‘pattern’ that we do subconsciously, with lighting speed.  But if we can learn how to slow this process down, break it up and do some detective work so that we use the right data, make sure we have all the data we need and then draw the most useful conclusions, our lives will be so much better!

The other day I had a client say to me: “We need to do more online PR and focus on improving SEO”.  I took this as a criticism that we weren’t doing enough and the client was unhappy.  However, after a couple of days and another conversation I realised that the client was so delighted with what we are doing that they want more of it; and after reading our blog posts they are keen to move into blogging and other social media to improve their online marketing!

Here’s what to do to be a ‘thinking detective’:

1. Put your ‘critic’s’ head on and retrace your thinking steps.  What data did you select? What caught your attention? What are you considering unimportant here?  Quite often we focus our attention on what is wrong rather than what is going well!
2. Then retrace your thinking: how did you interpret the data you selected? What filters did you put on it (i.e. a negative one?)? What assumptions and presuppositions did you make?  i.e. in the example above I assumed the client was unhappy, and I presupposed that we weren’t doing enough online work.  That clouded the rest of my entire thinking processes.

Related posts you may enjoy reading:

• Accelerate your business through conversation
• Communication boosts learning and innovation
• Good communication or 41 years of mistruths?
• How to accelerate behavioural change out of recession

Perhaps we are looking at the slow crawl out of the recession: a CBI report published yesterday shows that UK manufacturers are more optimistic as the outlook for factories is at its most upbeat for over a year.  Around 27% of firms are expecting to raise production levels this Autumn -  a sure sign things are improving.

However, a report published in July claims that whilst UK companies are better placed to take advantage of an economic recovery than their US counterparts, it is their communication and skills gap that could let them down.

The McKinney Rogers report, undertaken with executives in over 100 large and medium sized companies, highlights that one of the biggest challenges for companies coming out of the recession will be to ensure their strategic plans are effectively and quickly implemented. 

Businesses expect that their markets will be dramatically changed by the recession and the best will be able to capitalise on the opportunities that this presents. Despite UK companies being relatively able to adapt to the changing environment, disagreement and conflict in senior teams coupled with skills gaps at operational level and weaknesses in communicating internally will hinder recovery in many companies.

Changeworks Communications offer a strong solution to this through a programme of internal communications. Our Embodied Brand programme and our new 3 day course: ‘High Performance through Accelerated Business Conversations’, are powerful ways to accelerate your business out of the recession.

Watch the video to find out more:

the art of conversation

In business, we gain trust, collaborate, learn and increase our collective wisdom through conversation.  But how many conversations are truly productive?  How much time have you or do you spend in meetings where issues aren’t resolved, understanding is not gained and actions fail to materialise?  How many such meetings degrade into a competition about who can get their opinion over in the most persuasive way?

 I overheard a conversation between a marketing director (MD) and a product development director (PDD) recently.  It went something like this:

MD: “You know our new targets for increasing sales in the next quarter? Well, my in my revised marketing plan I recommend a series of high profile webinars, linked to trial offers of the products, to do this. What do you think?”

PDD: “We tried webinars in my previous company and they failed miserably.  And the trial offers will undermine brand values and hit margin. So I really don’t think that will work.  In my revised development plan I have outlined a proposal for upselling the new X product to existing large blue chip users, that way we retain our premium brand image.”

MD: “But you will never attain the targets we have been set with that plan.  The market is too niche.  My plan is more about volume and we have much more chance of hitting those tight targets.”

PDD:  “Well its my brand that you are working with here and I won’t recommend your plan to the CEO.  It’s just too risky.  He will also be worried about the financials behind it.”

And on it goes.  Two people clearly stating their opinions but making some not-so-obvious mistakes to get to true collaboration and thereby missing the opportunity to reach a solution that is bigger than the sum of the parts.

There are some common, yet often hard-to-spot blocks, to productive dialogue and conversation which I mentioned in the previous post.  So how do we turn such conversations around to accelerate business performance and success?

We engage in the dance of conversation.  By balancing advocacy (clearly stating our own opinions and thinking without being attached to them – quite zen really) with inquiry (staying open and curious to the others point of view and ideas even if they are in conflict with ours). 

Here’s a few things to consider:

• Build rapport and stay in rapport when you are disagreeing – if you are able to develop deep rapport, it is amazing what difference it makes
• Undertand how thoughts and emotional state affect our behaviour and non-verbal communication – manage your own state to stay in dialogue even if the other person is annoying or irritating you
• Recognise the logical levels of change and tap into higher motivating levels to work in a more powerful way with the other person (i.e.’chunk up’ to find commonality in beliefs and values or purpose)
• Use language skilfully – recognise any assumptions or inferences that you are making and stick to the facts.  What is missing or what are you ‘not seeing’ ? What are you generalising or distorting?  What conclusions are you jumping to? Go back and just stay with the facts.
• Help others see where you are coming from by sharing your thinking with them clearly – clearly reveal how you came to your conclusions (based on fact). Encourage them to challenge your thinking – welcome and embrace this, as it is only through staying open to challenge that we get to a higher level of reasoning
• Aim for reciprocal inquiry : Actively listen to the other person (i.e. don’t just listen for the gaps in their conversation so that you can get your next point in!) and use questions skilfully to elicit and fully understand the other’s point of view:
  • “What data have you used to get your plan?”, “how are you seeing this differently to me?”, “how did you reach your conclusions?”, “Remind me what your overall purpose or goal is here”

Of course, Changeworks Communications has much more to share about this.  Our three day ‘ABC’ course, “Achieving High Performance through Accelerated Business Conversations” is part of our Embodied Brand (TM) programme.  And teaches you how to have powerful conversations that will change the way you work.