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Viral ChangeTM: Leadership zen?

Continuing my series on Viral ChangeTM, I wanted to consider the role of leadership in the process of such a cultural change programme.

The Leadership Paradigm
Firstly we need to unpick our paradigms of leadership. When you hear the word – leadership –what immediately comes into your mind? What do you see, hear or feel?  For most of us, if we are honest, we see person(s) in some position of authority who are directing, controlling and guiding the organisation. If we are Gen-Xers rather than baby-boomers (and I do recognise that I am guilty of generalising here) we perhaps see these people as ‘enablers’ too.

So what is leadership? It is a word that has become a generalisation or rather, a nominalisation. This means that what is actually a process word, which implies movement and doing, has been turned into a fixed form of a noun. This is a lazy way for our brains to give a label to what is actually a complex process.  But in so doing, our language forms our reality and this means that we over simplify and miss the deeper meaning of ‘leadership’ or rather the process of leading.

Who’s the Leader?

How many of those lucky people designated as ‘leaders’ are now rallying for more example of leadership from the ranks? How many claim that ‘everyone is a leader’. Yet as Mike Cook says in his recent blog post; how many of them actually mean that they want to see more ‘do as I want you to-ship’.

Now, you already know that Viral ChangeTM is not linear, mechanistic, top down change but organic and spread through peer to peer networks. Of course, different challenges and contexts require different processes for leading but at its very heart leadership is done through example: being the change you want to see (to quote Gandhi). And, as Warren Bennis says “Letting the self emerge is the essential task of leaders”.

Do you notice two key words here:
• Being
And
• Letting (or allowing)

How many of us do you think truly understand, yet alone embody, the concept of leadership as ‘being’ as opposed to ‘doing’ and ‘allowing’ rather than ‘directing/controlling’?

And this is exactly why Viral ChangeTM is the process of leadership in action! And it is also why many leaders are actually VERY uncomfortable with the whole idea of Viral ChangeTM and certainly what presents itself as the main challenge for leaders undertaking a Viral ChangeTM project.

The true leaders in Viral ChangeTM are the employees ‘chosen’ to be the change catalysts. As leaders they need to be ‘allowed’ to influence change in their peer networks, to challenge the status quo and to rally action. Essentially they become the change that you want to see in your organisation.

So what do the ‘traditional’ leadership (senior management, CEO etc)have to do to ‘allow’ this to happen:

• They need to live and breathe the non-negotiable behaviours – they are examplars and it will all flounder if they don’t ‘walk the talk’
•  They need to learn to feel comfortable with feeling uncomfortable 
•  They need to put mechanisms in place to allow the new leaders – certainly at first this means overt support mechanisms to nurture and support the change catalysts
•  They need to be seen to be supporting them
•  They need to proactively reap the fruits of the change that the new leaders achieve – for example have ways of solidifying and reinforcing new processes and ideas

In short, they need to let go and notice how, in such letting go, how change is allowed to happen!

Further reading
1. HBR, How Gen X Leads: http://blogs.hbr.org/ideacast/2009/12/how-gen-x-leads.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+harvardbusiness+%28HarvardBusiness.org%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

Other posts you might enjoy:

• Viral Change means letting go
• 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

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!

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

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

We are taught about (and I lecture on) the cultural web and this model certainly has relevance when we talk of organisational culture but one thing is missing.  What is the evidence of culture? What is the real tangible measure of culture? It has to be behaviour. 

Behaviour is the outcome from the inputs of those elements of the cultural web, such as symbols, structures, rituals, values.  And when we talk about cultural change we are really meaning behavioural change anyway.

I went to the Chartered Institute of Marketing’s Annual Conference in Birmingham on 11th November and was inspired by some of the speakers there.  Evan Davis was fantastic as the Chair of the event. And several of the key speakers alluded to using employees as champions of cultural and strategic change. John Smythe, founder of Engage for Change, talked about sharing power and adopting a ‘co-creation’ approach to engagement where employees are involved in decision making and building the strategy (the ‘how are we going to get there’ element). I loved what John had to say because it takes the approach of employees as champions of change, perhaps seeing employees as directors of strategic and cultural change from the ground floor.

John listed five routes to engaging for change:

1. Engage the leaders (them as role models)
2. Interventions
3. Transforming communication
4. Build capability
5. Identify measures and drivers

Rather like in the hero’s journey (from Joseph Campbell’s amazing book ‘The Hero with a Thousand Faces’), they need a strong ’call to adventure’ to get them bought in to this process. I can see the hero’s journey applying to organisational change where the hero’s journey starts in the ordinary corporate world, and the employee receives a call (a challenge) to enter an unusual world of strange events.

Glenn Manoff from O2 told us the about the O2 story – a massive employee engagement exercise culminating in the opening of the O2 arena.  And this gave me some ideas for how to get this call to adventure across.  Using an almost trance-like process (akin to Anthony robbins!), a manager cleverly used ‘appreciate inquiry’ as a tool to help people visualise, imagine and connect to a future that is different and more successful than the present.  This is exactly like the ‘Imagine If’ sessions in Viral change.  It helps people step out of their current frame and put on a new, exciting frame that opens them up to possibility. From here we can use facilitated sessions to elicit ideas and connect to a new reality.

“If you can imagine it,You can achieve it. If you can dream it,You can become it.”
William A. Ward

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”  Einstein

Internal segmentation of employees is sometimes needed to help target different audiences by attitudes, values and potential behaviour around change. It can be useful in a collaborative change programme. We need to consider the outcome and use this as the basis for the segmentation, otherwise it is meaningless. But as part of this process, which doesn’t have to be onerous, we can ask employees where they can add value and what the likely blocks to success will be.  And this is just the start of the co-creation process.

Comment on this article or email me (sue@changeworkscom.co.uk) with your thoughts.  Changeworks Communications helps organisations achieve behavioural and cultural change.