I
Un-managing change
10 lessons from Obamaland to the design of large scale behavioural change
in organizations. Viral Change™ in
action series
10 reflections
on the conditions for large scale change as practiced by Viral Change™
by Leandro
Herrero
Yes I can (
profile you) 1 of 10
It should be pretty obvious to all of us working in
organizations of some sort, but the
social network of the organization (the
social network IS the organization) is not equalitarian. There is no democracy
in the distribution of influence and connectivity between individuals. There is
not even a Bell curve or normal distribution. It’s a power law. Small number of
people have high levels in influence and connectivity, large numbers of people
have low levels. And once you have high levels you tend to acquire more (Mathew
effect, described in Viral Change™)
The top-down communication systems in which most management
practices are based upon assume equality and uniformity. Translation: everybody
is equal, everybody needs to hear the (same) message, everybody needs to get
the cascaded down powerpoints. This is what I describe as ‘World I’ in Homo
Imitans (you can download that chapter here). ‘World I’ is an attrition model.
Start aiming at all, and efficiency goes down in the information tsunami. At
the end a few people pay attention, let alone do something about it. ‘World II’,
which is behavioural based as opposed to information and messages, is a scale
up model: some people start doing something, other copy, critical mass appears
and eventually a large number of people
are doing something (new) good or bad... I have explained elsewhere how we need
both to work in tandem (Viral Change™ (2006,2008); Homo Imitans (2011)
But let’s go back to the reluctance of the network to buy equality
and uniformity. The HR produced Bell curve which defines an average (of people) as
performing well, a few on one side doing very well and a very few
excellent; and in the other side a mirror of doing not so well and less underperforming, tells us
noting about the ability of people to influence others, whether they have
positive or negative influence, are sceptical or not, engaged or not ,
supporters or disenfranchised etc. It’s
sad that the climax of employee mapping often used by HR can tell us so little about
the employee ‘social GPS’ position in the company. And, for the record, no, the
Bell Curve people and the Power Law people do not correlate
Incidentally, this assumption of ‘equality of all
employees’, certainly equal as human beings but not equal on performance –
according to your own Bell curve – and not equal in
influence/connectivity/engagement according to our Viral Change™ power law,
is in Organization Development and
management practices a mirror of the old problem of Economics. The entire Economics
is based upon the assumption of the rationality of people but there is a small
problem, many of us behave pretty irrational. The entire ‘new’ Behavioural
Economics discipline was born as a
result. We have a mirror problem: our HR systems assume equality of
employees (again, for good reasons of
fairness, let alone Employment Law) but this assumption is useless particularly
to understand change
Political campaigns a
la Obama have long understood, and recently mastered the art: profiling. It
sounds a bit technical and market-research but what it means is that in this approach
there is no point to treat everybody the same. A connected mum very active in
school and worried about education funding or education quality gets no personal
message (by the local activists) about
health care reform, youth employment , let alone the Iran threat. Profiling is
hardly a new concept but the Obama movement/campaign has refined this to its
best and at a micro-level not just as a macro-social phenomena. This has been
possible due to the smart use of gigantic data available, sophisticated
technology and an obsession with de-centralisation and grass roots (topics I
will address is the rest of these series). Incidentally the Republican party
had access to same data but was very bad as its use, the technology failed them
and there were not near as de-centralised and localized as the Obama camp.
There is a lot to learn from us within the organization. At
the very least we need to review the way we have most of our HR/OD/Management
practices practically blind to ‘micro-profiling’. Everybody gets the same
message, same interpretation, same PowerPoint, same stories. The old fashioned
and failure prone ‘management of change models’ are very weak at profiling because they are based
upon that lack of understanding on how the social network works. These models
are very poor because whether explicit
or not understand the organization as the one represented by the organizational
chart.
In our Viral Change™ programme we take time at profiling
small groups of individuals who many not be very high in the hierarchy but have
a tremendous ability to pull other peoples behaviours. These (distributed)
leaders are the real engine of change. Our primary engagement is with them, not the entire organization. Yes we can
(orchestrate large scale change) More to come
NOTES
The ‘yes we can profile you’
was the heading of an article by Daniel Kreiss, at the Stanford Law
Review Online, 2 February 2012
For a detailed (too detailed) and fascinating account of the
progression of sophistication in targeting and profiling in US politics, read The
Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning
Campaigns by Sasha Issenberg ( Crown Publishing Group, 2012)
Viral Change™ is describe din two boks, Viral Change™: the
alternative to slow, panful and unsuccessful management of change in
organizations (2006,2008) and Homo Imitans, the art of social infection. Viral
Change™ in action (2011) by LeandroHerrero
Viral Change™ is a trademark
Next: 2/10 It’s tribal
(people like me, one of us), reinvent the organization chart
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