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
3/10 It’s about you, and between you (not us at
the top, not the leadership team)
In one of the multiple accounts of the 2008 Obama campaign, David
Plouffe, then campaign manager , now senior adviser in the current 2012
Administration, wrote in his book ‘The Audacity to Win’ about the importance of
the grassroots movement. This may seem obvious and indeed common to many
campaign and political strategies. What was different ( and it is today) in
Obamaland is the extraordinary emphasis in the transversal, tribal, ‘people
like me’ (see previous section)
connectivity and collaboration. Put it simply, the message was a
persisting, its is about you talking to other people like you, not about Barack
Obama talking to you. Of course Obama did talk to them, and indeed with superb rhetoric.
So they were not short of top-down messages. But the campaign itself
de-emphasised that at the expense of ‘you and between you’.
The 2012 Democrat campaign outnumbered the Republican one by
several factors of magnitude in ‘local clusters’ and their ‘local organisers’.
The ‘total numbers’ were less relevant that the clustering and the sense of
belonging. It was about ‘them’: those local communities, local offices, local
groups and the communication and connectivity between them. Then, technology
comes in of course to facilitate it, and indeed it did (the ‘republican
technology’ was well behind and for all purposes failed, there is not nicer way
to put it)
We in organizations tend to dismiss a bit this tribal (‘its
all about you’) element in favour of, perhaps, it’s all about the objectives, or the
strategy, or the guidelines form the top or even the vision. Obama and Co also
had objectives, strategy, guidelines an vision but seemed to say, don’t get distracted, focus on that
vision but it is really, really, really about you: how you discuss it, what it
means for you, what you can do, how you can bring in others. This may seem obvious to many. Usually these
are the people who would say that ‘things have changed a lot’ and the new
organization is really bottom up. Let’s call a spade a spade. This is the
exception.
We bring technology in (if we can and) Enterprise Micro
Blogging systems such as Yammer play a fantastic role in the tribal connectivity.
Again, many people get fascinated by the technology and forget that
collaboration is a behaviour not
technological feature. In other words, connectivity is not
collaboration.
A great deal of the ‘Communication industry’ spends a lot of
time on the quality, quantity, effectiveness, measurement, channels etc of messaging. For obvious reasons! But communication is not
change or engagement per se and it needs a good ‘pull effect’ to expand and
multiply the message itself. Top down communicating systems follow an attrition
model: big at the top, small in results. A good learning from the political
strategists of Obamaland is that no matter how much of top-down communication
they could provide ( and Mr Obama did!) what really was going to matter was
that transversal, local clustering, ‘it's really about you’, grassroots
organizations. Obama campaign was extremely successful because it was not a
campaign but a social movement. Viral Change™
orchestrates these social movements inside the organization and in the macro
societal world. Oh well, Obama did not
call us but the Viral Change was
published first in 2006 – maybe somebody
…
NOTES
Some of the differences between the campaigns and camps are
well summarised in this Pinterest collection http://pinterest.com/infographics4u/2012-elections-infographics/
David Plouffe’s ‘The Audacity to Win’ was published by
Viking in 2009
Viral Change™ is described in two books, Viral Change™: the
alternative to slow, painful and unsuccessful management of change in
organizations (2006,2008) and Homo Imitans, the art of social infection. Viral
Change™ in action (2011) by Leandro
Herrero
Viral Change™ Global L.LP. PO Box 1192, HP9 IYQ, United
Kingdom
+44 (0) 1494 730999
Viral Change™ is a trademark
Next:
4/10
Neither
top down, not bottom up. Grassroots and polycentric
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