Viral Change (TM)

tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8083788690470870386Wed, 02 Aug 2023 10:06:58 +0000Viral ChangeCulture and behavioursViral Change conceptLeandro's booksChange management mythsorganisational changeinnovationviralSpeaking engagementDisruptive IdeasNetworkscommunicationsinfluenceleadershiporganisational redesignChange ChampionsThe Chalfont Projectsales force effectivenesssocial changesocial networksLeandro Herrerocritical massinnovactionsinternal communicaitonssocial normDr Leandro HerreroGandhiPolitical changePopTech conferenceTokyobookfairbusiness managementbusiness transformationcorporate ritualscuriosityeffectivenessemail communicationsexcellencefacebookhomo corporateinnovation behavioursinquiryinternal epidemicpower lawritualssummaryviolenceviolence preventionviral change summaryweb 2.0Viral Change (TM)Home of the conversation on VIRAL CHANGE™, the alternative to slow, painful and unsuccessful management of change in organisationshttp://www.viralchange.net/noreply@blogger.com (Dr Leandro Herrero)Blogger181125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8083788690470870386.post-674840687680520566Fri, 20 Jun 2014 06:00:00 +00002014-06-20T07:00:08.298+01:00Neutral, blind, amoral<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"> <i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">An excerpt from the book Homo Imitans by Leandro Herrero:</span></i><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"> <i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><br /></span></i></div> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;"><i>Behavioural change management is neutral, blind, amoral. The </i></span></span><i style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">user of behavioural sciences, however, may be purpose-driven, </i><i style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">have a clear vision and choose a moral path. He may also be </i><i style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">stupid.</i></div> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"> <i style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 15px;"><br /></i></div> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;"><i>To reward high-risk, invisible, short-term, virtual market </i></span></span><i style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">investments (those ‘vehicles’ brought to us by the City of </i><i style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">London or Wall Street; vehicles which have no consistency and </i><i style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">would belong better in Monte Carlo or Las Vegas) and to do it </i><i style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">with massive amounts of money is simply stupid. Obviously not </i><i style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">for the recipient of the reward, but for </i><i style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">the community at large that suffers the </i><i style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">consequences.</i></div> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;"><i><br /></i></span></span></div> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;"><i>The really good thing that has </i></span></span><i style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">happened in the last years to real </i><i style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">behavioural sciences is their ‘discovery’</i></div> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;"><i>by economists. Historically, economics </i></span></span><i style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">was based on the rationality of the </i><i style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">individual. You know, given a choice, </i><i style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">people will maximize its utility. This was </i><i style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">even written on the frontispiece of </i><i style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">economics as a discipline. Well, at least </i><i style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">until behavioural economics came </i><i style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">along and added the graffiti:</i></div> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;"><i>‘sometimes’. This ‘sometimes’ or ‘maybe’ was enough to start </i></span></span><i style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">challenging all basic assumptions. Behavioural economics today </i><i style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">look at things from the perspective of the behaviours of the </i><i style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">individuals, who frequently exhibit ‘non-utilitarian’ behaviours, </i><i style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">irrational ones that do not fit the theory. Behavioural economics </i><i style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">do not take the simplistic carrot-and-stick approach. These </i><i style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">people know that there is a complexity to, even competition </i><i style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">between, carrots. They also know that sticks sometimes don’t</i></div> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"> </div> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;"><i>work.</i></span></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <br /> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">For more visit </span><span lang="EN-GB"><a href="http://www.viralchange.com/">www.viralchange.com</a></span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div> </div> http://www.viralchange.net/2014/06/neutral-blind-amoral.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Julie Smith)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8083788690470870386.post-6617519139738321751Tue, 17 Jun 2014 06:00:00 +00002014-06-17T07:00:00.510+01:00Imagine this...<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"> <i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">An excerpt from the book Homo Imitans by Leandro Herrero:</span></i><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> Imagine this: a revolution that needed to understand upfront the correlation between the personality of the revolutionaries and the outcome of the revolution; a revolution wanting to know the differences in adoption of the revolution depending on some cognitive and mental capacity of people. Or needing some survey on ‘change readiness’. I am not trying to trivialize the importance of ‘knowing’, but the scaling up of ‘acting’ is very much independent from it. And that’s the very significant distinction of the behavioural-pragmatic approach. Large-scale change? Bypass the individual ’understanding’, the ‘state of readiness’, the ‘intellectual awareness’, the measure of ‘emotional engagement’, the degree of ‘personal internalization’, etc. Behaviours x influence x networks will give you the scale-up statistics you need. Remember: cogito is a</div> <div class="MsoNormal"> bonus.</div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> A great deal of modern management thinking has been influenced by a poor understanding, poor grasp and poor execution of behavioural sciences, which seem to stay stuck at the very superficial level of the ‘carrot and the stick’. Performance appraisal systems, sales management incentives, bonus schemes...they all look somewhat (or a lot) like carrots. A few years ago, I conducted an informal review of about a dozen sales management incentive schemes in several pharmaceutical companies. Only one made sense from a behavioural perspective. All the others were completely flawed and at least half of them had outcomes that were the opposite of what the scheme had intended to reward. All of them seemed to have been designed by a (well-paid) quantum physicist. The problem is that behavioural-sciences-carrot-and-stick models seem cheap to apply. Everybody seems to know how. But they’ll also need to bear the consequences, of course.</div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <br /> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">For more visit </span><span lang="EN-GB"><a href="http://www.viralchange.com/">www.viralchange.com</a><span class="MsoHyperlink"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div> </div> http://www.viralchange.net/2014/06/imagine-this.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Julie Smith)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8083788690470870386.post-1065602094707035220Thu, 12 Jun 2014 06:30:00 +00002014-06-12T07:30:01.675+01:00Behaviours are wonderful things!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> <div class="MsoNormal"> <i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">An excerpt from the book Homo Imitans by Leandro Herrero:</span></i></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><br /></span></i></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">Behaviours are wonderful things! They are powerful, they </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">are explicit and they provoke many emotions. However, </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">for many people today behaviours are still ‘secondary </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">citizens’, only understood ‘as a result’ of other things such as </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">values, beliefs or thinking.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;"><br /></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">These are people who, very often truly genuinely, say that </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">changing behaviours means little unless the mindset or the </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">attitudes have changed. They would say you can change </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">behaviours, but it will be just superficial, not for real, just a game </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">of pretend. Your (real) thinking will not have changed. Mindsets </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">and attitudes... You know how I feel about those!</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;"><br /></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">In many parts of the world, ‘behaviours’ still get bad press. They </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">seem to be mentally associated with ‘forcing people’ to do </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">something. In English, ‘to behave’ means to behave well, to </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">conform to the norm, to stick to the rules. In psychiatry, </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">behavioural therapy has long been labelled as a sort of </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">superficial approach, not comparable with the more ‘serious’ </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">and ‘deep’ therapies such as psychoanalysis or psychotherapy, </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">which are based upon understanding and insights.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;"><br /></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">These stereotypes won’t go away soon. </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">I don’t have much room to digress here </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">and I know a discussion about this could </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">go on for hours, perhaps even days or </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">months...but I do believe we need to </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">elaborate a bit on this before we move </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">on. People, particularly the ones who </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">associate behaviours with carrots and </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">sticks, have a hard time understanding </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">the potential value and pragmatism of </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">focusing on behaviours.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">This view of behaviours as the poor, </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">secondary, visible representation of </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">more noble bodies such as mind, </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">mindset, cognition, value systems, etc. </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">is well-maintained by many Homo </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Sapiens professions for very good </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">reasons. We all tend to attribute all </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">motivation for our actions to the </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">essence of Sapiens. The opposite would mean accepting that we </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">are less in control than we think we are and that our free will is </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">less free than we think.</span></div> </div> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"> <i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><br /></span></i></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">For more visit </span><span lang="EN-GB"><a href="http://www.viralchange.com/">www.viralchange.com</a></span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div> <div> <br /></div> </div> http://www.viralchange.net/2014/06/behaviours-are-wonderful-things.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Julie Smith)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8083788690470870386.post-6634395571744656339Mon, 09 Jun 2014 06:30:00 +00002014-06-09T07:30:01.397+01:00How to fail expensively: don’t leave the calm shores of world I<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> <i><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">An excerpt from the book Homo Imitans by Leandro Herrero:</span></span></i><br /> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: inherit;">It should be clear by now that while world I is a conveyor of important and vital messages that play an imperative role in raising awareness, educating, establishing rules of the game and engaging minds and hearts, it is world II where the real cultural change takes place. And that cultural change can only take the shape of an infection, a behavioural infection that creates new norms (ways of doing, ways of supporting new processes, style of dealing with customers, etc.) That is why the concept of social infection is so important.</span><br /> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: inherit;">My insistence on the shortcomings of world I in creating social change do not come from a dogmatic position. On the contrary. I have seen traditional change management programmes fail and many well intentioned efforts to ‘convince’ and ‘engage’ with ‘communication tools’ fall by the wayside. I have also seen the incredible waste of energy and money involved in all this. Basically, I have seen enough to question why on earth people continue to do the same. Perhaps this also rings some bells for you.</span><br /> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: inherit;">There is also plenty of depressing data. When we put together all that we know about change management programmes (those surrounding an IT implementation, those aiming at a broader cultural change or those aiming for transformation), the track record is far from impressive. Generally speaking, about 70% of the initiatives fail to deliver on the expectations. This is a big number by any account, but management has come to think of it as something more or less inevitable. Imagine for a second that 70% of airplanes crashed, 70% of bridges fell down, 70% of buildings collapsed or, simply, that 70% of the time your corporate IT system was down. Dreadful thoughts, no doubt. Well, this is the equivalent in change management.</span><br /> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span> <div class="MsoNormal"> <i><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">For more visit </span><span lang="EN-GB"><a href="http://www.viralchange.com/">www.viralchange.com</a></span></span></i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div> </div> http://www.viralchange.net/2014/06/how-to-fail-expensively-dont-leave-calm.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Julie Smith)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8083788690470870386.post-9129447076933453723Thu, 05 Jun 2014 06:30:00 +00002014-06-05T07:30:03.404+01:00Choosing influence that can scale up.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"> <i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">An excerpt from the book Homo Imitans by Leandro Herrero:</span></i><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <b><span style="font-family: "Candara,Bold","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Candara\,Bold";">Choosing influence that can scale up.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <b><span style="font-family: "Candara,Bold","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Candara\,Bold";"><br /></span></b></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">The second discipline of Viral Change™ is influencing. However, </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">this is not about just any kind of influence, it’s about ‘scalable’ </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">influence. Or in other words, it’s about how to create a fast buildup </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">of the social infection. There is a new ‘industry of influence’ </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">that promises to teach tricks and </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">shortcuts, sometimes with poor or no </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">scientific basis. It tends to be thrown in </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">the same basket as ‘motivating people’ </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">or ‘inspiring them’. ‘How to influence </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">people’ often appears in ‘training </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">packages’ that promise to teach you </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">skills in achieving goals, managing your </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">own boss, getting a raise or simply </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">being in control. Becoming an </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">‘influencer’ now seems to be part of the </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">expected portfolio of politically </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">accepted goals</span><b><span style="font-family: "Candara,Bold","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Candara\,Bold";">.</span></b></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;"><br /></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">Very often, influencing gets trivialized </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">and reduced to the ‘tools’ and ‘how to’. </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Often it’s limited to listing vague </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">requisites which would work equally </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">well for ‘being a good manager’ as for </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">‘navigating through life’. In those </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">‘packages’, people are asked to ‘change </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">their minds’ or their ‘mindset’ (remember, that thing I still can’t </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">find?). They make it sound as logical and easy as changing the oil </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">in your car. Or they are asked to ‘request and clarify </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">responsibilities and reward appropriately’. It’s hardly something </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">to disagree with, but it makes you wonder why the othe\</span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">thousand things you could do to be an influencer are not listed.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;"><br /></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">In chapter 4.2, I’ll share which aspects of influence are relevant </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">for social infections and which ones are good for nice </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">conversations and bullet points in training programmes.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <br /> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">For more visit </span><span lang="EN-GB"><a href="http://www.viralchange.com/">www.viralchange.com</a><span class="MsoHyperlink"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div> </div> http://www.viralchange.net/2014/06/choosing-influence-that-can-scale-up.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Julie Smith)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8083788690470870386.post-4016802414193153972Mon, 02 Jun 2014 06:30:00 +00002014-06-02T07:30:04.060+01:00Obsessive focus on behaviours<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"> <i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">An excerpt from the book Homo Imitans by Leandro Herrero:</span></i><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">Confronted with the execution of a strategy (problem solving, </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">culture building or any other aim), we are always offered a </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">choice of routes: world I and/or world II. As we know, traditional </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">management’s default position is world I. </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">In the following chapters, I will address each of the world II </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">components on their own. Each of them relates to disciplines in </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">the social and/or network sciences and all of them contain a fair </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">amount of counter-intuitive principles. Mastering the </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">combination of these components or disciplines is the basis for </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Viral Change™. As the graph on the previous page summarizes, </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">the art of social infection requires:</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><br /></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <b><span style="font-family: "Candara,Bold","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Candara\,Bold";">(1) Obsessive focus on behaviours<o:p></o:p></span></b></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">The first discipline is behavioural change management which is </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">well-anchored in traditional behavioural sciences. I am still </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">surprised to see how the management world remains filled with </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">folk psychology and half-baked behavioural answers, eagerly </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">embraced by people in search of quick fixes. Invalidated </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">behavioural concepts are widespread and anybody in </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">‘management’ or ‘HR’ seems to be a de facto expert in the </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">matter. I’m advocating for the application of some standards, </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">like those needed to master accounting or running a production </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">line.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;"><br /></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">When it comes to ‘people’, it seems anything goes. The results </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">are things such as ludicrous incentive schemes which reward </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">exactly the opposite of what they intend to promote or </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">extraordinarily complex competence frameworks that seem </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">copied word-for-word from the latest management book on the </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">shelves. Chapter 4.1 will explore key concepts about behaviours </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">in the context of social infection of the viral change type. As it </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">will be impossible to summarize the whole discipline of </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Behavioural Change Management in one chapter, I will focus on </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">a few key concepts that are crucial or simply not well </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">understood.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <br /> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">For more visit </span><span lang="EN-GB"><a href="http://www.viralchange.com/">www.viralchange.com</a><span class="MsoHyperlink"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div> </div> http://www.viralchange.net/2014/06/obsessive-focus-on-behaviours.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Julie Smith)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8083788690470870386.post-2829333223762348989Fri, 30 May 2014 06:30:00 +00002014-05-30T07:30:01.151+01:00I reorganize ergo sum<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"> <i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">An excerpt from the book Homo Imitans by Leandro Herrero:</span></i><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">A reorganization has taken place. A new structure amalgamating </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">old divisions is in place and now the ways of doing must change. </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">The Big Consulting Company has left (well, not quite, they never </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">do) and there is a myriad of PowerPoints and fresh materials </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">articulating the new structure, the new operating model and the </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">new processes and systems in extreme detail.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;"><br /></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">Senior management cascades this information down through all </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">the layers of the organization (from VPs to directors to managers) </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">in a series of workshops. It’s all very rational, sophisticated and </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">legitimized by the enormous budget used to reach this point.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <b><span style="font-family: "Candara,Bold","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Candara\,Bold";"><br /></span></b></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <b><span style="font-family: "Candara,Bold","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Candara\,Bold";">(1) The ‘small’ detail of how people are actually going to work </span></b><b><span style="font-family: "Candara,Bold","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Candara\,Bold";">together in the new regime...is not in ‘the slides’</span></b></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">A key component for successful change is that people not only </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">understand the new structure (they are now de facto part of it) or </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">the new processes (they all make sense on paper), but also that </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">they actually behave differently. Suddenly, they have to share </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">information with people who they have not worked with before.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;"><br /></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">They can no longer draft their business plan in the cosy isolation </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">of their office with the assistants of their three loyal lieutenants. </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">Now, they have to ‘co-develop it’ (sic) with a dozen of interconnected </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">‘stakeholders’ who didn’t need to know about each </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">other before (or if they did, they pretty much ignored each other </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">without the sky falling down). There is nothing in the colossal </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">stack of PowerPoints left behind by the Big Consulting Company </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">that even touches on explaining, suggesting or helping with how </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">people are going to behave differently. Why? Because the Big </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">Consulting Company operates in world I and in world I, the </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">availability of the information is an end in itself. After all, if new B </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">is better than old A, Homo Sapiens will do B. ‘OK, and if not, we’ll </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">train them.’</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <b><span style="font-family: "Candara,Bold","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Candara\,Bold";"><br /></span></b></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <b><span style="font-family: "Candara,Bold","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Candara\,Bold";">(2) So they make an attempt to define which new behaviours are </span></b><b><span style="font-family: "Candara,Bold","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Candara\,Bold";">needed</span></b></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">Their management team has become acutely aware of ‘the small </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">detail’ mentioned above and now develops a series of exercises to </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">define the kind of behaviours that may be needed.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <br /> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">For more visit </span><span lang="EN-GB"><a href="http://www.viralchange.com/">www.viralchange.com</a><span class="MsoHyperlink"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div> </div> http://www.viralchange.net/2014/05/i-reorganize-ergo-sum.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Julie Smith)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8083788690470870386.post-4440953844011285380Mon, 26 May 2014 06:30:00 +00002014-05-26T07:30:02.374+01:00The two worlds side by side<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"> <i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">An excerpt from the book Homo Imitans by Leandro Herrero:</span></i><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">Mr Sapiens and Mr Imitans live in different places, but though </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">they should build bridges between them and then use them </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">every day, they should also be very mindful of their different </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">worlds. World II objectives cannot be achieved in world I </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">territory. Social infections (world II) are not created by posters. </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Revolutions are not announced. Well, not usually. Social </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">movements and cultures are not created by training.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;"><br /></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">Communication (world I) is not change.<o:p></o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;"><br /></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">As the figure on the previous page illustrates, the maths of world </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">II could not be more different from the maths of world I. </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Attrition is to world I what build/scale-up is to world II. World II </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">effects start small, often unnoticed, with selected behaviours </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">being practiced by a small number of individuals.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;"><br /></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">These are then copied by people in their immediate circle of </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">influence and create ‘clusters of new behaviours’: true new critical masses, copied and spread by others like an infection, </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">eventually generating ‘new norms’.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;"><br /></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">Let’s look at the differences between world I and world II in </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">some real-life organizational examples. Note that there is </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">nothing intrinsically wrong with the contents of world I, but its </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">main problem is poor scalability and sustainability, for which it </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">needs the help of world II as we will see later on. When you look </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">at the highlights in each column, you may have lots of questions.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;"><br /></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">Don’t worry, as the rest of the book will hopefully answer all of </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">them. For now, it’s enough to simply appreciate the differences </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">or perhaps increase your awareness of which world you spend </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">most of your time in.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">For more visit </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;"><a href="http://www.viralchange.com/">www.viralchange.com</a></span></div> http://www.viralchange.net/2014/05/the-two-worlds-side-by-side.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Julie Smith)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8083788690470870386.post-1206141071848262403Fri, 23 May 2014 06:00:00 +00002014-05-23T07:00:03.944+01:00Repetition <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"> <i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">An excerpt from the book Homo Imitans by Leandro Herrero:</span></i><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">In an information-cluttered working </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">environment where many ‘initiatives’ </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">compete for airtime, repeated topdown </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">communications become terribly </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">inefficient. In Cluttered Corporate Inc, </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">noise and signal get blurred. Eventually </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">all is noise. The biggest health hazard </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">of world I is information pollution. </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">In fact, the mathematics of world I are </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">the maths of attrition: start with aiming at everybody and then</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">cascade down. Information will reach initial destinations </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">(stocks). Some people will pay attention. From those first </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">‘receivers’, some people will pay enough attention to </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">understand. From those, some will consider doing something.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><br /></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">From those, some will actually attempt to do something. When </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">you get to the terminus, a relatively small percentage has been </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">truly influenced by the communication(s). Attrition is not only </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">embedded, amazingly, we have come to accept that this is </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">perfectly OK, a natural part of the process.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;"><br /></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">To fight attrition, we usually have a not-so-secret weapon: </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">repetition. A new, bigger and better communication campaign </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">will take place. This time perhaps communication packages will </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">be prepared for VPs. VPs will brief directors, directors will have </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">workshops with managers and managers have meetings with </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">staff. And this way, ‘everybody will have gone through it’ (this is </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">the language you hear) to ensure consistency. It is a noble and </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">expensive goal. Large budgets are allocated, but the </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">programmes have relatively small impact.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <br /> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">For more visit </span><span lang="EN-GB"><a href="http://www.viralchange.com/">www.viralchange.com</a><span class="MsoHyperlink"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div> </div> http://www.viralchange.net/2014/05/repetition.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Julie Smith)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8083788690470870386.post-6534643960884699917Tue, 20 May 2014 06:00:00 +00002014-05-20T07:00:05.441+01:00‘Deus ex machina’<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"> <i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">An excerpt from the book Homo Imitans by Leandro Herrero:</span></i><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">In this world, big seems to be beautifully linear as well: the more </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">information pushed down to the bottom, the more pipes or </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">channels used, the more flow created...the better it seems. </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Indeed, this is a world of channels, vehicles and their language: </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">flow, block, saturation, etc. The pathways are algorithmic, </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">pardon my language. It means that usually the roads are more or </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">less preset and laid out like on a geographical map. You can go </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">from A to Z via different roads—either meandering along the </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">scenic route or taking the highway—but you have to stick to the </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">map. In large organizations, the organization chart represents </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">the information highways (algorithms) for the ‘cascade down’.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">Success in world I is defined by the </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">quantity and quality of the currency that </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">reaches its destination points. In a </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">1,000-employee organization, the aim of a</span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> communication campaign is to reach </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">1,000 points of arrival. Simple. The </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">assumption is then that 1,000 people </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">will understand the message and that, </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">as a result, 1,000 people will be </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">‘engaged’ in a particular way </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">(intellectually, emotionally). The latter is </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">difficult to validate other than by </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">invoking the corporate equivalent of </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">the ‘deus ex machina’: the post hoc </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">fallacy. In other words, we did </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">communication campaign A, we improved B (results, </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">performance, employee survey data), ergo, the communication </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">campaign did it. In most cases, this is a very weak argument </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">dominating a strong and convenient management belief.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <br /> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">For more visit </span><span lang="EN-GB"><a href="http://www.viralchange.com/">www.viralchange.com</a><span class="MsoHyperlink"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div> </div> http://www.viralchange.net/2014/05/deus-ex-machina.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Julie Smith)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8083788690470870386.post-7723834677906479021Fri, 16 May 2014 06:30:00 +00002014-05-16T07:30:01.578+01:00 Currency is Information<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"> <i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">An excerpt from the book Homo Imitans by Leandro Herrero:</span></i><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">In this world, the currency is information: verbal, written or </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">electronic information that flows all around and between us. </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">This is the world of facts, the world with pieces of data or </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">packages of knowledge flowing from one place to another. </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Homo Sapiens and management love this world. The information is packaged and pre-cooked so that it is digestible, usually </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">presented in PowerPoint dishes or contained in spreadsheet </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">prisons (after all, we call the boxes ‘cells’). Bullet points flood </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">corporate life, encapsulating and summarizing thoughts.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;"><br /></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">In this world, company visions are presented and declarations of </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">intention made. We ‘send’ guidelines, announcements, </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">directions, pieces of news, congratulations, threats, tricks, </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">explanations on the steps needed to go from A to B and </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">anything else that the label ‘communication’ can accommodate. </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">The ‘organizational logic’ is explained and distributed this way. It </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">travels ‘down’ using traditional communication vehicles (from </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">emails to posters, newsletters and magazines) or more modern </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">media (video, audio or a combination of both).</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;"><br /></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">Formal verbal interactions take place in world I. A significant </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">amount of our time is dedicated to this world. We have </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">‘collaboration devices’ to facilitate the currency exchange: </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">meetings, forums, workshops, town hall presentations, </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">seminars, webcasts and podcasts. Technology has helped us to </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">communicate in bigger and better ways. Fibre optics can now </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">transfer 10 trillion bits of information per second</span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;"><br /></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">Information can be used, reused, packaged and repackaged. And </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">what’s more, it’s able to reach your eyes/screen/earphones on </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">demand. E-mail is pervasive in this world. The corporate </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">executive or the individual professional is ‘always on’, on </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">demand, connected to a server 24/7. The arrival of a piece of </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">information to your (big, small or minuscule) screen is </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">announced by a blip that triggers a Pavlovian reaction. There is </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">no way that information, the currency of world I, would not get </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">to you.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <br /> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">For more visit </span><span lang="EN-GB"><a href="http://www.viralchange.com/">www.viralchange.com</a><span class="MsoHyperlink"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div> </div> http://www.viralchange.net/2014/05/currency-is-information.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Julie Smith)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8083788690470870386.post-4886683024271101171Tue, 13 May 2014 06:00:00 +00002014-05-13T07:00:08.601+01:00We’ve been getting it wrong time after time.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"> <i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">An excerpt from the book Homo Imitans by Leandro Herrero:<o:p></o:p></span></i></div> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"> <br /></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">We’ve been getting it wrong time after time. Change </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">management programmes that fail to deliver, many</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">inefficiencies in the management of organizations, the </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">poor performance and big disappointments of government orchestrated </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">social change interventions, the failed civic or </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">religious campaigns to develop and implement a ‘social agenda’, </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">the slow, painful and often unsuccessful health education and </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">promotion initiatives...in short, lots of failed attempts to change </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">behaviours in a large population, either inside the firm or in the </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">outside world.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;"><br /></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">They all have something in common. All these failures stem from </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">the misunderstanding of the differences between two separate </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">worlds, each with their own rules and their own tempo: the</span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">world of communication (world I) and the world of behaviours </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">(world II).</span></div> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"> <br /></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">These worlds are very different. I have summarized these </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">differences in the graph at the end of this chapter. Yet we mix up </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">these worlds all the time, like mixing apples and pears, </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">pretending that they are the same. After all, they’re both fruit. </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">We cross the border between these two worlds at our  </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">convenience and we use their attributes indistinctively. And this </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">is where the problem starts.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;"><br /></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">I deeply believe that achieving success in any of the goals </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">described before, from internal management in the organization </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">to an external macro-social change, depends on mastering both </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">(a) the understanding of and respect for the differences </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">between the two worlds and (b) the establishing of bridges </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">between them without getting them mixed up. Management in </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">particular has not learnt the distinction between world I and </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">world II. It muddles them together as if they were one single </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">territory. The consequences are a series of messy and wrong </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">expectations either about people or ‘management systems’. </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Things that belong to world I are expected to deliver outcomes </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">that belong to world II and vice versa. For example, behavioural </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">change (world II) is expected to follow an information or </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">communication cascade (world I). Every single day in the </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">management of organizations this mistake is made. The mistake </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">costs time, effort, and results, at the very least, in inefficient </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">management and leadership. Let’s look at this in detail.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <br /> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">For more visit </span><span lang="EN-GB"><a href="http://www.viralchange.com/">www.viralchange.com</a><span class="MsoHyperlink"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div> </div> http://www.viralchange.net/2014/05/weve-been-getting-it-wrong-time-after.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Julie Smith)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8083788690470870386.post-4426589457231338851Thu, 08 May 2014 06:30:00 +00002014-05-08T07:30:00.538+01:00Incredible Plasticity<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"> <i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">An excerpt from the book Homo Imitans by Leandro Herrero:<o:p></o:p></span></i></div> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"> <i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><br /></span></i></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">If the Social Sciences teach us anything, it is about our incredible </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">plasticity, which we are always more ready to attribute to others </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">than to ourselves. And this fantastic capacity is precisely the </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">good/bad news to consider. Bad news à la Iraq, good news à la all </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">the possible good that roles and uniforms could provide in daily </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">life. And since most of our daily life is spent at work, all the above </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">applies to management and leadership. The problem is that </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">management science has developed thick membranes, as if it </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">needed to protect itself from intrusions by Psychology, Sociology </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">and the other Sciences de l’Homme. Milgram and Zimbardo are </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">not taught in business schools, but I can’t think of a better </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">starting point to discuss leadership.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;"><br /></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">Back to the news. Another article I read was cynical about the </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">‘new’ Iraqi police. The occupying forces had finally realized there </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">was no option but to bring back the old police force and the </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">military that had been disbanded. The columnist joked about </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">“</span><i><span style="font-family: "Candara,Italic","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Candara\,Italic";">seeing the old moustaches and the old faces back</span></i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">” and could not </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">understand how we should expect new behaviour from them. </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">Most people would sympathize with this point of view but the tiny </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">minority that belongs to the Social Psychology tribe would have </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">no problem accepting it. If the context changes (and, indeed, it</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">has) this police force may surprise people with its ability to comply </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">with the new regime. A change of uniform and context may </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">create some good, even with the old moustaches. Similarly, </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">providing a positive context in organizations (this is the leader’s </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">function) makes roles and uniforms constructive. The same </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">roles—managers, directors, project leaders, heads of HR and vicepresidents— </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">in a negative context create havoc.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;"><br /></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">The key is the existence or absence of agreement on nonnegotiable </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">behaviours, hopefully, but not necessarily, linked to a </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">value system. These non-negotiable behaviours were probably </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">absent in Abu Ghraib, or everything there was possible and </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">negotiable in a contingent way – that is, depending on what needs </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">to be achieved; for example, weakness in the detainees. </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">Contingent approaches in management and leadership are </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">wonderfully convenient and deeply dangerous, not something </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">that traditional business education is prepared to accept. My </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">unofficial father of contingent leadership is Jack Welch, ex-CEO of </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">General Electric.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <br /> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">For more visit </span><span lang="EN-GB"><a href="http://www.viralchange.com/">www.viralchange.com</a><span class="MsoHyperlink"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div> </div> http://www.viralchange.net/2014/05/incredible-plasticity.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Julie Smith)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8083788690470870386.post-4986444548573019094Mon, 05 May 2014 06:30:00 +00002014-05-05T07:30:03.614+01:00Roles, Power and Uniforms<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"> <i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">An excerpt from the book Homo Imitans by Leandro Herrero:<o:p></o:p></span></i></div> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"> <br /></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">The pictures that shocked the world will still be in many people’s </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">minds when the name Abu Ghraib is forgotten. The scenes of Iraqi </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">prisoners and their American custodians made front pages and </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">prime time everywhere. The sense of disgust was universal, but </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">apart from this there was a varied spectrum of reactions. There </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">were the politico-military questions. How on earth could this </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">happen? Were the perpetrators just a few bad apples? How far up </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">the chain of command did it go? There was the socio-political </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">question: to what extent can this type of thing be justified? And </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">there was the plain, ‘normal citizen’ question: how on earth can </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">human beings do this to one another?</span></div> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"> <br /></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">Now the blame has gone in several directions, the buck has </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">stopped somewhere, so we are told, and the whole thing will </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">soon more or less evaporate into history. American writer Gore </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">Vidal reacted to the events of 9/11 with a sharp, cynical and </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">otherwise politically incorrect comment: “</span><i><span style="font-family: "Candara,Italic","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Candara\,Italic";">It will be all over by the </span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Candara,Italic","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Candara\,Italic";">Christmas sales</span></i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">.” It didn’t quite happen like that, but he wanted to </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">make the point of just how fragile our collective memory is. The </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">Abu Ghraib saga, I suspect, will be contained one way or another, </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">and soon consigned to the black book of black history. Period. </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">Among the thousands of articles and references relating to Abu </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">Ghraib there was an unpretentious, not terribly prominent and </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">matter-of-fact column published in </span><i><span style="font-family: "Candara,Italic","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Candara\,Italic";">The New York Times</span></i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">, which </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">revealed that, at least for a tiny sector of the population, these </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">events were no surprise whatsoever. Anybody with a degree in </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">Social Psychology would have said: “</span><i><span style="font-family: "Candara,Italic","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Candara\,Italic";">Aha! This is Milgram and </span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Candara,Italic","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Candara\,Italic";">Zimbardo revisited</span></i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">.” These were the authors of some old </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">psychological experiments that have since been repeated several </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">times. The article mentioned the studies and sought the opinion </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">of people who had taken part.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;"><br /></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">I referred to Stanley Milgram in a previous article (‘It’s the system, </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">not me’, May 2004). In a nutshell, it involved the citizens of the US </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">town of New Haven who had volunteered to take part in an </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">experiment on the effects of punishment on learning. They played </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">the role of teacher, reciting words that the learners had to repeat </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">correctly or receive an electric shock. The intensity of the shock </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">rose with each mistake, and the learners screamed with each </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">increase, eventually pleading with the teachers to stop. But the </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">psychologist directing the experiment encouraged the teachers to </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">continue regardless. Some refused and some carried on to the </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">maximum voltage, which was labelled ‘dangerous’. The </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">proportion of people who continued administering the voltage </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">was 65%. Interestingly, laughter was sometimes the teacher’s first </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">reaction when hearing the learner’s initial discomfort. The catch, </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">as students know and readers of this column will remember, was </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">that the learners were actors.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">For more visit </span><span lang="EN-GB"><a href="http://www.viralchange.com/">www.viralchange.com</a><span class="MsoHyperlink"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div> <br /> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> </div> http://www.viralchange.net/2014/05/roles-power-and-uniforms.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Julie Smith)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8083788690470870386.post-3914409752210096226Thu, 01 May 2014 06:30:00 +00002014-05-01T07:30:04.112+01:00Good news: In management we don’t have electric shock.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"> <i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">An excerpt from the book Homo Imitans by Leandro Herrero:<o:p></o:p></span></i></div> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"> <br /></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">The good news is that in management we don’t have electric </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">shocks. The bad news is that there is a worse kind of pain than </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">that inflicted by voltage: psychological pain. The dynamics of </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">power in our organizations are very rich. We exercise power, obey </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">orders and follow instructions. We also challenge them, resist or </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">decide not to comply. In the process, organizational life </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">sometimes serves as a coverall excuse for many things that would </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">not be accepted in normal life. How many times have we said, or </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">heard, “</span><i><span style="font-family: "Candara,Italic","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Candara\,Italic";">It’s not me, it’s the system. If it were up to me, I would let </span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Candara,Italic","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Candara\,Italic";">you do it</span></i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">.”</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;"><br /></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">I have always been fascinated by the pervasive use of ‘they’ in </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">organizations. ‘They’ want this. ‘They’ forced me to do that. What </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">fascinates me even more is how often I have heard it used by </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">senior people, even those at the very top. Who is ‘they’ in those </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">cases? In my experience, it’s a virtual, almost Olympic ‘they’ – the </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">system, the best, most convenient and unaccountable </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">management black hole.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;"><br /></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">We don’t need the man in Milgra</span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">m’s lab to tell us, “</span><i><span style="font-family: "Candara,Italic","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Candara\,Italic";">Keep pushing, </span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Candara,Italic","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Candara\,Italic";">it’s an experiment, for goodness sake. Do you think you can break </span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Candara,Italic","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Candara\,Italic";">the protocol just like that</span></i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">?” Our managers, supervisors, directors </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">and vice-presidents, you and me—65% of us, if Milgram is right— </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">will say “</span><i><span style="font-family: "Candara,Italic","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Candara\,Italic";">I am sorry, John, it’s not me, it’s the system. I have to inflict </span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Candara,Italic","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Candara\,Italic";">this pain on you. I don’t want to, but I have no choice</span></i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">.” In </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">organizations, such behaviour comes in many forms and shapes. A </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">30-volt shock, for example, is forcing people to do something that </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">is a hassle, unnecessary and serves no purpose other than to </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">boost the ego of the person giving the instructions. A 50-volt </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">shock might involve denying someone that little, perhaps one-off, </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">opportunity for flexi-time that would make all the difference to </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">the employee’s family and no difference whatsoever to the </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">business. A higher voltage could entail submitting somebody to </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">unnecessary humiliation and considerable psychological pain by </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">requesting an action that serves no purpose other than as a public </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">show of power.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;"><br /></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">I have seen the latter done to someone going through a terrible </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">family crisis. Nevertheless, she was told, “</span><i><span style="font-family: "Candara,Italic","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Candara\,Italic";">I am sorry, we have to do </span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Candara,Italic","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Candara\,Italic";">this, it’s the system. There is nothing I can do</span></i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">.” It was a fantastic lie; </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">there was a lot the manager could have done.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">For more visit </span><span lang="EN-GB"><a href="http://www.viralchange.com/">www.viralchange.com</a><span class="MsoHyperlink"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div> <br /> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> </div> http://www.viralchange.net/2014/05/good-news-in-management-we-dont-have.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Julie Smith)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8083788690470870386.post-7180067223536770882Mon, 28 Apr 2014 06:30:00 +00002014-04-28T07:30:00.665+01:00It’s the system, not me...<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"> <i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">An excerpt from the book Homo Imitans by Leandro Herrero:</span></i><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">Not many people knew what was going on in the psychology </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">department. Nothing unusual about that. An advert in the local </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">newspaper offered volunteers a few dollars for participating in an </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">experiment, and many people from the city of New Haven </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">applied.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;"><br /></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">The study was run by Stanley Milgram, a small curious assistant </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">professor specializing in social experiments. This one examined </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">the effects of punishment—administered here as an electric </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">shock—on learning. The psychologist conducting the experiment </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">read sequences of words to be repeated: house, money, flower, </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">pretty, whether, cat. Each time a subject got them wrong, the </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">volunteer, who was sitting on the other side of a one-way glass </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">screen, administered a small electric shock. The potency of the </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">shock increased progressively with each mistake – the lever </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">moving from 25v to 30v, 40v and so on.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;"><br /></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">As the experiment continued, the subject’s reaction changed from </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">a grimace to expression of more and more discomfort. Invariably, </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">the level became very unpleasant, even unbearable. The subject </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">would be almost screaming. The administrator objected. “</span><i><span style="font-family: "Candara,Italic","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Candara\,Italic";">Never </span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Candara,Italic","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Candara\,Italic";">mind</span></i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">,” the psychologist said, “</span><i><span style="font-family: "Candara,Italic","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Candara\,Italic";">this is a well-controlled experiment, </span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Candara,Italic","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Candara\,Italic";">you need to keep pushing the button</span></i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">.” Screams. “</span><i><span style="font-family: "Candara,Italic","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Candara\,Italic";">I want to stop. He </span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Candara,Italic","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Candara\,Italic";">wants to get out</span></i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">.” “</span><i><span style="font-family: "Candara,Italic","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Candara\,Italic";">No</span></i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">,” said the psychologist, “</span><i><span style="font-family: "Candara,Italic","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Candara\,Italic";">keep trying. It’s </span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Candara,Italic","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Candara\,Italic";">the protocol, we can’t break this experiment yet</span></i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">.” And so it </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">continued until the pain was intolerable and the administrators </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">were shaking. But they kept pushing the button. Well, some of </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">them: 65 % to be precise. The other 35% gave up and refused to </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">continue the torture.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;"><br /></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">The experiments were repeated and repeated, always the same: </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">mistakes, shocks, up, up, up. And the citizens from New Haven </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">kept pushing the button even though they were torturing the guy </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">on the other side of the screen. Again and again, 65% complied </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">with the instructions, and 35% told the psychologist to keep the </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">money. More screams, more shocks and more knowledge about </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">learning.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">For more visit </span><span lang="EN-GB"><a href="http://www.viralchange.com/">www.viralchange.com</a><span class="MsoHyperlink"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <br /> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> </div> http://www.viralchange.net/2014/04/its-system-not-me.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Julie Smith)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8083788690470870386.post-8221079009677169217Thu, 24 Apr 2014 07:00:00 +00002014-04-24T08:00:04.441+01:00From the jungle to Wall Street.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"> <i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">An excerpt from the book Homo Imitans by Leandro Herrero:<o:p></o:p></span></i></div> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"> <br /></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">Rituals that are effective both on the business AND the organizational level are rare. Most of the time there is a disconnect between the business functionality (poor) and the </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">ritual and tribal functionality (very high). One of the visible </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">effects of a sudden cost-cutting exercise in the firm is the almost </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">automatic suppression of some rituals: no more off-site </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">meetings, no more transcontinental travel for a meeting, no </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">more people sent to business schools...</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">But rituals can’t be suppressed. We can’t pretend that we can </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">get rid of them, leaving a vacuum behind. The annual sales </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">conference can be cancelled for cost-cutting reasons, but it will </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">probably be substituted by regional/local ones, a digital one, a </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">series of internal meetings with lots of PowerPoints, </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">teambuilding exercises, local dinner meetings or something else.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;"><br /></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">The platform for belonging and expressing mimicked behaviours </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">must exist one way or another. And if there is a real vacuum or a </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">shortage, a new ‘corporate initiative’ will be launched for the </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">corporate tribes. Tribal behaviour helps us understand a lot of </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Homo Imitans’ social life. Today’s anthropology should move </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">from the jungle to Wall Street.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <br /> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">For more visit </span><span lang="EN-GB"><a href="http://www.viralchange.com/">www.viralchange.com</a><span class="MsoHyperlink"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div> </div> http://www.viralchange.net/2014/04/from-jungle-to-wall-street.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Julie Smith)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8083788690470870386.post-2912994029230822888Mon, 21 Apr 2014 06:30:00 +00002014-04-21T07:30:00.758+01:00Forget tribes in Polynesia. <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"> <i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">An excerpt from the book Homo Imitans by Leandro Herrero:</span></i><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">Forget tribes in Polynesia. Open your windows and you’ll see </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">urban tribes, corporate tribes, religious tribes, political tribes and </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">sports tribes. The ‘social proof’ mechanism of influence operates </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">nicely here, sometimes even without saying a word. This </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">mechanism ensures that ‘everybody here says, does, behaves, </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">wears X, Y, Z, etc’. This is the generic, largely unconscious </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">copying and imitation that has been well-studied by sociologists </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">and social psychologists for many years under the broad label of </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">‘conformity’ mechanisms, which I mentioned above.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;"><br /></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">Homo Imitans needs to belong to and feel part of something </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">that provides meaning, context or simply a psychological (or </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">physical) shelter (a safe(r) place or a power/control centre). This </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">was the case in the communes in the seventies and it still </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">happens in day-to-day society today. Tribal Homo Imitans copies </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">clothing, look and hairstyle, lexicon, behaviours and rituals</span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 7pt;">5</span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">. In </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">the era of the cult of diversity, our similarities are embarrassingly </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">colossal.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;"><br /></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">Corporate Homo Imitans is particularly interesting. One of the </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">problems of ‘modern management’ is that it ignores </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">anthropology</span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 7pt;">6</span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">. It thinks it doesn’t need it in order to calculate </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Return on Investment (ROI) or to deliver the five-year strategic </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">plan. But corporate Homo Imitans is a perfect object of interest </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">under the anthropological umbrella. It has rites of passage </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">(talent pool goes to Harvard), rituals (annual business plan </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">process), tribal ceremonies (offsite conferences for the entire </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">company) and other gluing mechanisms.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;"><br /></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">Some of those corporate rituals practiced by Homo Imitans on </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">the payroll are completely inefficient from the organizational or </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">business perspective (in some cases even utterly useless). This is </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">a fact well-known by many corporate leaders.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <br /> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">For more visit </span><span lang="EN-GB"><a href="http://www.viralchange.com/">www.viralchange.com</a><span class="MsoHyperlink"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div> </div> http://www.viralchange.net/2014/04/forget-tribes-in-polynesia.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Julie Smith)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8083788690470870386.post-6417932774311588139Fri, 18 Apr 2014 07:00:00 +00002014-04-18T08:00:07.367+01:00‘Talk therapies’ don’t work here. <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"> <i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">An excerpt from the book Homo Imitans by Leandro Herrero:</span></i><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">In the seventies, I was a practicing psychiatrist in Spain and I frequently observed a curious phenomenon of conformity selfregulation in groups. At that time, there were numerous groups of young people living in the countryside, sharing a communal life. As much as there may have been a noble, idealistic and counter-cultural aim, they all looked weird to everybody else. They were all carbon copies of each other in clothing and physical appearance. This is how they expressed their rejection of the rest of us in suits and ties.<o:p></o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">Life inside these communes was pretty intense, even if their members told you otherwise. There was a tight, unwritten set of rules which held the community together. Under the appearance of a free world, there were lots of borders and ‘regulations’, even if the latter were not recorded in a Standard Operating Procedure manual. They were typical cases of the </span><i><span style="font-family: "Candara,Italic","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Candara\,Italic";">‘</span></i><span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">Dios los cria y ellos se juntan’</span><i><span style="font-family: "Candara,Italic","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Candara\,Italic";">.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">This environment attracted lots of young people from many categories: disillusioned youngsters, counterculturalists, those rejecting their parents, people wanting to save the world or refusing to join the capitalist society, music lovers, love lovers, sex lovers, drug lovers and chronic hippies. It also attracted mentally ill people.<o:p></o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">In psychiatry, a delusion is a firm, unshakeable belief in something that has no basis in reality. For example, my thoughts are stolen by a third person. The thought process behind this belief is solid and unbreakable. Rational counter-arguments don’t work, because there is nothing rational about the logic of interaction of the deluded, mentally ill person. A psychotic person thinks and behaves in a strange manner and changing that will not happen by any rational means. That is why psychotherapy or ‘talk therapies’ don’t work here. As you can imagine, there was a lot of irrationality in those communities and very often it was difficult to distinguish between the counterculturalist with an intact brain (or perhaps a brain partially challenged by a recreational substance) and the psychotic who was convinced that an extra-terrestrial visited him every night and took energy from him.<o:p></o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <br /> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">For more visit </span><span lang="EN-GB"><a href="http://www.viralchange.com/">www.viralchange.com</a><span class="MsoHyperlink"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div> </div> http://www.viralchange.net/2014/04/talk-therapies-dont-work-here.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Julie Smith)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8083788690470870386.post-8443103238204495339Tue, 15 Apr 2014 06:00:00 +00002014-04-15T07:00:05.121+01:00‘Dios los cria y ellos se juntan’<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"> <i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">An excerpt from the book Homo Imitans by Leandro Herrero:</span></i><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">The crowd is group contagion on a larger scale and with broader borders. Crowd behaviour has been studied from many angles and in a nutshell, two streams are apparent. People join a crowd because of a conscious or unconscious, rational or irrational affinity to something or the desire to behave in a particular way.<o:p></o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">This is called convergent theory. But the crowd itself, for whatever reason, also makes people behave in a particular way. This is called contagion theory. You can see that both are possible and likely to appear together. Homo Imitans has some characteristics that make him find affinity with others (convergence). Once inside the crowd or large social group, he can see others ‘going with the flow’. It’s a visible phenomenon. And so, he will become infected by the collective behaviour (contagion), which will reinforce his belonging to the crowd. But there is a third element. The collective itself may also create its own emergent and somehow invisible rules. This trio of crowd rules also explains quite a lot of what is going on inside organizations even if strictly speaking organizations are not crowds. People may join an organization because they want to be part of it. There may be many reasons. Once inside, ‘the organization joins them’.<o:p></o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">Now, some crowds are one-off phenomena, others are transitory, some recurrent (civil rights protests) and some are established rituals (religious gatherings). In some crowds the stability is often precarious. The crowd’s own rules can be broken very easily by small deviations, particularly if Homo Imitans has ‘converged’ from different ‘positions’ and uses the crowd as a vehicle of expression. In crowd mode, sometimes all it takes is a minority of rule-breakers to exacerbate hidden emotions in Homo Imitans. The anti-Iraq war demonstrations in the UK and other parts of the world saw enormous (largely selforganized) crowds composed of a variety of unlikely companions. On the surface, they all had the anti-war theme in common, but the motivations behind their anti-war stance and the ‘crowd-joining’ mechanisms were extremely diverse. The crowd, which can have its own personality and emotions, is the perfect social copier and amplifier. An old classification of primal emotions is useful here</span><span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 7.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">4</span><span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">. It is said that if the dominant emotion is fear, the crowd could convert it into panic. If it’s craze, the crowd produces joy. If it’s anger, the crowd breeds hostility.<o:p></o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">Incidentally, I believe my parents may have inadvertently been very fond of the convergent theory, as they often used the Spanish expression </span><i><span style="font-family: "Candara,Italic","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Candara\,Italic";">‘</span></i><span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">Dios los cria y ellos se juntan’. This translates roughly as ‘God creates them and then they get together’, pretty much meaning people always seem to be able to find likeminded people and associate themselves with those. The English say ‘birds of a feather flock together’, but in my parents’ opinion that always meant something more. It meant trouble...<o:p></o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">For more visit </span><span lang="EN-GB"><a href="http://www.viralchange.com/">www.viralchange.com</a><span class="MsoHyperlink"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div> </div> http://www.viralchange.net/2014/04/dios-los-cria-y-ellos-se-juntan.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Julie Smith)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8083788690470870386.post-7930828420239855016Thu, 10 Apr 2014 06:00:00 +00002014-04-13T20:34:34.270+01:00Why do we have an epidemic of obesity and not of anorexia?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"> <i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">An excerpt from the book Homo Imitans by Leandro Herrero:</span></i></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">Like many aspects of the behavioural and social sciences, it </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">contains a high dose of stereotyped thinking that is not always </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">substantiated. Take public role models, for example. The </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">question is not whether they are powerful, but what their </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">relative power is when compared with other mechanisms of </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">social influence...</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">Eating habits are a good example. We spend a lot of time </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">criticizing thin young girls on the catwalk. With their quasianorexic </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">looks, we believe they are perverse role models for the </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">younger generation, who will then aspire to become (and stay) a </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">size zero. But if their influence is so powerful, why do we have an </span><span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">epidemic of obesity and not of anorexia? As I have mentioned </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">before, a close friend or a friend of a friend has more power to </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">influence your body weight than thousands of pictures of skinny </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">people in magazines. Close ties may be more powerful than </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">pictures on a screen.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">If you navigate the waters of corporate life, as I do as an </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">organizational consultant, you will often hear that the role </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">modelling of the senior leadership team dictates what goes on </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">below them. Or that people in the organization cannot behave in </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">a particular (ethical, effective, open...) way if the leaders at the </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">top don’t behave that way. Both claims assume that the </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">leadership or management team at the top has great powers. It </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">is so entrenched in our management thinking that just the idea </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">of challenging this would raise a few corporate eyebrows. </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">It is difficult to disagree with the idea that the top leadership </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">must surely be behaving following the standards that they wish </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">to be used in the organization and that if these standards are </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">poor, it is likely that the organization is on shaky ground to say </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">the least.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><br /></span></div> <br /> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">For more visit </span><span lang="EN-GB"><a href="http://www.viralchange.com/">www.viralchange.com</a></span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div> </div> http://www.viralchange.net/2014/04/why-do-we-have-epidemic-of-obesity-and.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Julie Smith)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8083788690470870386.post-3849634525995426045Tue, 08 Apr 2014 06:30:00 +00002014-04-13T20:33:32.766+01:00The champions...<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"> <i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">An excerpt from the book Homo Imitans by Leandro Herrero:</span></i><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">The pre-existence or the engineering of a common goal very </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">often links people together in a way that accelerates social </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">copying. In a recent television series in England, school students </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">with no particular singing skills or interest in singing were invited </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">by a charismatic young (external) teacher to create a choir in a </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">school without choir tradition. At first, the teacher was </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">frustrated as he was not able to get many students to join. Then, </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">a tipping point moment followed where the enrollment of some </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">induced the enrolment of others and, suddenly, a very </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">reasonably-sized choir was formed. At some point (‘threshold </span><span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">change’), social copying (enrolling, attending class, singing, </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">rehearsing) took over and singing in a choir became acceptable. </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Eventually, this brand new choir entered a large public </span><span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">competition at a first-class venue</span><span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;"><br /></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">Many of the components of social contagion that will be </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">addressed in this book were present in that television series. The </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">champions: mainly the young teacher and the head of music. The </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">backstage leaders: the headmaster and other teachers. At first, </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">they were baffled, but then they understood that their role was </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">to support the choir in the background and to be seen doing so; </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">not to come along to choir rehearsals and pontificate about ‘the </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">importance of singing’. The behaviours: joining the queue for </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">enrollment, rehearsing, being punctual and talking about it. The </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">attitude of the students: initially sceptical and even hostile, but </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">then turning into positive when they saw a critical mass (a group </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">of their own peers) on board. The threshold change: slow intake </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">and change at the beginning, then things speeding up quite </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">quickly. The social reinforcement: being able to sing per se and in </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">front of people; the visit from other young choir singers from </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">another school of similar social status (‘people like us’) and, </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">probably, the presence of the cameras.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <br /> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">For more visit </span><span lang="EN-GB"><a href="http://www.viralchange.com/">www.viralchange.com</a><span class="MsoHyperlink"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div> </div> http://www.viralchange.net/2014/04/the-champions.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Julie Smith)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8083788690470870386.post-1894138501207881751Fri, 04 Apr 2014 07:30:00 +00002014-04-04T08:30:00.202+01:00Monkey see, monkey do...<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"> <i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">An excerpt from the book Homo Imitans by Leandro Herrero:</span></i><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">Homo Imitans is at the core of evolution. We </span><i><span style="font-family: "Candara,Italic","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Candara\,Italic";">are </span></i><span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">because </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">we copy. But Homo Imitans did not disappear when </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Homo Sapiens took over. Like a dinner guest reluctant to </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">leave, Homo Imitans stuck around. Social copying explains so </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">much about our behaviour that sometimes it makes you wonder </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">if Sapiens really deserves the limelight it got. When I was a child, </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">the word ‘imitation’ came linked with monkeys. Indeed, at 2 or 3 </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">weeks old, both chimps and humans start imitating others. And </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">then the ‘monkey see, monkey do’ really begins.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">There is a whole world of data available on imitation in animals, </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">but my interest in social infection centres around the social life of </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">that odd couple in evolution: Sapiens and Imitans. People have been documenting the social whereabouts of Homo Imitans for </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">a long time. Some of those accounts belong to the social </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">sciences and only surface in the media occasionally. However, </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">some phenomena start in the media and end up being analyzed </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">or validated by academia.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: "Candara","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Candara;">In the Annex of this book you will find a library of short </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">summaries of the most relevant cases that illustrate this social </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">life. The classification in the Annex is artificial, but deliberate. I </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">grouped them as they tend to appear in public life (‘clusters of </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">examples’), but there is a great deal of overlap between the </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">mechanisms involved. I’ll take you on a short tour later, but, </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">before that, let me set the scene by sharing some comments on </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">six general and somehow overlapping examples of our social </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">copying life.</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">For more visit </span><span lang="EN-GB"><a href="http://www.viralchange.com/">www.viralchange.com</a></span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div> </div> http://www.viralchange.net/2014/04/monkey-see-monkey-do.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Julie Smith)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8083788690470870386.post-2722863805191766474Wed, 02 Apr 2014 07:00:00 +00002014-04-02T08:00:11.640+01:00This statement is silly.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"> <i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">An excerpt from the book Homo Imitans by Leandro Herrero:</span></i><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">In my adopted home country, England, you send your children either to public school or private school. Those who can afford private education will shop around. Parents usually visit nearby schools, look at the facilities, talk to headmasters, listen to their ‘spiel’ of “</span><i><span style="font-family: 'Candara,Italic', sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">children are very happy here, this is</span></i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><i><span style="font-family: 'Candara,Italic', sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">what makes us different</span></i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">”, check the fees and make a decision. All those bits of information get to your brain together with “</span><i><span style="font-family: 'Candara,Italic', sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Mary takes her children here. You know Mary</span></i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">? </span><i><span style="font-family: 'Candara,Italic', sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">The</span></i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><i><span style="font-family: 'Candara,Italic', sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">lawyer you met at that party</span></i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">?” And the combination of all this, allows you to decide ‘freely’ where to send your children. So, Mary and you meet in the car park for years to come. When somebody has just been hired and goes to the office on his first day, he is given a tour of the place and perhaps an induction plan. There are Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) to follow, training courses to join and detailed instructions on how to fill in an expense sheet. In other words, lots of formal ‘onboarding’ stuff. But the SOP does not contain all the rules or the hundreds of things that occupy 90% of your time in daily life. They are not written down. Is it better to bump into each other in the corridor </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">as a way to meet people or to request formal meetings through Outlook instead? Is it better to desert the floor en masse at </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">lunchtime or to unpack plastic containers and free your cucumber sandwiches in solitude instead? Is it better to wear a </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">tie or to avoid embarrassment for being the only one who does?</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Is it better to chat across the dividing screens or to enjoy monastic silence behind closed office doors? Is it better to have meetings in the cafeteria or in meeting rooms? Is it better to put everything into PowerPoints or to have a dialog without visuals?<o:p></o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">By day three the new recruit has unconsciously adopted hundreds of unwritten rules which truly define ‘the culture’.<o:p></o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">We are influenced by others in an incredible way. This statement is silly. It is obvious. However, many people spend a lot of time fighting against the fact that this is actually the case. We all want to be unique, different and not part of the crowd. But we are definitely influenced by others. What’s more, friends and friends of friends seem to have a particularly strong power over us. It is not entirely clear why, but many studies, some of them quoted in this book, show that this is the case. In a very important American study where more than 12,000 people were followed over three decades, it was shown that people were at a greater risk of becoming obese when a close friend became obese. We’ll talk more about this later. Obesity! Friends! Interestingly, in this large study, friends were statistically well above the influence from spouse or siblings.<o:p></o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <br /> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">For more visit </span><span lang="EN-GB"><a href="http://www.viralchange.com/">www.viralchange.com</a></span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div> </div> http://www.viralchange.net/2014/04/this-statement-is-silly.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Julie Smith)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8083788690470870386.post-4127265996015701913Fri, 28 Mar 2014 09:00:00 +00002014-04-13T20:32:51.274+01:00Obesity! Friends! <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><i>An excerpt from the book Homo Imitans by Leandro Herrero:</i><o:p></o:p></span><br /> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><i><br /></i></span> <br /> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">In my adopted home country, England, you send your children either to public school or private school. Those who can afford private education will shop around. Parents usually visit nearby schools, look at the facilities, talk to headmasters, listen to their ‘spiel’ of “</span><i><span style="font-family: 'Candara,Italic', sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">children are very happy here, this is</span></i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><i><span style="font-family: 'Candara,Italic', sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">what makes us different</span></i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">”, check the fees and make a decision. All those bits of information get to your brain together with “</span><i><span style="font-family: 'Candara,Italic', sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Mary takes her children here. You know Mary</span></i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">? </span><i><span style="font-family: 'Candara,Italic', sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">The</span></i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><i><span style="font-family: 'Candara,Italic', sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">lawyer you met at that party</span></i><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">?” And the combination of all this, allows you to decide ‘freely’ where to send your children. </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><br /></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">So, Mary and you meet in the car park for years to come. When somebody has just been hired and goes to the office on his first day, he is given a tour of the place and perhaps an induction plan. There are Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) to follow, training courses to join and detailed instructions on how to fill in an expense sheet. In other words, lots of formal ‘onboarding’ stuff. But the SOP does not contain all the rules or the hundreds of things that occupy 90% of your time in daily life. They are not written down. Is it better to bump into each other in the corridor </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">as a way to meet people or to request formal meetings through Outlook instead? Is it better to desert the floor en masse at </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">lunchtime or to unpack plastic containers and free your cucumber sandwiches in solitude instead? Is it better to wear a </span><span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">tie or to avoid embarrassment for being the only one who does?</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Is it better to chat across the dividing screens or to enjoy monastic silence behind closed office doors? Is it better to have meetings in the cafeteria or in meeting rooms? Is it better to put everything into PowerPoints or to have a dialog without visuals?<o:p></o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">By day three the new recruit has unconsciously adopted hundreds of unwritten rules which truly define ‘the culture’.<o:p></o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">We are influenced by others in an incredible way. This statement is silly. It is obvious. However, many people spend a lot of time fighting against the fact that this is actually the case. We all want to be unique, different and not part of the crowd. But we are definitely influenced by others. What’s more, friends and friends of friends seem to have a particularly strong power over us. It is not entirely clear why, but many studies, some of them quoted in this book, show that this is the case. In a very important American study where more than 12,000 people were followed over three decades, it was shown that people were at a greater risk of becoming obese when a close friend became obese. We’ll talk more about this later. Obesity! Friends! Interestingly, in this large study, friends were statistically well above the influence from spouse or siblings.<o:p></o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br /></div> <br /> <div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-family: Candara, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">For more visit </span><span lang="EN-GB"><a href="http://www.viralchange.com/">www.viralchange.com</a></span></div> </div> http://www.viralchange.net/2014/03/obesity-friends.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Julie Smith)0