The #BeMoreYou page on this site is there to help leaders assess if I am the right person to support them and if they are the right person too. Words like bravery and transformation are peppered through the site, and this phrase from the page is apposite to today’s post: “My commitment is that our work together will facilitate the greatest possible impact for you, your business, and the world.”.
In my work, many of my clients over the years have been leaders of large organisations and they bring me in to support them with transformational change, to amplify their own already high impact, to put an even greater dent in the universe, so to speak.
Today I’ll share an excerpt from a recent article on transformational change I found valuable in an understanding of just what it takes to move from idea to execution of transformation.
In this, I’ll also distil some of my thoughts around the themes in the article, including how you can create a conversation around “dropping pebbles” to create an effective strategy to effect “complex contagion” and so real transformation throughout the organisation.
First, an acknowledgement. I say that “people are my library” and one highly valued librarian for me is Bruce Peters. Some of my humourous friends may say I am “wide but shallow”, with knowledge across lots of areas but with some of it not in that much depth. Absolutely! Bruce, on the other hand, is deeply knowledgeable and across a wide range of learning. Recently Bruce sent me an article with a note “I just read this interesting article on building networks/connections. It offered some perspective that I had not encountered.” Bruce is already an expert in this space, so anything which offers him new perspectives I always read right away!
The article is called: “Making Change Contagious” and talks at length about taking transformative change ideas from top leadership and helping them ensure that the idea becomes contagious and then embedded from top to bottom and side to side in the organisation.
Now, are there many, many theories and fields of deep research around taking transformative ideas to deep implementation? Yes.
Is there one “magic bullet” answer to this that I can give you after all my years working in practice in this area? No.
As I wrote in “Learning from The Beatles – “Mixing” your Leadership” :
“In supporting leaders over many years, I love to distil to simplicity, to allow them to focus on their priorities, their message, their context. As Da Vinci said: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”. At the same time, sometimes we need to consider more than ultimate simplicity, we need to consider several dimensions to give depth to our context. By dimensions, I like to envisage sliders on a studio production mixing desk.
Imagine moving them up and down based on what is appropriate for your leadership and what your organisation need. This gives you the choice of moving beyond “either/or”, “yes/no” binary choices, to give some richness and depth to focal areas.”
In the thorough and in-depth “Making Change Contagious” article, the authors referenced various dimensions, including:
Strong ties <> Weak Ties
Simple Contagions <> Complex contagions
Reach <> Redundancy
In the article, they start by comparing and contrasting whether or not to focus on those with whom you have strong ties or weak ties in leading transformative change. It then moves into referencing work of an academic, Damon Centola. Bold type added by me for emphasis:
“Damon Centola, an associate professor..at the University of Pennsylvania…in a new book, How Behavior Spreads, Centola describes his work — and the work of other social network researchers — over the past several years. He explains that strong ties can be better conduits for diffusion than weak ties in some situations. It all depends on what kind of diffusion (or contagion) you are trying to encourage.
Centola says there are two kinds of contagions: Simple contagions that spread effortlessly, such as the measles or the news about your company’s latest quarterly earnings, and complex contagions that don’t spread so easily, such as investing in bitcoins or using a new form of birth control. Adopting complex contagions entails some kind of cost or risk, or it requires that other people start using them before they’re worth your trouble — being the only person you know on Facebook isn’t so great, right? There is, writes Centola, an “important distinction between being exposed to a behaviour — and knowing it is an option for you — and actually deciding to adopt that behaviour for yourself.”
Simple contagions only require exposure and thus are best spread through weak ties. Reach is the key to success with them. But Centola found that complex contagions require adoption, and so need strong ties to help them gain currency. That’s because redundancy is needed. Complex contagions require multiple confirmations to create enough confidence for adoption. Imagine a manufacturing company contemplating 3D printing: How much evidence of the technology’s utility would senior leaders need before they’d be willing to stop using existing assembly lines and start printing components? How many of the company’s customers would have to own 3D printers before its leaders would have the confidence to make that shift?
Corporate transformations are complex contagions, too: They require changes in behaviour, which entail costs and risks. Transformations also feature a high degree of complementarity — lots of people have to get on board if they are to succeed.
This suggests that leaders attempting organizational overhauls should tap their strong ties, which is precisely the opposite of how many leaders approach transformation. They try to reach lots of people with whom they have weak ties at once — bringing large groups together for rousing sessions aimed at describing the burning platform on which they are precariously perched and the visionary lifeline that will save them. The goal: Get the attendees to buy in and then transmit the message far and wide.
Instead, leaders should start smaller and go for redundancy. They should make the case for transformation through their strong ties and let it reverberate among those connections until they convince themselves that it is both real and necessary. And then, leaders can let their strong ties spread the word through their own strong ties. “Viewed from the relational perspective of each individual, strong ties are the most important links in the social network,” writes Centola. “They are proximate, trusted, and familiar, and therefore the most influential for diffusion.”
In my experience (and there has been more for me learned from experiential learning than any academic or other research, trial and error if you will!), I liken the way to organisational transformation to “dropping pebbles“, with the process for creating a strategy for such “complex contagion” (love that phrase!) always having elements unique to each organisation.
Once I am working with a CEO (and sometimes their close leadership team) and they have clarity around the type of transformation (eg new vision, cultural change, commercial pivot etc) they are going to undertake, it is then a matter of making it contagious.
I then start a conversation with them around “dropping pebbles”, to create ripples in a pond that will cascade, reverberate, and also bounce back to the centre. Questions could include:
- What size pebbles do we need to drop?
- How many pebbles?
- When, and with what intervals?
- Where in the pond do we need to drop them?
- How might they reverberate?
To effect organisational transformation does require addressing the needs of complex contagion, so talk about dropping pebbles to create your strategy.
Now, all of that said, if you are a CEO looking to effect transformative change through a vision you have developed and truly believe in, where would you start dropping pebbles?
If this is you, contact me, happy to have an hour for coffee (or on a call anywhere in the world) and am sure that one hour will be of value (and I will also learn from you!). For now, though, I’m aligned with the article, and here is (painting in broad strokes) what I have found to be a distillation of an effective strategy:
- What is your vision?
- Take more time than you think you need to get clear on the vision for transformative change, focussing on cultural/behavioural change at least as much as process and commercial change
- When you feel you then need to spell out the details of the change, don’t. For transformation, it is key to have people buy into the vision and feel they are part of not only implementing it but also in developing it at the level they operate at.
- In short, take time, and at the same time focus on the core elements and consciously leave space for those throughout the organisation to take ownership.
- Engage key leaders
- The CEO cannot do this alone. I repeat. The CEO cannot do this alone. Yes, many have tried, and to some extent succeeded, but for truly transformative change, release the ego entirely and focus on dropping pebbles
- I would almost always start here by engaging key leaders in the organisation before taking it wider. CEO’s have a tendency to start telling the world their grand vision. Slow down, engage others first.
- Who are those key leaders? I would always include those with great reach (as the article references) so in corporates the senior leadership team for sure. I’d also include, in social media terms, “key influencers” at this stage. They must be without reference to corporate hierarchy and may actually be perceived as “junior”, yet I’d always have some “in the room”, both for reach and redundancy, plus the very valuable element of reducing the echo chamber effect.
- Create contagion
- I realised I’ve NOT been concise in making three points at this stage, ah well… got enthusiastic!
- At this third point, however, this is where it gets woolly, it will very much vary between organisations. Such change is complex, hence inherently unpredictable.
- What I will say for now is COMMUNICATE and LISTEN in equal measure.
- As I say to CEO’s and Key Leaders at this stage is “Communicate more than you could possibly imagine is necessary. When you are bored to death of communicating, you are probably halfway there!”.
- When you communicate, no “death by powerpoint”, no webinars or townhalls online with hundreds of people (you think are) listening to you. Instead, you and your first concentric circle of “dropped pebbles” get out and talk to everyone in your organisation. Make the groups small and manageable (eg visit your offices) and create a blend of group meetings, 1:1 meetings, walking the halls.
- Communicate and Listen.
This is such a FUN area to work in, at least I think so !
Have fun, and remember, Drop Pebbles!