Leaving the insanity behind

“Companies have lots of things in the machine – selling skills, advanced selling skills, competitive selling skills, coaching, advanced coaching – and the average response is: let

By Editor on Sep 4, 2007

Companies have lots of things in the machine selling skills, advanced selling skills, competitive selling skills, coaching, advanced coaching and the average response is: let's have more of the same, Herrero says a bit tongue-in-cheek. Insanity is carrying on a me too's change management programme in the same old way and expecting it to work this time.

Big bang

We employ new tools, do lots of communication and training and undertake new process mapping, expecting new behaviours and cultures just to happen, he says. But the average change programme starts with a big bang and then disappears as the next corporate initiative comes up or, worse yet, shows up again and again as though it has a life of its own, he warns.

Despite lots of stakeholder meetings, user teams and steering committees, things fail and more often than not it gets blamed on any associated technology, Herrero says.

Twenty-five per cent of the problems come from technology and 75% from people, but we'sre happy to spend 75% of our money on trying to fix the technology, he says. That's the mathematics we use, so we shouldn'st be surprised.

Behaviours are not by-products
Behaviours, he says, are simply expected as a by-product of all else that we do. But the reality, Herrero points out from experience, is that people continue doing as before and the project is considered a failure.

Sound familiar?

We need to first understand the behaviours we have in the system to sustain the new processes, he says. We cannot expect behaviours will happen as a result of new programmes and systems. It's very counter-intuitive, but that's how it is.

If a company wants to implement collaboration tools, it must first have collaboration as a behaviour as part of the DNA of the sales force first if the collaboration is going to work, he says.

Desired behaviours also must be properly reinforced, Herrero says.

You must reinforce the things you want to promote, develop or create, he explains. It sounds stupid, but reality is that in many cases we want one thing, but reinforce another. We want teamwork, but reward with an individual bonus. We want quality customer relationships but we reward call rate.

A typical example, Herrero says, is sales force management inputs and outputs. By pushing inputs such as efforts, training, use of tools and sophisticated analytics companies believe they will get the desired outputs.

The problem is that reinforcing input does not necessarily yield output; it gets you more input, he says. So our sophisticated, super-trained sales force is a sophisticated, super-trained sales force, but not necessarily productive.

Ideas travel

Another important tool for driving change and establishing behaviours is to understand how ideas travel within an organisation, Herrero says.

Your organisation is a set of connections and flow of individuals or networks that are very complex, he says. But old organisations look like organisational charts, where big issues require big action to push them down through all the management levels. It's a tsunami approach to change that comes from the top and moves down through the organisation.

Change, however, doesn'st have to be slow and painful or unsuccessful, Herrero says. Today's organisations need to switch to a small set of sometimes non-negotiable behaviours that have the ability to deal with big issues and create sustainable change, he advises.

Organisations are really clusters of networks linked with each other, he explains. Some are week ties, while others are stronger, but 75% of all conversations, collaboration and innovation happen in these networks. Only 25% occurs in teams, committees and other formal clusters. So it seems like a waste to put our energy in the 25%, but that's what we do all the time.

Viral change

Behaviours, Herrero says, spread through an organisation much like an infection spreads throughout a population. Some individuals are exposed and the behaviour is established or has infected them, while others are exposed and incubating the behaviour, just on the verge of change. A third group is exposed, but not showing symptoms or signs of acquiring the behaviour and a fourth group is still of an unknown status.

Distribution of people in organisational networks does not follow the Bell curve one might expect, he says. Instead it is a power law, where there are small groups with a large number of connections and a large group with few connections.

Groups with more connections, will continue to grow their numbers of connections and ones with less will acquire fewer, Herrero says.

It's a simple case of the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, he explains. And at some point groups with a large number of connections will reach a tipping point. When that occurs, a super node's is created that behaves as a single unit that thinks, does and looks the same. It's often called group think.'s

In highly networked organisations, Herrero says, massive communications to all miss the point that ideas travel better through the best connected individuals or groups. Capitalising on networks allows ideas to be established even if they don'st directly touch every member of an organization, he stresses.

The viral system of change is very powerful, Herrero says. No other system can do that. A small set of non-negotiable behaviours communicated through a small group of people in the networked organisation can yield big, sustainable change.

The pharma industry is full of me too companies, Herrero warns. They must reboot, he says, and become really innovative companies through viral change.

Is it time for your company to reboot?

Viral Change: the alternative to slow, painful and unsuccessful management of change in organizations by Leandro Herrero (meetingminds, 2006) is available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble and through meetingminds.