12 simple rules of social change, organizational (culture) or societal

My (revised) 12 rules of social change at a scale.?These very simple laws apply to any large scale change including the one inside organizations, cultural change and transformation and any other labels.

1. Cater for many motivations. Don’t kid yourself everybody will join in with the same motives. Super-alignment is overrated. You need to aim at ‘compatible dreams’. But, be very clear and ruthless about the non negotiable, no matter what motivations may be behind people joining. A good focus for the non negotiable is behaviours.
2. Create a compelling narrative, one that explains ‘the cause’ and ‘the success’. In organizational terms, use ‘the cause’ as well as term to frame purpose and direction. Success does not have to be articulated in numbers (only).
3. Segment, segment and segment. One single overriding, top down narrative of mission/vision/strategy that comes down from the top in monolithic form does not make sense. Be aware of the tribal listening. Who expects to hear what? This is normal in political marketing, and very unusual in organizational internal marketing.
4. Engage as many people as you want but the key ones, if you are into scale (and you should be) are the hyper connected, the ones who have a natural pull effect, and can influence many. It has nothing to do with hierarchy. If you don’t know who these people are, you have a big problem.
5. Fix role assumptions, expectations, labels. Advocates, activists, volunteers, passionate, mavericks, rebels, doers… these are very different types of people. Obvious as that may seem, we mistake them all the time
6. Passion per se is overrated. It’s hard work first! 50 passionate people in the room exhibiting passion won’t change many things. Passion is a great bonus when associated to 24/7 commitments.
7. It’s grassroots, or it isn’t. These ‘nice words’ ( a grassroots movement) won’t generate a bottom up system per se. The greatest force of influence is peer-to-peer, but it needs to be orchestrated; it needs to be organized. ‘People-like-me’ plus organization (platform) is the change dynamite equivalent.
8. Leadership is needed. Big discovery! But not any thing leadership. There are at least 2 types. The top down–leadership needs to support, endorse and provide resources. That’s their first hat. Their second hat is Backstage Leadership, the art of supporting the distributed peer-to-peer network in an invisible (backstage) way.
9. ‘Readiness’ is a red herring. No revolution started when everybody could be ready for it. In fact, most likely, not many people may have been ready. Don’t wait for full alignment, full endorsement and full support unless, that is, if you have a second and third life in mind. If you work on this one, go, go, go; people will get ready then.
10. Build in a tracking process, but be careful what you measure, it may be irrelevant. Be clear what you want to see, then figure out how you can capture and extract meaning.
11. Master bottom-up storytelling at a scale. Impactful, even game changing stories are often small and prosaic, but an indication that progress is made. Make sure they are not hidden, a kind of precious secret. Get them out. Big heroic stories are overrated. They don’t speak to ‘people like me’.
12. Recalibrate all the time. Stay in beta. Don’t aim at perfection, or you’ll be perfectly dead soon.

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What now?

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