The Chalfont Project focuses on behaviours in all the change programmes they implement with clients.

Behaviours for Success delivers effective and sustainable change, whilst it also enables the client to lead the process themselves in future situations.

High impact Cultural Change is a unique programme to change ‘the way we do things’ in an organization quickly.

The Chalfont Project has created Viral Change as a conceptual umbrella. It’s a specific methodology and model of ‘management of change’ that creates sustainable organizational change. Viral Change combines behavioural change management and the power of internal networks of influence within the organization.

You can read more about Viral Change in Leandro Herrero’s book Viral Change: the alternative to slow, painful and unsuccesful management of change in organizations. The book is available from Amazon UK, Amazon US or through meetingminds.

You can also listen to Leandro Herrero talk about Viral Change in an on-demand audio-visual presentation.

Traditional change management models focus on implementing new systems and processes first. Then, they roll-out mass-communications and massive training programmes to convince people to switch to the new processes and systems. New behaviours are, consciously or unconsciously, ‘expected’ to appear all by themselves. Very often, the behaviours needed to make a successful switch have not been introduced and so the change fails.

With Behavioural Change, the focus is on changing the behaviours first. In this way, new processes and systems can be rolled-out ‘sustained’ by the new behaviours.

Part of the problem of change management programmes is that they focus too much of the ‘learning’, ‘communicating’ and ‘engaging’ without having specific plans on how to do it – other than massive communication programmes that intend to touch every corner of the organization.

The model is flawed. There is no change unless the change is behavioural. Behaviours can’t be taught or communicated in the traditional way. Behaviours travel and spread via imitation and social copying. Also, only a small percentage of people in the organization have the influence to spread those behaviours – and they are not in senior management.

The traditional academic and consulting model is linear: big change needs big set of initiatives cascaded down to all via big communication programme, with emphasis on a naive rational appeal (‘B is better than A, we should go for A’) and vague conceptual black boxes such as ’employee engagement’.

We have developed and implemented many times a completely different model called Viral Change”. In this model, a small set of behaviours spread by a small number of people through their networks of influence and properly reinforced create massive behavioural tipping points with new routines and ‘cultures’ appearing and becoming stable.

Change for us is to create an internal infection of ( here whatever the object of the change may be) and making success ( in whatever operational definitions have bee agreed) fashionable. The change may have to do more with fashions and infections than rational presentation of objectives and rational persuasion is hard to swallow when people have spent their lives supporting and trying to implement mechanistic top-down so called change programmes.

Behavioural Change is a way to create longer lasting change. We at The Chalfont Project believe there is no change unless there is behavioural change.

Behavioural Change is implementing change in organizations by focussing on changing the behaviours (needed to sustain the change) first, and not by expecting that new behaviours ‘will appear’ as a consequence of changes in processes and systems.

Disruptive Ideas is three things. It is first a usually short engagement with a client to inject disruptive thinking in the way organizations are managed and the specific applications to their company. Disruptive Ideas allows management to look for relatively small interventions or organizational changes, usually of very low cost if any at all, and create high impact. We work with clients to look at their disruptive thinking track record via an assessment of practices and then the injection of new management ideas and their implementation. This is very effective with Innovation groups, management teams, or an entire division.

Disruptive Ideas is also a Seminar that can take place in-house usually for a day or couple of days. In this seminar we use examples of these ideas and explore their use in the organization. It ends with a commitment to action. Then we can help the company in the implementation if needed, but this seminar is crafted as a distinctive one day event. It also works well as a whole day, very dynamic and practical company conference.