LARGE-SCALE BEHAVIOURAL CHANGE

There is no change unless there is a behavioural change. 

Large-scale behavioural and cultural change is Viral Change™ and is the new generation of change management in organizations and society.

From supporting your business as you look to the future, to driving large-scale cultural and behavioural change that is sustainable for the long term – we are your organization’s architects.

A great deal of modern management thinking has been influenced by poor understanding and poor execution of cultural change.

In Viral Change™ we take a ‘behavioural-pragmatic’ approach because behaviours create cultures – which ensures our cultural change approach is more sustainable and effective than traditional change management methods.

We all know that articulating your unique space in the world, and the culture you want to create for your employees, is vital. However, how do you make it stick? How do you activate it in a way which ensures it resonates with all employees regardless of function, hierarchy, or expertise? How can you make sure employees live and breathe your culture?

We have been successfully driving internal cultural and behavioural change in organizations for many years and we are ready to help you now with our unique and proven approach to relaunching the fundamental principles of your organization’s cultural positioning.

 

What We Offer

Our people mobilizing platform, Viral Change™, is an extensive consulting programme which drives sustainable, behavioural and cultural change, at scale. Led by our behavioural and cultural change experts at The Chalfont Project, this programme will successfully drive change to achieve the culture you want for your business unit or organization. For an example of our roadmap: PowerPoint Presentation (viralchange.com).

To hear what our Viral Change™ clients say: https://vimeo.com/548491263/447e2a3bdc

FIND OUT MORE ABOUT OUR LONGER-TERM CONSULTING SERVICES

Viral Change

Viral Safety™

CultureLab: Fast review of your culture change plans and actionable recommendations to implement changes

FIND OUT MORE ABOUT OUR SHORT TERM INTERVENTIONS:

Feed Forward Your Organization: the 5 Key Pillars of Culture Change

Activating Your Values and Behaviours

Uncover the Critical Behaviour Drivers You Need in the Post-Pandemic World

BOOKS AND OTHER RESOURCES

Viral Change book
Viral Change - the alternative to slow and painful management of change
Homo Imitans book
Homo Imitans - the art of social infection
The Mobilize Masterclass - online learning from The Chalfont Project Academy
Behavioural Change - online learning from The Chalfont Project Academy
Attitudes to Change - online learning from The Chalfont Project Academy

Viral Change™ in Organizations

Sustainable large scale behavioural change ensures your business is fit for the future. With our expert team of culture and behavioural change experts we will work with you to ensure your culture is the best it can be. 

We engage everyone in your organization and drive change from the grassroots up, led by a unique style of leadership that focuses on supporting ownership and responsibility. It provides a solution for many of your organizational needs where changing behaviours and making them sustainable is key.

Let’s face it – your success, that of the teams or individuals in your organization, is reliant on behaviours – not just yours but everyone’s.

  • Imagine real peer-to-peer change with high impact. 
  • Imagine your organization, in the not too distant future, where small groups of highly connected and influential employees (not just management) are driving change by engaging their peers in conversations and actions.
  • Imagine, for example, as a result of behavioural change, you are all closer to the customer, decisions are quicker, engagement is higher, and attrition falls. Imagine that this is not a one-off phenomenon, but it has become the norm. That will happen dozens or perhaps a hundred times today. Also, those conversations and interactions between those peers take place very informally, not in teams, workshops or committees.
  • Imagine that, as a result of starting this practice now, it is common and routine for most employees to ask, “Can this be done better, faster, cheaper, and more successfully?” 
  • Imagine that all of this becomes normal, as normal as having a team meeting, a 1:1, or a regular salary.
  • Imagine other new habits, such as asking the question ‘who needs to know about this?’ and openly sharing innovation, ideas, and information regardless of roles, boundaries, groups, or team identities.
  • Imagine all of this breaks down siloed working, removes unhealthy behaviours, and everyone focuses on their role within the entire organization, their role as a responsible and solutions-focused employee that truly means they become a colleague to all—a real advocate for the organization with every customer, on or off the clock. 
  • Imagine one hundred thousand people behaving in this way, not just today but as the norm. None of the above is achieved through endless workshops, pamphlets, office posters, or top-down management rhetoric. 
  • Leaders support grassroots activity.

Now imagine two more things;

  • Stories are floating around the organization about small or not-so-small successes, and as a result, people share and talk about them.
  • The hierarchy of managers and leaders has mainly remained invisible but has been coached to support those small groups and lead this socially derived change from behind. This is called Backstage Leadership™, and we create it with you.

We describe change driven from your grassroots up and at a large scale, sustainable, with a strong focus on new behaviours and an additional form of personal and peer leadership that is largely distributed across the organization.

We orchestrate this for your organization. This is true change; this is a well-orchestrated social movement.

Viral Change™, can enable you to:

  • Get closer to the customer
  • Be more responsive
  • Create cross-collaboration across the board
  • Execute a rapid integration, merger, or restructuring
  • Implement new ways of doing things following an employee engagement initiative
  • Create a particular culture
  • Enable a broad transformation to be able to do more with less, faster and better
  • Embed safety behaviours, not just train on safety
  • Increase the use of new technologies, which depend on people adopting new behaviours

Viral Change™, leading to behavioural change, provides solutions for any situation that depends on stabilising new behaviours or new ways of ‘doing’ and requires the changes to be sustainable and multiplied at a rate and scale.

The formula is behaviours x peer to peer influence x informal networks, plus stories and backstage leadership = RESULT.

This is a proven platform that delivers. We are the architects of this approach and its practical orchestration and implementation. We will orchestrate large-scale behavioural change by partnering with you and your team of leaders as you lead from backstage.

Viral Change™ provides solutions to business problems

Viral Change™ provides solutions for any situation which depends on spreading and/or establishing new behaviours or new ways of doing and which requires the changes to be sustainable and at a large scale.

LET’S TALK – TO FIND OUT HOW WE CAN WORK TOGETHER TO POSITIVELY IMPACT YOUR BUSINESS THROUGH VIRAL CHANGE™ – CONTACT US

VIRAL CHANGE™ IN SOCIETAL CHANGE

LARGE-SCALE BEHAVIOURAL CHANGE IS AT THE CORE OF THE SOLUTION FOR MANY SOCIETAL PROBLEMS, FROM PUBLIC HEALTH TO COMMUNITY CHALLENGES AND THE WORLD OF SUSTAINABILITY.

MICRO AND MACRO SOCIAL CHANGE FOLLOW THE SAME RULES

In the book Homo Imitans, Leandro Herrero makes a persisting point: there are no fundamental differences between the mechanism that creates (or blocks) a grassroots-driven large-scale behavioural change inside the organization and those which create (or block) behavioural changes in the wider society. In both territories what has been created is a form of social movement, whether it is labelled or not in this way.

The success formula is the same: strong focus on behaviours (versus a more vague and ‘unmanageable’ ‘change of attitudes’ or ‘change of mindset’); peer-to-peer influence ( versus top-down hierarchical dictation); informal networks of relationships and influence (versus formal team and committees structures); stories that flow around and create a new narrative of success (versus top-down a bombardment of information) and a particular form of leadership which may seem largely invisible (versus traditional command and control) but which is working from the background.

WHEN THE FOCUS IS LARGE-SCALE CHANGE IN SOCIETAL TERMS.

Health awareness programmes, health-related behavioural change, tackling street violence, community cohesion projects, social interventions on dysfunctional groups such as families, interventions to holt spread of antisocial behaviour, large-scale behavioural change needed in sustainable and green goals, these are all examples where we need to move from top-down indoctrination and hierarchical cascade down of information to a grass-roots, peer to peer-driven social copying and imitation. As Leandro Herrero says in Homo Imitans, ‘the best way to tackle a behavioural epidemic is not to fight it but to orchestrate a counter-epidemic’.

VIRAL SAFETY

My safety is your safety.

That could be the summary slogan of what we are doing in Viral Safety™. A bottom-up approach where safety behaviours are universal, for managers and staff, no distinction. Safety is not something imposed or just a question of compliance. It’s collective cooperation, employee engagement and personal ownership, all in one.

Safety is acknowledged to be priority number one for many organizations in a variety of sectors. The traditional approach to building these capabilities in the organization has been training. Numerous well-crafted Safety Training Programmes do exist, obviously targeted to the specific industry and sector, if not a particular company in itself.

Beyond training

Many good companies have excellent safety training programmes. In fact, in some cases, training is so pervasive and performed so efficiently that training per se seems to take over and shape the entire culture. That may sound good but, in fact, ‘a culture of safety’ is not the same as ‘a culture of training in safety’. ‘Safety’ and ‘training on safety’ are different.

Training is crucial, necessary, and imperative. Unfortunately, it’s not sufficient. Awareness of risks, protocols, and procedures do not guarantee the consequent behaviours of people. The traditional safety approach is heavily biased towards compliance. In many cases, ‘safety’ and ‘compliance’ has become indistinguishable.

Behavioural focus.

However, safety is heavily behavioural: what people do or don’t, not what people ‘understand’. ‘Knowing’ that something is wrong, or risky is not a guarantee that people will behave accordingly. Awareness that non-compliance may have consequences, shifts the energy towards circumventing compliance and avoiding the consequences, not a solid platform to build a culture.

This area of work is also often contaminated by historical ‘belief systems’: ‘accidents will always happen, this is a risky world, it’s inevitable.

The Viral Change™ Principles.

In our Viral Safety™  programmes we tailor the fundamentals of the Viral Change™ methodology of large-scale behaviours and cultural change  focusing on

  • A small set of non-negotiable behaviours that apply to all in the organization, management and staff
  • The power of peer-to-peer as the strongest known force of change and behavioural spread in any organization
  • The importance of the informality of connections and influence between people regardless of hierarchy
  • The amplifying power of storytelling to spread key behaviours
  • A leadership model (Backstage Leadership™) in which top leaders and managers create the conditions for all of the above, as opposed to simply exercising ‘compliance power’

Bottom-up meets Top-down.

Viral Safety™ will plug into existing top-down safety training and communication programmes but will focus on the bottom-up spread and scale up of specific behaviours that will not just enhance but will make real the learnings from the communication and training systems.

Whilst top-down training and communication have intrinsic limitations (one cannot be trained every day, and, possibly, the reach to the entire organization is by definition limited) Viral Safety™ multiplies day-to-day behaviours across the entire organization regardless of the immediacy of a training programme.

A true culture of safety.

Viral Safety™ creates a culture of safety, which is not the same as ‘a culture of compliance’ or ‘a culture of training’, although both are of course included.

For every unsafe act/incident there are thousands of safe ones. For us, in behavioural terms, reinforcing positivity is paramount.

Safety, embedded in daily life, across the board, requires a true social movement where everybody has a role. We, at The Chalfont Project, and via our proprietary Viral Change™ platform, create that social movement. We’ve been doing this for more than 20 years. We know what works. Talk to us to see how we can help you.

 

HOW TO DRIVE CULTURE CHANGE IN your ORGANIZATION via our short term accelerator interventions

Activating Your Values and Behaviours

Delivered by The Chalfont Project’s behavioural and cultural change experts, these interactive and bespoke sessions will focus on uncovering, revealing, or re-positioning your organization’s cultural framework in a way that avoids PowerPoints and the uninspiring standard presentation. 

We will support you in bringing your cultural articulation to life through a combination of plenary sessions, interactive breakouts involving real-life scenarios unique to your organization, and Q&A.

  • The importance and reasoning behind your cultural framework
  • Positive change that will occur as a result of the session
  • Understand behaviours that will be detrimental to the new framework
  • Committing to the simple changes that will impact the organization as a whole
  • Maintain momentum for driving your organization’s culture forward by committing to one simple change and sharing that commitment with others

Uncovering Critical Behaviours and Values

If your needs are more behavioural focused and you’re still identifying your key values or behaviours – our team of specialists, led by Dr Leandro Herrero, will work with you through this short intervention to:

  • Develop a comprehensive set of non-negotiable behavioural drivers
  • Ensure there is a clear understanding of how these were selected and why
  • Understand how these will drive culture change across the organization
  • Produce a roadmap for the next steps

Both interventions can be delivered virtually or in-person, our experts will attend and conduct an engaging and immersive session.

Sessions can be half to 2-day sessions depending on your business needs. We will provide guidance on follow-up activities and recommendations to ensure that momentum from the session continues long after the session finishes. 

We have successfully driven behavioural and cultural change for many organizations and we are ready to help you get the culture you need and ensure your business is fit for the future.

 

Feed Forward Your Organization: the 5 Key Pillars of Culture Change

There is no change unless there is behavioural change. The laws governing behavioural change are very specific. And we can help you navigate them.

If you want to have a conversation about the future of work, don’t start with hybrid vs. non-hybrid, flexible vs. non-flexible, work from home vs. work from anywhere.

It’s the wrong start!

The real conversation is about the culture you want or need. Company culture is the petri dish where everything grows. The culture has workplaces. Focus on culture. This is the real driver. This is the true conversation. In the current climate the future of work has changed.

We have been successfully driving internal cultural and behavioural change in organizations for many years and we are ready to help you now, using the Five Pillars of our proprietary behavioural change platform –  Viral Change™:

Behaviours 

Peer-to-peer networks 

Influence 

Storytelling

Backstage Leadership™ 

We will guide you through and help you create sustainable behavioural and cultural change across your organization/team/department to ensure you are fully prepared for the future…not stuck in the past.

Key Learnings

Using the Viral Change™ Mobilizing Platform framework, cultural change experts from The Chalfont Project team led by Dr Leandro Herrero, will develop a bespoke agenda for your organization based on our 5 pillars.  Following a detailed discussion with you, sessions will be weighted depending on your organizational needs.

BEHAVIOURAL-BASED MANAGEMENT:

Your organizational focus should be on instilling behaviours, not simply changing or implementing new processes and systems; these are the baseline, a given.

Key learning: Understand the value of implementing behavioural-based change in your organization.

MOBILIZING SCALABLE INFLUENCE: 

How to maximize influence and trust within the organization; hierarchical influence is a given. However, peer-to-peer influence is the true engine.

Key learning: Learn to map the real influencer network amongst your employees and make use of it in your organization.

NURTURING INFORMAL SOCIAL NETWORKS: 

Formal structures are a given, the default. However, most of the neat stuff happens in informal social networks, ignore them at your peril.

Key learning: Identity your internal social networks and learn how to harness their power in your organization.

ACCELERATING A NEW NARRATIVE (STORIES): 

Storytelling is not new, although still largely ignored by many business organizations. It has never been more important to master the art of using the right stories to accelerate a new corporate narrative.

Key learning: Learn the essentials of storytelling and promote their value within your organization.

FOSTERING BACKSTAGE LEADERSHIP™: 

Top-down leadership is a given; the real engine of leadership is distributed around the organization in the form of highly influential people, whose influence does not depend on the job description or title.

Key learning: Uncover, enhance and master the concept of Backstage Leadership™ in your organization.

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