A prescription for Virality

A daunting challenge in organizations is in ensuring that new initiatives launched are propagated company-wide, radiated across teams and embraced by employees. Despite the best of intent, most ideas have an early death and get buried the very next quarter.

This is the case with several kinds of initiatives: tactical adjustments to priorities, new processes or ways-of-working, and at times deep cultural changes to the inner fabric of organisations, which is the toughest of all.

Leadership and their role in propagation of ideas

I’ve grappled with this change management challenge for years, whether at a team or a program level, or at the organisational scale, as has been in the past years at Gramener. I’ve experimented quite a bit with the packaging of the idea and exploring various channels of communicating and selling them.

There has been mixed success following these up with positive and negative reinforcements, in terms of rewards & penalties. While phase-wise expansion led with pilots and close monitoring have had some influence on adoption.

Leadership responsibility doesn’t rest with conceiving and setting the changes in motion. Nor does it suffice to just convert them post-launch into a metric in the organisational dashboard. Leaders are looked upon to make ideas go viral.

Tipping Point: a master plan for virality

Malcom Gladwell’s ‘Tipping Point, has useful lessons in this regard. In the series of my recent catchup with Gladwell’s books, it was only natural that I complete this one, his first book.

I lay out learnings from this book in an organizational context on a potential prescription to architect virality of a strategic initiative. Its just 3 things that one needs to manage carefully, to unleash the storm:

“The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.”

1. Right Message:

• Get a sticky content as a first step to virality, & get your messaging right. Package it well (say posters, slogans) & make it relevant to your audience
• Identify Call-to-Action by prescribing what individuals need to do next. Its shown that this alone could differentiate success from failure.

“There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible.”

2. Targeted Individuals:

• Target critical links in the team, as Gladwell shows not everyone matters in making something go viral. Its those few, specifically, 3 kinds of people.
• Connectors are well-networked people to spread the message; Salesmen are persuasive sellers who convert; Mavens are knowledge experts who validate, improvise, educate others & form the backbone of an initiative.

“There are exceptional people out there who are capable of starting epidemics. All you have to do is find them.”

3. Right context

• Create the right environment for the message to thrive & multiply. One needs to engineer and actively create this, rather than wait and watch
• Reinforce behaviour — positive or negative (awards/penalites), enlist symbolic influencers and grow a community that can drive change

“..to bring a fundamental change in people’s belief & behavior… create a community around them, where those new beliefs can be practiced ..& nurtured.”

Interestingly, this concept applies to almost any situation and the takeaways can be comfortably adapted, as exemplified by the many examples quoted in the book. If this has aroused some interest so far, do check out the book.