Viral Change™ and Society

Nothing described in these pages about the modern approach to change in organizations could not be applicable to macro-social change. In one of our books, Homo Imitans: the art of social infection, viral change in action, we make the point of bridging this gap between what business organizations have traditionally seen as ‘their management world’ and what society sees as ‘social movements and social change’. There are no differences. Change is behavioural in both. Grassroots, bottom-up leadership is more powerful than top-down dictation. This is equally true inside the organization ( private, public, business, NGO…) and in streets, towns and neighbourhoods. In both worlds the formula is the same: small set of non negotiable behaviours, small numbers of highly influential individuals, informal social networks, stories and new narrative and a form of leadership which is distributed.

Social policy needs to be informed by the understanding of how all these components work, their orchestration and their deployment. This is Viral Change™. As Viral Change™ practitioners, ‘the organization’ is our natural home. As citizens, we aspire to support positive social change by bringing our skills and expertise in the socio-behavioural and network approach.

“In the short term, the health of all of us depends largely on people following public health rules (masks, distance, hygiene, group gathering etc.) and also, eventually getting the vaccine.

The Covid-19 virus spreads exponentially and we need to address the desired behavioural change in the same exponential terms. Anything short of that won’t be enough to tackle the epidemic and progress towards normality.

A viral epidemic for which there is no immediate cure, only ways of managing it, can only be controlled by a counter behavioural epidemic.

The very likely availability of several vaccines in the near future brings well founded hope. But there is part of the population that may be reluctant to be vaccinated, mostly out of misinformation and powerful belief systems.

This document addresses the non-medical management of the pandemic through the lenses of large scale behavioural and cultural change principles, as practised by the Viral Change™ Mobilizing Platform for the last 20 years, in the area of organizational change.”

Click on the link to read the full article, first published in November 2020:

12 rules for a behavioural counter-epidemic to deal with Covid-19