Sustaining a movement in your organization
by Arnaud Henneville, Mar 8 2014
As we saw in an earlier post, starting a movement in an organization is not an easy task.
But now that you have managed to get your people’s attention on ‘the Urgent’ (for a discussion on ‘the Urgent’ vs. ‘the Important’, download white paper here) you need to keep them interested. In other words you need to engage them. How does one keep engagement levels high when we know that eventually engagement, like everything else, plateaus?
In our rollouts with some of the most recognized corporations in the world we have isolated 4 key success factors;
- WIIFM: ‘What’s In It For Me? Why shall I pay attention to this apparently ‘Urgent’ thing of yours?’
- Talk to the Heart not just to the Mind & align Incentive Systems accordingly
- Make it Social, Mobile and Glocal
- Data is key: analyze data in real time and adjust if necessary

In today’s complex matrix-organizations, to make an internal initiative go viral is not a laidback endeavor. All leaders have something they want their people to embrace, to do differently or simply to do faster/better. But to sustain the positive spiral past the tipping-point is just as complicated as to obtain it.