freediver
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Another interesting newsletter from Michael Wood:
Change management - What does it all meme?
One of the more fascinating concepts to emerge from the cross-fertility between the sciences is the concept of memes. Memes are intellectual concepts. They can be understood as a single idea. These memes are considered to exist under some of the same rules that govern an ecology. Some memes are competitive with each other. Some help each other. Some have no effect on each other at all.
If you are familiar with movies such as "The Matrix", you will be familiar with the concept that bodies are hardware, and minds are software. Who you are depends upon you mind, not the hardware it is sitting in. So you can still be you, even if you are living in virtual reality, or transferred to another body, even a robot.
Memes take this abstraction one step further. Memes live in the environment of your mind. Your mind is their virtual reality. This is the memescape a truly mind-blowing concept.
The memescape has its own rules. A new meme, a new idea, that enters the memescape must compete with the exiting memes if it is to find a home. Your head becomes a jungle where ideas fight to the death to gain a foothold.
The concepts of memes provide great tools for understanding how knowledge is incorporated into an individual or an organization.
In most people, a new meme fights for its life, displacing existing memes in its ecological niche, or combining with existing memes. An unsuccessful meme simply dies off ("in one ear and out the other"). A meme that is completely foreign to the mental environment may not survive for very long at all.
(People who are disconnected from others often do not share many of the same memes.)
Like an ecology, the nastiest memes can be the hardest to get rid of - weed memes. Stupid ideas, bad biases, lazy behaviours, all sorts of things take root and are hard to get rid of. Nasty ideas also have a habit of sitting un-noticed until they leap out. Self-doubt and suspicion are easily planted, but hard to remove.
A very few, rare individuals are able to compartmentalize their memescape, basically building a zoo of ideas. Some of these may be wildly antagonistic to each other. In genius, this presents as the ability to contemplate contradictory information and concepts. It can also be the basis of empathy for others.
Some people have a completely closed system, an ecosphere in which nothing new enters. These are scary people, and a little sad.
You should also realize that some individuals my have highly developed immune systems that protect them from bad memes. These individuals may get thrown into a cesspit of a situation or group, and yet come out the other end as still good people and great employees. Not everyone has that. Not every person in the company will survive the experience. Worse, these bad memes are not limited to work. If a bad meme takes hold, it can spread into the home life affecting more than simple business bottom lines. There are also individuals with warped immune systems that prevent them taking in new beneficial concepts.
For an idea to take root and spread in an organization requires that it falls on fertile ground. With this model, it is obvious that you cannot simply dump new ideas and concepts into a company and expect things to change without preparation.
You have to prepare the group by finding memes that have something in common with the existing mental flora and fauna, but are more like what you want to have in the organization. To do that, you will want to develop a meme map that puts down in black-and-white exactly what beliefs exist in the company.
By the way, bad people don't have this restriction. Weeds spread faster than flowers, and it is much easier to destroy an organization than to improve it.
You need to continue to provide a conducive environment for the memes to grow. This means constantly encouraging and reinforcing the new ideas. There is no point in throwing a handful of seeds into the wind and coming back twelve months later looking for a crop.
You also have to be vigilant for the take up of weed memes. They can be hard to spot and tricky to overcome.
A common mistake that managers make is to react to the people, rather than to the meme. Managers may get rid of staff, calling them a bad egg or rotten apple, but have exactly the same problem at the end.
Have you ever seen those organizations that are just bad places to work, with a bad attitude to staff, customers and the job? They usually have disillusioned delivery staff and fearful and political managers. They also have massive staff and management turnover, yet the company always smells the same. If the people are always leaving, how can the company remain the same? The answer is that the bad concepts infest the company. As new people come on board, the memes gain a foothold in their memescape. It is, unfortunately, common to see people with great experience and CVs join a bad organization and, instead of making it better, get worse themselves.
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