As a behavioural psychiatrist by background, Dr Leandro Herrero knows only too well how people’s behaviour can influence an organisation. Now, after many years’ experience in industry, he is using his expertise to help businesses adopt a radically different approach to achieving change and improving performance.

Through the Chalfont Project (www.thechalfontproject.com), a consulting company of organisational architects that he founded in 2000, he works with a broad range of international clients, from Fortune 500 to small start-ups, focusing on innovation, behavioural change, leadership and human collaboration.

Dr Herrero maintains that the traditional methods of change management are slow, painful and largely unsuccessful. Large-scale initiatives that are cascaded down through big, unwieldy communication programmes are ineffective, he said.

“I call it the Big Splash effect,” he explained. “These things start off at the top with a big splash but, as the message filters down through the organisation, the ripples get weaker and weaker.

“Viral change has the opposite effect. You start off with small ripples of behavioural change, which become stronger as word spreads and more people adopt the changes. It’s like a series of small fires breaking out on a mountain which eventually merge to form one large fire and completely change the landscape.”

So what is viral change and how does it work? According to Dr Herrero it’s a small set of behaviours spread by a small number of people through their networks of influence to create massive behavioural tipping points.

These are translated into new routines and cultures with the adoption of new ideas, different processes or new ways of working.

“Viral change is about creating an internal epidemic of success in whatever way you have pre-defined success,” said Dr Herrero.

It works by getting companies to identify and clarify what they want to change and then getting small groups of people to make the change, spreading the word through action and example until it becomes part of the company culture.

Viral change challenges the traditional role of internal communication, admitted Dr Herrero, but those professionals who embrace it will have a significant part to play, he said.

“I’ve had discussions with various communication organisations and communicators about this. Reactions range from those who want to ignore it and carry on doing things the way they always have to those who are genuinely interested in questioning existing methods.

“Internal communicators have a vital role in supporting viral change, providing the communication framework. But the more significant role is in storytelling. Stories are the currency of change.

“They provide a clear picture to spread a message and it’s up to internal communicators to absorb, capture and pass on the story. It demonstrates that change is happening rather than the traditional approach of bombarding people with communications from on high demanding that change should happen,” he concluded.