Ann Marie Galvin

Why "communication" & "persuasion" are insufficient levers for change across an organisation or system: part 2. A summary of comments in response to my last post, across multiple social channels. I pulled out six themes: 1) Why persuasion fails: Greg Satell, author of the original article, clarifies that persuasion methods DO work — Robert Cialdini's research shows that. The problem is that once people return to their social networks, they may get convinced right back. He points to Brown & Reingen's 1987 paper on social ties & word-of-mouth referral as foundational evidence. 2) Visibility & peer influence: Arokia Antonysamy notes that if people in informal networks don't trust change, it won't scale regardless of formal mandate. Nicole Kavanagh adds that visibility strengthens informal networks & gives people courage to act differently. Phil Whatling observes that healthcare teams regularly copy what's working next door — local conditions matter more than large programmes. He suggests that identifying & managing local conditions for safe information flow could be one of the lowest-cost, highest-impact levers for change we have. 3) Conditions for change: Anthony Lawton points out that leaders can only maximise the benefits of social architecture (the relational networks that carry change) when the structural environment supports it. People are asked to adopt new behaviours while the systems around them actively punish exactly that: meeting structures that consume capacity, decision processes that fragment ownership, reporting demands that pull people away from the relationships where change actually travels. Noel Hatch confirms that peer-to-peer spread works when rooted locally — trust builds through shared experience, not messaging — but raises the key question of how to stop that energy staying localised & start reshaping the wider system. 4) Momentum & organisational risks: John-Paul Crofton-Biwer notes NHS change efforts often focus on those who won't change, using authority to cajole. Building momentum behind those already succeeding flips the model — but organisational antibodies can slow or reverse progress when early successes are neglected. Victoria Hewitt adds that replacing "should" with "could" produces open, often joyful responses rather than closed resistance. 5) Show impact from connection: Maike Kueper notes peer influence stays underrated partly because it resists easy measurement. Jo Ann Endo shares a powerful example: a researcher whose palliative care findings spread through networks & had extended patients' lives had no idea how much her work was valued by practitioners. 6) Build the architecture proactively: Melissa Panagides-Busch argues social architecture must be built before crisis hits, not during it. The organisations that navigate hard moments well are usually the ones that invested in those invisible threads long before they needed them. To conclude, a quote from Reza Hosseini Ghomi that sums up the spirit of many of the comments: “social architecture may be the real operating system of transformation”.

Why "communication" and "persuasion" are insufficient approaches to change across an organisation or system. Communication campaigns can build awareness, but they rarely change behaviour at scale. Persuasion works well when our audience is already open to change. But when we lead any significant change effort, we work across the full spectrum: people who proactively advocate for change, those who passively accept it, and those who actively resist it. For a large portion of that population, even the most sophisticated argument will not shift their position. We change through our relationships. I've learnt greatly from @Digitaltonto (link at the bottom of this piece). Decades of social science research shows we're profoundly shaped by the people around us: our colleagues, peers and professional community. This influence extends not just to our immediate connections but three degrees out: to their networks and the networks beyond. When researchers have studied people who made major shifts in their thinking (e.g., leaving long-held beliefs, changing deeply ingrained ways of working), they consistently find that change followed a shift in their social environment, not exposure to a better argument. People did not think their way into new behaviour. They were drawn into it by those around them. This has profound implications for how we lead change. The real levers are not in our communications strategy. They're in our social architecture. Five things we can do as leaders of change to build our social architecture: 1) Find the people who are already moving: People who already believe in what we are trying to do and are quietly making it happen. Find them and connect them to each other. We are not creating energy for change — we are locating it. 2) Create the conditions for peer-to-peer spread: People adopt new ways of working when they see colleagues they respect doing things differently. Prioritise proximity over broadcast. Small group conversations, site visits, and shared learning across teams carry more influence than organisation-wide communications. 3) Make progress visible at the local level: Transformation does not announce itself top-down and cascade neatly through an organisation. It spreads when people can see it working nearby, in their context, for people like them. Celebrate local progress loudly and often. 4) Connect people to the difference their work makes. Creating regular opportunities for people to hear from, or spend time with, those they ultimately serve is one of the most underused and most powerful tools we have as leaders of change. 5) Put our energy where it will travel furthest. Build on the readiness that exists, make it visible, and let success do the persuading that arguments could not. None of this makes effective change communication redundant. People need clarity, honesty and a coherent narrative about where we are heading. But that is the scaffolding, not the structure. Change travels through people, through trust, through the invisible threads that connect one person's conviction to anothers. See: medium.com/@greg-satell/why-….