An overview of meme-based change
I am going to assume, by the way, that you are reasonably comfortable with the concepts of traditional change management. If not, I strongly recommend John Kotter’s Leading Change (1996) or Colin Carnall’s Managing Change in Organizations (2007).
At the risk of stating the completely obvious, you have to understand the memes that are running in your organisation (really running, not the ones that you think should be running) and have a clear picture of what you want the end result to look like.
The trick to delivering change using memes is to weaken the organisational immune system just enough and just at the right time, and to design a memeplex that will propagate through the organisation and deliver the changes in mindset required.
While organisations do store inactive memes (in process manuals, etc.), the active memes are in people’s heads, and it is the contents of those heads that you must seek to change. While it is useful to talk about the memes of an organisation, we must really remember that they are the sum of the memes of the people in it
The set of memes you end up with must be consistent and balanced. Changing the current behaviours, without jeopardising the consistency of the organisation, requires both enough vision to identify the required memes and enough analytical nous to evaluate their impact on the rest of the organisation.
However, nothing will undermine a meme-led change faster than saying one thing and doing another. If a leader introduces a new meme, he must be its high priest. If it’s a new vision, then everything he does should be seen to lead to that vision. If it’s a new set of values, then his behaviour according to those values must be beyond reproach. If it’s a tactical meme such as a change of process, then he should introduce it firmly and reinforce it frequently. Similarly, meme-killing behaviour must be consistent. There must be no exceptions, no delays and no forgiveness for heresy.
This sounds daunting, but you do have a chance. Gardner (2004) points out that - unlike the leader of a nation who has a vast and heterogeneous population to convert - organisations are usually relatively simple to sway: participation in the organisation is entirely voluntary and generally temporary, so that the greatest dissenters will weed themselves out of the population by finding other jobs. This means that you can generally introduce more complex messages in an organisational change than you would if you were trying to move 50 million people.