Pine Pienaar suddenly appeared on the team as we prepared for to go live on a major change at Spoornet (South African Railways). Dawie De Villiers, the Programme Director, informed me that Pine was our secret weapon, the most connected man in Spoornet. He seemed to know everyone in the organisation from the union bosses to the train guards, and they all seemed to like and trust him.
If the management team had taken the time to create a Sociogram for Spoornet it would have looked a little like the one below. Pine would have been represented by the biggest bubble being the person most identified by others as a trusted source of information about what’s going on in the organisation. In reality, such a diagram would have had hundreds of bubbles (or ‘Nodes’) each representing different people and many more lines linking them together.
Once we had Pine on board, he used his connection to help us communicate with everyone affected by the forthcoming changes, both formally and informally, oiling the wheels of change.
People like Pine Pienaar were dubbed ‘The Few’ in Malcolm Gladwell’s book ‘The Tipping Point’. A small group of well-connected and well-informed people who are instrumental in propagating change across a population. They are rarely senior managers and often highly mobile individuals with access to a variety of people as part of their job, such as health and safety advisors. Whoever they are and however you find them, they can be hugely influential in creating a Tipping Point for change.
To learn how to take the pain out of change see www.5forcesofchange.com . For more on Connectors listen to ‘The Gossip Mill’ on https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001r1fy
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