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UNLEASH YOUR TROJAN MICE
Instead of having expensive tools or large scale change initiatives, have lots of small ones. Small things that don’t require a lot of budget or permission from too many people but that will work away together to achieve significant benefits.
Conventional initiatives are like the more familiar Trojan Horse. Big, lumbering, slow moving. It takes a lot of people to move it and it is very hard to get it to change direction without a lot of effort. It is also very slow moving and risks not making it to its destination at all. As we deployed low cost small tools and kicked off little initiatives at the BBC we began to describe our approach as deploying Trojan Mice, a metaphor borrowed from the British consultant Peter Fryer. Set up small, unobtrusive, inexpensive, and autonomous tools and practices, set them running, and cajole and nudge them until they begin to work out where to go and why. In contrast to the Trojan Horse, Trojan Mice won’t allow you to steer them precisely. They run around really fast with no apparent destination in mind. They don’t require direction and work not only without external control but to some extent independently of each other. But they do know where the food is! They can together work out what works and keep doing it until they succeed. They can also represent a significant challenge and are very difficult to stop.
An incremental approach seems ideally suited to deploying social tools at work. People need to buy into them ...
