To argue that ‘cultural change catalysts’ can turn into inhibitors is, as quite usual for the management literature, is re-inventing the wheel.

The idea is that ‘catalysts’ in cultural change act like catalysts in chemical reactions. Exploring this analogy further, catalysts in chemical reactions do not produce more of the intended products, speed up the generation of the product, and are unaffected by the process.

I do not feel that this analogy is appropriate, on account of the three arms of the quality of what a ‘catalyst’ is.

I am unconvinced that there has been more of the “intended products”. How you measure these ‘key performance indicators’ is more of the domain of people with a management training rather than experienced practitioners or clinicians.

The number of re-tweets on Twitter is a metric of sorts, but so is the traffic to a page 3 supermodel on the internet.

In my own field, has the number of retweets of tweets containing the term ‘living well with dementia’ led to a ‘transformational change’ in what people understand to be wellbeing?

I doubt it.

Do ‘cultural change catalysts’ speed up the generation of the product?

I am not convinced about this either. In fact, I would like to propose that the #hashtag activism can put a lot of people off from participating.

The people who are put off, ironically, are exactly the sort of people this campaign was trying to embrace – people at the “edges”.

People at the “edges” will not be able to become the Chief Inspector of Social Care at the Care Quality Commission through wacky ideas on Twitter.

Conversely, they might be singled out for worth ‘keeping an eye on’ in a negative sense.

When I know of well meaning people who have been diagnosed with severe mental illness for the first time having worked in the National Health Service, this is not trivial.

Nor is the fate of whistleblowers, and the inadequacy of the Public Interest Disclosure Act (1998).

And whether “radicals” are in fact “radicals” demands proper scrutiny.

I have often marvelled at the term “shared values” of corporate glossy prospectuses. Such shared values in my experience have been used to stamp out diversity, freedom of expression, and to encourage a rigid sense of conformity.

We’ve seen a similar mathematical approach to an analysis of when ‘hipsters’ become ‘conformists’.

When people doing their job in the health and care systems take to Twitter to talk of their resentment of non-clinicians and non-practitioners talking of ‘radicalism’, you have to begin to worry.

This ‘radicalism’ is the ultimate sin for what innovation management values, in my experience.

Innovation management is, if anything, all about ‘environment sensing’ and making connections between different disciplines. If a part of your environment ‘resents’ your work, it’s time you should NOT adopt an approach of ‘there is no alternative’ and continue with #boatrockers regardless.

And my final concern?

That catalysts are unaffected through the process.

I am not entirely convinced about this, as there is scope for a two-tier system of ‘registered catalysts’ and those who are not.

Of course, business management has taken two prongs of attack latterly – promoting competitive advanced and increasing shared social value.

The increased shared value, I argue, can be so intense so as to be quite off putting.

And when the same beneficiaries are at the same events with the same awards and the same projects, with the same commissioning targets, compared to others who have not participated in ‘catalysing the transformative change’, you do really have to query whether they are genuinely unaffected by the process.