Networks, Complexity, and Relatedness

Networks, Complexity, and Relatedness
Inquiry and learning into social networks, organizational network analysis, and the relationships among people and systems in complex organizations and networks.

Friday, October 28, 2005

ONA Case Study

The current issue of The Learning Organization, published by Emerald Insight contains an article that I have co-written with Rob Cross and Vic Gulas of MHW Global on Vic's work with organizational network analysis at MWH.

This article is part of my ongoing contribution to the research in ONA and organizational change for the Network Roundtable at the University of Virginia (directed by Rob).

I'm current in process of writing another case study on an ONA project with another of the Roundtable member companies. I love doing this writing as it connects me with people doing real, earnest, useful work in organizations and helps me to understand how ONA plays out as a tool in organizational change. But it's not just organizational change, it's about knowledge, and how the tools of knowledge management and organizational design together provide a framework and a set of methods for changing the connectivity of organizations.

Also in this issue is an article by my Cynefin colleague, Dave Snowden. He writes about the network component of Cynefin which is in some ways antithetical to the "mechanistic" approach of the traditional survey-based ONA. But all methods have their place, and when used appropriately offer great insight into the complexity of relationships, on which all work is based.

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Monday, October 17, 2005

Social Architecture

My bags aren't packed, but I was looking forward to KMworld until I found out about the conference that Stowe Boyd has designed a Symposium on Social Architecture to be held in Cambridge (just a few miles away!) November 14:

The Symposium on Social Architecture (SSA) will bring together the leading lights of the social software and social media space to discuss the overarching themes and underlying technologies that are driving the massive uptake of people-centered, user-driven, individual-connecting applications, communities, content, and services.

Since my re-awakening to what's happening in the world of social software at Connect & Collaborate, I'm trying to get both back in the know and inspired. Stowe, of course, is a master at creating good conversation and the invitee list for this event has me really drooling. (In fact, I met Stowe and David Weinberger at one of my first KMWorld conferences - in Dallas in '99. What serendipity that was!)

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Sunday, October 16, 2005

Sense-Making, ONA, and Descriptive Self-Awareness

My recent ONA (Organizational Network Analysis) work with clients and with the Chicago masterclass have brought home for me the role of ONA in sense-making, and the distinction "sense-making" itself. A network analysis gives an organization data presented both visually and quantitatively that sparks insights that prompt good, probing questions and lead to action. In one of my recent client projects, one of the senior managers who had been skeptical of ONA said it was "spot on" with respect to his intuition about the behaviors and relationships in his group. The whole picture -- a complete set of questions and relationships laid out in a series of charts -- gave the organization a sense of where it is in time, and set them off into inquiries about where more connectivity would enhance the organization.

I've also been working with Verna Allee, who positions ValueNet Works[TM] as a sense-making experience. Verna and I have both worked with David Snowden, whose Cynefin framework provides a method and mindset for working on hard, complex problems. The foundation (for me) of Cynefin begins with a core set of sense-making heuristics and methods: being able to make sense of a context and identify it as simply ordered, complicated, complex, or chaotic. I particularly like tto use David's phrase descriptive self-awareness as it captures the purpose of network analysis: to give organization a new language for dialogue.

For those of you interested in learning actual techniques and methods for sense-making in organizations (coupled with key methods in narratives and networks), check out the Cynefin course in Washington, DC, December 12-14.

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Saturday, October 15, 2005

1,000 cups of coffee

Change management is a key topic for any consultant; for those of us doing the work of moving organizations to networked collaborative styles of work it is a hot topic. Lately I've thought a lot about the best lesson I ever learned about how to change a large organization and recalled that I'd written about it in Freedom At Work, a monthly newsletter that I edited and produced between April 1994 and December 1995.

The topic was "enrollment," the act of engaging others in a commitment to change. I opined on how truly great and charismatic leaders can move countries to embrace change even in the face of adversity. Others among us, I said, "must use 1,000 cups of coffee:"

I owe this metaphor to Chris McGoff who at the time I first heard him speak (1992?)at a conference on "groupware" which we quaintly called it back then. Chris at the time was at Global Decision Support Systems. Chris had been asked how to convince managers to use computer software in meetings. He smiled and said, "One thousand cups of coffee." I continued:

With something that is particularly new, or that requires changes in many aspects of how people work, you need to be prepared to have the enrollment conversation with everyone single person in the organization, as many times as you need to have it. You have to listen to where people are coming from, and speak to them in a way that they can hear possibility for themselves, or the organization, in what you are proposing.

One of my own most successful enrollment efforts (six years prior to hearing Chris speak) hinged on 32 lunches. I listed to the individual stories [some heart-wrenching, personal tales] and concerns of each of the people in a documentation production group who were undergoing retraining to use a new publishing system [of which I was the software architect and development manager]. Passive aggression was rampant, and the production group manager said, "Patti, you have to do something." I slowed down the pace of development, let people catch up, and let them choose roles and responsibilities that made sense for them in the way that the new system was changing their jobs. Some people blossomed into entirely new careers and learning; others retired or took new jobs. All received the support and coaching they needed through change.

The project was long and difficult, and it never would have succeeded without the hard work and collaboration of these production group staff. And I'm not sure that, without those lunches, the project would ever have succeeded.

Lunch was expensive, but my manager gladly covered the costs. Contextual listening, interviewing, coaching, are all part and parcel of moving an organization from one state to another, and it's always the personal relatedness -- at some level -- that makes the difference.

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Monday, October 10, 2005

Connecting blogdots and real people

At Connect and Collaborate, I met Liz Lawley who gave a great talk on social software. Liz has a dream job, a year's fellowship at Microsoft, where she can just poke around and get herself involved in projects that interest her. I learned a lot from her keynote, and was motivated to get out and look at more of what's happening outside of the heads-down network analysis that's been keeping me busy of late. I expect to do a lot of writing in the next few months, so the first thing I did was sign onto del.icio.us. She also talked about some very interesting software you can use to find out who else in the world is in the same place in the world that you are. Traveling brings on the urge to do that.

After leaving New York, and after stays in Virginia, Maryland (Rockville), Davidsonville (near Annapolis), and Oshkosh WI, I landed in Chicago for the two-day ONA Masterclass that I give. Prior to the trip, I got in touch with Jack Vinson. I thought I would like to meet him and perhaps have him come and talk to the class about MeshForum. He and Shannon Clark invited me to a MeshForum dinner that just happened to be happening that Wednesday, where I met a few other bloggers who are out and about. Buzz Bruggeman has been traveling a lot to market his software product ActiveWords. Jim McGee was there as well, whom I thought was rather brilliant.

So that about doubled the number of active bloggers I know, and then there was a bonus: Lilia Efimova, whom I've admired for sometime, was in Chicago for a conference and also showed up for the dinner. Lilia and I met for breakfast Friday morning -- it was her birthday! -- and talked about her research on knowledge management and weblogs. In addition to studying corporate weblogs (including 8 weeks of research at Microsoft), Lilia is working on a network map of the knowledge management blogging community. She showed me some of her files in UCINET and I promised to look deeper and help her with some ONA questions.

And of course Lilia knows Liz, so that was a nice shortcut to dots.

I had another serendipitous f2f in Chicago. While I was in Oshkosh with my Mom, my cousin Janny called my Mom to see how she was doing (Mom is half-way through chemotherapy for ovarian cancer). When Janny and I chatted we discovered we'd both be in Chicago Thursday evening, so arranged dinner with herself, her husband Ken and their daughter Kelly (whom I had not seen since she was a toddler). It's good to keep these distant family connections going, and it was a real treat to see them.

Now it turns out that there is a new linking tool for those who travel and seek good wireless networking spots and are generally clueless about where in the world others they know may be in the world. It's called Plazes and it looks pretty darn cool. When you have the software and have signed in you can see yourself and others on a map of the local area -- bingo, just like smart tags, you get a signal if a friend is near. I'm not eager to get back on the road just now, but do expect that I'll pack Plazes on my laptop for my next trip

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patti anklam. How to make networks work.

Find me person-to-person !

KMWorld 2008 September 23-25, San Jose, CA. I'll be doing a session on Net Work and moderating a day with KM thought leaders.

links: network analysis

My ONA Page

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links: blogroll

21st Century Organization
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