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.

This blog is MOVING: new site is almost ready: change your readers, now: http://www.pattianklam.com/blog

Monday, March 20, 2006

Scenarios as sense-making

Art Hutchinson (no relation other than we are friends)wrote a superb blog on his attendance at a recent IIS (International Intelligence Summit) in Crystal City, Virginia. I first met Art about 8 or so years ago when he was at Northeast Consulting Resources Inc, a dynamic strategy consulting firm that invented a scenario-based method call FutureMapping. (NCRI merged into Nerve Wire in 2000; Nerve Wire was purchased by Wipro in 2003).

Lately, my thinking has been focusing "above the playing field" in ONA to look at other valuable ways that visual maps offer sense-makingg, especially since I started working with Verna Allee and using ValueNet Works(TM) analysis. They are very complementary views -- the personal vs the organizational exchange mapping is an area I'm working on with Verna and her colleague Oliver Schwabe.

To these views, I've been adding the network market map view, based on work by Laurence Lock Lee, who is working on a PhD thesis about the correlation between centrality in a market map and social capital. (No references yet). Valdis Krebs has an example of such a map on his site of the Internet industry (2002).

The scenario view that emerges from a FutureMapping workshop gives yet another perspective to help a group understand its context both with respect to market forces and the network of companies in its industry and supplier network.

And, like all the methods that produce maps, the vital result is the conversation that emerges from both creating and reviewing the maps themselves. Here are some salient points that Art makes in his post:

More eyes and more minds make for more understanding.
Art emphasizes this in talking about how important the distributed collective intelligence of blogs, wikis, and prediction markets in order to plumb the depths of understanding of large complex events. But this is also true of the smaller-scale, group oriented methods. ONA and VNA are most useful when they bring a variety of interpretations and knowledge into the interpretation process.

Rehearse for the future. If orchestras, sports teams, and military units spend as much as 75% of their time rehearsing, why not management? We can play "what-if" scenarios during the ONA analysis process to see the potential impact of losing key people or perhaps adding additional connections. Having these scenarios in mind will enable managers to respond effectively with rehearsed strategies.

The difference between actuarial uncertainty and creative uncertainty.
Companies are interested in ONA as a tool to help understand the actual impact of the ageing workforce and planning appropriately. But are they equally prepared to respond with a network view when a disruptive innovation threatens the business?

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Friday, March 17, 2006

Another node in the network of networks interested in social networks

The SNA JumpStart series began yesterday very positively. We had almost 150 people on the call, and despite a phone glitch that kept my guest speaker from getting on the phone, all went well. I await the survey results. We've also had a rash of sign-ups for our Yahoo! group community, ona-prac.

It's a bit daunting to start a Yahoo! group. It doesn't have the features we'd really like, but the barriers to entry and to user participation are so low, it seems like a good way to get started.

I heard a great talk today about the Knowledge Network at Caterpillar Tractor (on the SIKM Leaders forum). They have homegrown tools that support the ability for two communities to share a threaded discussion. I could really use that this week. There are terrific dialogues about SNA and communities in the COM-PRAC list (discussion on ROI brought in the topic of SNA and benchmarks) and also in the new Google group Value Networks (Valdis Krebs' posting about the validity of data in an article about SNA and a link to his article on The Social Life of Routers).

Second jump start session on SNA is tomorrow: Nat Welch will be hosting case studies by Don Ronchi (Raytheon) and Kate Ehrlich (IBM). It's not to late to register.

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Thursday, March 09, 2006

More Sense-Making from SNA

Rob Cross's recent post in Centrality is a description of the rich context that an SNA/ONA can reveal. Many people think that the creation of maps is the objective of an ONA. The objective is actually to understand the nature of the relationships in the group being examine. That's why demographic information is so important. The standard demographics (location, group, hierarchy, tenure, job role, function, etc.) provide important clues to the points of disconnect in an organization.

Working with Rob and colleagues at the UVA Roundtable, I've learned the power of the cultural view. Given a set of cultural attributes, such as "openness to risk taking" and "collaboration," respondents rate each attribute against the questions "Our organization places a high value on this attribute" and "This attribute is important to success in our business" the disconnects can be quite revealing. In the example in his posting, Rob cites a firm that was experiencing less-than-ideal collaboration among engineers on a critical product. The ONA revealed that while the engineers thought that collaboration was very important, they felt that the organization (i.e. management) did not. For the managers' part, they had grown up in the organization during a time when the culture was "free and vigorous" and assumed that the culture had not changed!

The data from this type of survey question, combined with the maps, provides a visual view of the cultural values (as perceived and as desired) that opens an organization to the rich dialogue that must undergird change.

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Wednesday, March 08, 2006

SNA/ONA Jumpstart Starts Next Week

Just a friendly reminder that our JumpStart starts jumping next week. If you haven't already signed up, there's still time to register for any of the four sessions.

One of my colleagues in this webinar is Bruce Hoppe, who has provided a lovely introduction in his blog post of February 28th. The concepts of bridging capital and bonding capital are essential in understanding how to work with building and creating networks. I love what Bruce has done in his slide showing the distinction between these types of capital.

Next week is both bonding and bridging: we're seeing a lot of our own extended network signed up for the call, and we hope that these calls will create bridges to other networks and pockets of interest.

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Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Keeping connections

My Google home page threw up the following quotation from Virginia Woolf one day this week:

"I have lost friends, some by death, others through sheer inability to cross the street."

It makes me think hard about the times that I've been unable to respond quickly enough to an email message, or that I've not done a quick IM connect, or haven't advantage of having a private chat during a teleseminar. Perhaps this struck me particularly because I'd spent some hours the previous weekend going through a set of LinkedIn groups I was in and getting in touch with people I'd not connected with for some time. Juicing my network, getting in touch, having the time to walk across the street and say, "hello."

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patti anklam. How to make networks work.

links: networks

My ONA Page

Rob Cross
Bruce Hoppe
Valdis Krebs
INSNA
ONA-prac. The online community for learners and practitioners in the emerging field of Organizational Network Analysis.

links: blogroll

21st Century Organization
Anecdote

Dave Snowden
David Gurteen
Jack Vinson