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.

Saturday, September 30, 2006

Network Weavers blog and website

Valdis Krebs, June Holly, and Jack Rizziuto have launched a web site for their collaborative, Networkweaving, from which they also blog. (Great picture, guys!) Their work truly is collaborative and they are finding resonance in their work of helping communities of all sorts learn to work in networks. They are presenting a workshop in Washington, D.C. October 12 and 13th, which sounds like a great way to be introduced to the art of network weaving as well as to some pretty cool people.

A recent blog post contains a map of the self-organizing network of community groups in New Orleans and surrounding areas that are starting to work together to continue the post-Katrina work.

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Saturday, September 23, 2006

KM Meets OD at the DIA

I had a note from co-author Zeke Wolfberg this morning, with a link to an article that he's just published with GovExec.com , "A Formula for Success." Its a good summary of his mission at the DIA, which is to change the culture of the agency toward learning-based behaviors. Zeke and I wrote about how the Knowledge Lab in our article, which focused on how Zeke created a network of change agents who shared his passion for the mission of the DIA and a commitment to change. Through a series of focused pilot efforts built on a set of strategic principles, the Knowledge Lab (with the support of the DIA's new director) is providing a model for other government and military agencies. Kudos to Zeke.

Reading the article reminded me of the talk that Bruce Hoppe and I gave at the Boston OD Learning Group last week, "KM meets OD" (or was it "OD meets KM"?) My part was to position knowledge management as a collection of disciplines -- many of which overlap organizational development practices -- that support business and organizational improvement by focusing on the intellectual capital of people, processes, and relationships. (I actually didn't go into this intellectual capital part but wished I had; it turns out to be a driving theme of Net Work, the book, which may actually be finished week after next, with an April publication date.) I summarized the next challenges for KM as a holistic set of disciplines that have much in common with OD:

Change management
Talent management
Learning organization
Collaboration

Zeke and his "revolutionaries" in the Knowledge Lab at the DIA are accomplishing some major organizational change using some good, basic, network techniques:

A bottom-up change network
Mission-focused pilots
Adopting methods that have been proven elsewhere
Working with a long-term strategy

The Knowledge Lab's mission now has a five-year strategy. The "lab" by the way, has no physical space and only one funded staff person (Zeke).

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Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Invisible Influence

Dave Snowden's blog took me to Green Chameleon this morning, where I found a reflection of myself. During the past few months, I've tried to keep up with a few of the blogs and email lists that have been great sources of inspiration, validation, and content for my work and have failed utterly to acknowledge them.

In his book, Achieving Success Through Social Capital, Wayne Baker provides a checklist for a TQM plan for continuous defect reduction. He provides the following ten examples of defects that one could count:

Failure to convert a human encounter into a human moment.
Failure to reconnect with an old contact once a week.
Missed opportunity to fill a structural hole.
Failure to share information.
Delayed return of a phone call, e-mail message, or letter.
Late for meetings.
Failure to attend association meetings.
Failure to send thank-you notes.
Canceling lunch appointments
Delayed updating of contact manager.

Note re (1). I've been saving this quote from Virginia Woolf that showed up on quote of the day a while back:

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

Note re (4). The book was published pre-blog, in 2000. However I think this item covers it. My problem is that I feel so embedded in an extended community (I don't read Green Chameleon, but I read almost all of the blogs and lists it cites) that I often feel whatever I share has already been shared to those I would share it with, so that means that my primary defect is in (8), which is to thank the invisible influences.

So: thank you, Dave, Denham, Shawn, Andrew,Bruce, Karl, John, Nancy, John, John, Ross, Valdis, Verna, Rob, Jack, Art, and others on my less-visited blogroll. I'll have to check in more often (see 2).

Oh, and I finally got round to reading Gordon Cook's interview with Jerry Michalski, and I honestly cannot remember what thread took me there. But talk about sharing! Jerry lets anyone see his Brain.

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Sunday, September 03, 2006

Jean Baker Miller and Relational Thinking

Jean Baker Miller died on July 29. I had just blogged about my connection with her on July 17.
As I slog through the completion of Net Work, her passing reminded me of where this work of mine began. I received a letter thanking me for making a contribution to the Jean Baker Miller Training Institute.
The letter includes a reminder of how much research she inspired into the impact of a relational view of the world:

She strongly believed in the power of connection to change people's lives, bringing about creativity, courage, and community in the place of isolation.

On July 17th, I was thinking of the theme "men and woman are different" in a note about BlogHer. What Jean's work suggested is that one of the reasons men and women are different is that women tend to have a more relational view of the world and are more likely to bring this view into work -- and play a role of tending to and managing relationships.

That was twenty years ago. The relational view (aka the network view) now represents a major element in management thinking, thanks (perhaps?) to the availability of tools that make relationships visible.

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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

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
Bill Ives
Dave Snowden
David Gurteen
Denham Grey
Jack Vinson
Patrick Lambe
Ross Dawson