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.

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Networks and Heterarchies

I was recently invited to participate in a published "panel" on the topic of heterarchies for the People and Strategy Journal, a quarterly publication of the Human Resource Planning Society. The lead article "An Argument for Heterarchy: creating more effective organizational structures" was written by Karen Stephenson, who has a gift for describing network concepts, in this case, the emergence of what she describes as a new network form, the heterarchy.

She describes heterachy as an "organizational form somewhere between a hierarchy and a network that provides horizontal links permitting different elements of an organization to cooperate, while they individual optimize different success criteria."

Now, I have used the term heterarchy myself in a more specific way (referring to closely knit social networks), but have no objection to the introduction of this topic in a prestigious HR community. It's important to get the word out: we are everywhere seeing the importance of understanding connections within and among corporations, institutions, and groups, profit and nonprofit alike.

I was one of eight experts invited to respond to Karen's article. It's exciting to be published among such respected thinkers as Ed Schein, Charles Handy (I've been a fan since I first read The Age of Unreason in the early 90s), and Art Kleiner, as well as colleagues Ross Dawson and Tracy Cox of Raytheon. Ross blogged about this article himself, including his own response to the article, and posted a copy of the PDF.

Karen is at her best when talking about the importance of relationships, particularly when it can be too easy for companies to declare a strategic "alliance" and forget about the myriad connections that need to be made at all levels in an organization. My response focused on the ways that heterarchies may emerge and form (top-down, bottom-up, or shaped) and then asks the question,"okay, what happens next?" If we see a heterarchy emerging, what is the real work that needs to be done? As Karen puts it: "Connection by technology without trust is merely traffic." Overall, the article and its responses make for great conversation.

end of script

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Friday, April 10, 2009

Networks and Learning

A local colleague and Boston KM Forum friend, Maya Townsend, has just published a terrific article in Chief Learning Officer magazine: Leveraging Human Networks to Accelerate Learning. Maya interviewed me for the article, and I'm pleased to be quoted along side of Karen Stephenson, one of the pioneers of organizational network analysis.

I am particularly happy to see how Maya positioned the need for learning officers to leverage networks. And the best way to leverage networks is to understand their structures and the people who play key roles in them. Dr. Stephenson identifies three types of key people: "Hubs," "Gatekeepers," and "Pulsetakers." Knowing who these people are in any given network offers the opportunity of moving knowledge more efficiently through the organization.

Here are Maya's four steps for CLOs to get started on their net work:

Understand what your organization gains from a network. Great diffusion of information? Access to the influential people? Help people across the organization connect?
Identify the set of venues -- networking space, blogs, communities -- that are currently in use or that can be used strategically to nurture networks
Use the key people you've identified to help seed the network
Stand back and let the network do its work

Nice job, Maya, of getting the word out to another vital senior audience.

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Tuesday, April 07, 2009

The Boston Globe

Today I am adding my voice to those who are rallying via blogs to protest the possible shutdown of the Boston Globe by its parent, the NY Times Co. If we were marching in front the NYT offices, carrying banners and placards, my would read: "Lead the revolution, don't turn your back on it."

Clay Shirky has written and spoken eloquently about the reasons for the demise of newspapers and suggests that perhaps "they had it coming" for not seeing the internet coming. But he also says, "Society doesn't need newspapers. What we need is journalism." And an environment -- a social architecture -- in which journalists can learn their craft from masters. Newspapers provide such an environment, and the Globe's rich history of journalism awards speaks for the generations of apprentices who have become masters.

We are in the middle of a revolution, and the economics of running a newspaper in a time when people can get their news from the internet are stark. The old business model is not affordable, but that doesn't mean we should shut down the business -- we need creative thinking of the kind that wins journalism awards to design a new model that gets the news to the online masses as well as provides investigative reporting, reflection, and context.

A friend once told me about a science fiction book he'd read. Post apocalypse, in a world bereft of information and telecommunications technologies, knowledge was passed only from person to person. One day, a character perhaps like our modern Wall-E digs through an ancient garbage dump and discovers a new technology that will bring this distopic society back to light: a pencil.

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Monday, March 23, 2009

Honoring Anita Borg on Ada Lovelace Day

My Ada Lovelace day tribute is to the inspiring Anita Borg, who was committed to bringing women into the field of computer science and whose work continues at...

In 1987, I was part of a small group of women in the software engineering group at Digital Equipment Corporation who were convened to work with Jean Baker Miller and colleagues at Wellesley College's Center for Research on Women. Sometime during that fall, one of our group returned from a computer systems conference on the West Coast talking about how all the women at the conference (perhaps a little more than a dozen) had all had lunch together one day. Among those women was Anita Borg, who founded (from there or around that time) the systers list. Mailings from the list animated my days at Digital, as the postings ranged from the technical questions, to career support requests, conference room sharing and ride information, and into the deeply personal.

It was not a happy time for women in engineering. I had fared somewhat better, though I was not a software engineer per se and had been given many opportunities. As a "senior consulting engineer," the first women from the documentation/information architecture field to be granted that title, I sat on the review board that approved candidates for promotion to senior positions in engineering. Anita was one of the few women engineers in these coveted positions.

She talked about the need to bring women into engineering every chance she got. But people weren't always listening. I talked to her at an awards ceremony at which she was due to speak, sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s, before Digital crumbled. She had prepared remarks directly focused at a number of senior managers in Digital who were present. However, one of them had earlier apologized that he would not be able to stay to hear her speak, because, Anita reported blood pressure rising, he had to "walk his dog."

That is as as good a sign of those times as any. Thanks to Anita and her vision, the world has changed, but I think we are still not as far as we could be. And what could be? Jean Baker Miller, herself an inspiration to many women for pointing out at a time when it was not politic to say so, that "women are different from men." She firmly believed that if women were designing the computers and applications that were becoming such an integral part of our lives, that the world would be very, very different.

I also blogged about this some time ago.

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Saturday, February 21, 2009

Communities and Networks -- A brilliant synthesis

Pretend, for a moment, that it is February 17th and I was blogging as I was supposed to. I would have written a blog post about a great new collaborative brainchild of Nancy White and Tony Karrer that I feel privileged to have been invited to. It's call the Communities and Networks Connection, and you will see my badge posted proudly here.

February 17th was the launch date, and I missed it while deeply immersed in a windowless office at a client's site, where my primary task is to bring the concepts and (more importantly) the practices of networks and communities to bear. So I really need to pay more attention.

The Communities and Networks Connection has a number of really terrific aspects. It aggregates the blogs of many of the thought leaders in community and network thinking, featuring many people I've come to know and work with. So, it's kind of like one-stop shopping. On one site, I can check on the most recent blogs of people I already subscribe to including Jessica Lipnack (Endless Knots), Lilia Efimova (Mathemagenic), Shawn Callahan (Anecdote), Valdis Krebs (TNT - The Network Thinker), Jenny Ambrozek (21st Century Organization), John Tropea (Library Clips), Mike Gotta (Collaborative Thinking) as well as Nancy and Tony linked above but I also can see what bloggers I've been missing and start to pay attention.

On the site, you can see the aggregated posts for the day, or click on any of the featured members. If you click on Networks, Complexity, and Relatedness from there, you'll see that it has also has mined my posts for keyword concepts, tools, and information types. These keywords are all rolled up on the site's main page.

Thank you, Nancy and Tony, for rolling out such a service -- to all those who want to see the latest thinking on communities and networks in one place, nicely organized, and bound to be an exciting stop on the morning's reading lists.

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Saturday, January 31, 2009

Twittersheep

I assume it's no secret that some of the time I should be blogging these days is spent on Twitter. I hope soon to shake this out so that I can translate more of the trends I see on Twitter into meaningful blog posts (that don't belong on theappgap.

But I had too much fun looking at my Twittersheep (hats off to Stowe Boyd) that I thought I should share it.

This word cloud comes from the biographies of the people who follow me on Twitter. I'm happy to see "social" and "knowledge" writ so large, but where is "network" ? And why so many consultants?

Labels: Twitter

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patti anklam. How to make networks work.

Upcoming:
The Business of Community Networking, Boston, MA March 24-26, 2009.

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