Networks, Complexity, and Relatedness

Networks and Heterarchies

2009-04-28T08:07:00.000-07:00

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

Networks and Learning

2009-04-10T14:06:00.000-07:00

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.

The Boston Globe

2009-04-07T05:20:00.001-07:00

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.

Honoring Anita Borg on Ada Lovelace Day

2009-03-23T07:15:00.000-07:00

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.

Communities and Networks -- A brilliant synthesis

2009-02-21T13:05:00.001-08:00

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.

Twittersheep

2009-01-31T10:04:00.000-08:00

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?

Insight and Serendipity

2009-01-11T14:03:00.000-08:00

At a meeting in December, a friend recently handed out The Eureka Hunt, from the New Yorker magazine's issue of July 28, 2008. The annals of science have now extended to an understanding of how insight occurs. It turns out that the brain activity associated with insights comes from the right hemisphere which, as that hemisphere has long been associated with creativity, makes sense. But there's a very interesting network insight as well: "Cells in the right hemisphere are collecting information from a larger area of cortical space. They are less precise but better connected." (Emphasis mine.) Simply, the cells have longer branches and access to a larger network of associations.

It gets more intriguing when we consider that when we are trying to solve a problem, we start with a focus that is controlled by the brain's prefrontal cortex, which wants to focus, get away from distractions, and look closely at the problem. Fortunately, this cortext is not just the largest part of the brain, it is also connected to all the other parts. The hub, if you will, of a network of networks. In order for the right hemisphere to be allowed to do its thing -- to work its way through its branches and network of associations -- the prefrontal cortex has to relax and give up control to the right hemisphere. Then, and perhaps only then, are we available for insight.

I've used the phrase "planned serendipity" to refer to the intentional practice of using Dopplr (though I use Twitter much more now) to let people know my travels and to see the travels of others just in case we engineer an encounter that might or might not happen otherwise. Seeking insight means we have to let go of the seeking, stop thinking so hard and just let the network do its work, just as in our lives we sometimes need to look beyond our frontal cortex of close friends, colleagues, and relationships to remember that we have a myraid of looser connections and weak ties that we may allow to come to light.

The Business of Community Networking

2008-12-27T10:08:00.000-08:00

Colleagues Jenny Ambrozek and Victoria Axelrod from the 21st Century Organization have teamed with the World Research Group to design a conference here in Boston, March 24-26: The Business of Community Networking. (You may also want to download the brochure.) This conference is focused on businesses that want to engage customers in interacting, networking, and exchanging knowledge using social media.

The speaker lineup illustrates a commitment to offer best practices -- real nitty-gritty how-to information. I'll be on a couple of panels and also delivering a talk on the process of community networking, with a focus on how the network lens (oops, no pun intended) can alter the perspective of community designers. I'm particularly happy to see Mark Bonchek (who also assisted in the conference design) on the agenda. Mark has been applying network (and net work) principles to his evolving businesses, currently incorporated as Soundbridge.

Early bird pricing is available until January 16th. You can save an additional $300 on the rate by entering the promotional code KKH735 when you register.

Five Good Things

2008-12-26T06:50:00.000-08:00

I've been on the theme of relationships and relationships for close to 20 years, much of it stemming from work with Jean Baker-Miller, who was an inspiration to me in the late 1980s when I participated in a Stone Center project. Jean's ground-breaking work in understanding the psychology of women opened the way for many changes in the workplace as well as in the discipline of psychological counseling. As more research shows how men and women are different in many physiological ways, it becomes clearer and clearer how revolutionary her ideas were.

Fundamental to Jean's theory is that women grow in relationship; we become transformed and empowered by through shared experiences and authentic conversation. Such transformation is not unique to women, but most often experienced by women. Growth-fostering relationships empower all people in them.

The five good characteristics of growth-fostering relationships:

A sense of zest or well-being that comes from connecting with another person or other persons.
The ability and motivation to take action in the relationships as well as in other situations.
Increased knowledge of oneself and the other person(s).
An increased sense of worth.
A desire for more connections beyond the particular one.

This work has always been founded on face-to-face personal, intimate, relationships, which we tend to think are more in the province of the feminine side. I wonder if our social media-based networking via technology has made it easier for men to develop relationships that they might not have done otherwise?

Blogging

2008-11-13T05:38:00.001-08:00

The more I immerse myself in the flow -- increase my addiction to the Internet, some would have it -- the harder it is to focus and collect my thoughts in a blog. I've always tried to use my posts to synthesize ideas that come from different places, so it's sometimes a long time before things gel into a coherent concept. Lilia Efimova's blog this morning brought my process into focus.

Her PhD thesis is on the blogger community and blogging. She has continued to blog throughout her research and now in her dissertation-writing phase. Here's how she divides the process of writing into phases:

Awareness and articulation -- starting to get ideas on the radar
Sense-making -- when the connections among the ideas and a possible meaning become clear
Turning the ideas into specific product -- the dissertation chapter

Here is her perceptive map of the process:

Here are the bits I am collecting (somewhere between the two left-side states):

Understanding what collection of Web 2.0 tools to use in different contexts (this will go on the AppGap)
Information overload in the flow (more on the topic introducing this post, also AppGap)
Uptake of net work in the nonprofit world (here)
Understanding the transition between an emergent, self-organizing state and the close-knit structure required for a team to produce

Actually, the last item will need a graphic that looks very much like the one above.

Thanks, Lilia!

Managerial Essays on Social Networks

2008-10-26T05:04:00.000-07:00

A re-posting on the Value Networks blog of a list of research centers in social network analysis reminded me to take a look at what's happening at the University of Kentucky's International Research Center on Social Networks in Business which nabbed Steve Borgatti away from Boston a year and a half ago. I noticed a few "managerial essays" that I hadn't seen before that Steve has written and that are now posted.

Steve's essay on Facilitating Knowledge Flows provides definitions of centralization, density, core/periphery, and also a term new to me, multiplexity (the the extent to which one kind of tie between two people is accompanied by another kind of tie between the same two people).

Creating Knowledge: Network Structure and Innovation illustrates network structures for innovation, and
Selecting a Team Leader is a short and powerful reminder of how network position can be a predictor of a team's success.

I miss seeing Steve around Boston and here in my home town of Harvard.

Grace Happens

2008-10-12T07:34:00.001-07:00

We had an extraordinary theater experience last night at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, MA. Let Me Down Easy is an Anna Deavere Smith "play in evolution" that begs the audience to inquiry about the nature of grace. If you are not familiar with Deavere Smith's work, you can find her on Ted. Her solo performances are based on interviews with people she seeks out in order to learn how the world occurs to them. As she talks with them and records the conversations, she acquires these people as characters who then inhabit her play as she inhabits them. Barefoot, so as better to "walk in their words," she expresses their thoughts and emotions as she speaks their words verbatim.

It's the weaving. In Let Me Down Easy, she mixes the views of theologians (including a Buddhist monk and an Iranian imam) about the concept of grace (which is a uniquely Christian concept) with the actual experience of grace as it visits or people's lives. Reverends James Cone ("Grace is Power") and Peter Gomes (businessmen are disinclined to practice the golden rule until after are successful) provide glimpses into different worldviews and experiences, one following the other at the beginning and both reappearing throughout.

But the play is as much about "Disgrace" as it is about grace. Her explorations of the genocide in Rwanda and its impact on survivors provides one powerful theme. A second theme is in her critique of the U.S. healthcare system which, in the words of Phil Pizzo, is very close to reaching equivalence with healthcare systems in 3rd world countries.

Practical experiences include a doctor who waited five days for FEMA to evacuate the Charity Hospital in New Orleans during Katrina and its aftermath, amid the black patients and nurses who knew that no one would come for them. In a touching conclusion, an orphanage director in Johannesburg talks about how she sits with children dying of aids.

You can hear Anna Deavere Smith doing some of her characters (including the wonderful Ann Richards, former Texas Governor, talking about her Chi) with Christopher Lydon here. (Many thanks to Craig DeLarge for picking up on my tweets and then searching out the two clips linked above and sending them to me. Also thanks to Jessica Lipnack, who inspired me to start going to the A.R.T. in the first place.)

Generations

2008-10-08T12:38:00.000-07:00

You know you've been touched by a powerful idea or theory when it keeps coming back to mind, and begging you to apply its perspective to other ideas you encounter or read about. I've been touched by the Strauss and Howe theory of generations.

Deb Gilburg, of the Gilburg Leadership Institute introduced the idea (first described in the 1991 book Generations) to a recent meeting of our local idea network Gennova. The theory has it that there is a cycle of generational patterns that repeats every four generations (approximately 22 to 26 years). Strauss and Howe have characterized the four patterns and have mapped these patterns to 350 years of American history. Each pattern both shapes and is shaped by the historical context of its time, but the underlying characteristics of each pattern remain the same.

We are now accustomed to thinking about our three primary current generations, Boomers (the first generation to actually identify and name itself), GenX, and GenY. There are, of course, still many members of the pre-boomer "GI" generation that took us through WWII and its immediate antecedent, the generation that Strauss and Howe call the "Silents." The archetypes that typify these generations are the Hero, Artist, Visionary and Nomad. A "turning" occurs after each cycle of four generations. The 2007 HBR article, The Next 20 Years: How Customer and Workforce Attitudes Will Evolve, though a bit scarily prescient in that it lists both Barack Obama and Sarah Palin as exemplars of Generation X. There's also a lot of free stuff on the web site linked above.

This intriguing theory shows up, of course, in my current work to understand how to implement social tools in the enterprise given the distinct differences between the Boomers who fill the top management ranks, the GenXers coming up to management, and the GenYers who we look at as group-oriented, network-and-tool-savvy, and eager to be assigned important work. The tool part is an instance of history (in this case, the march of technology) influencing the generation. But, the group-oriented nature of GenY as this generation gets down to work, in the same way that the previous "Hero" generation, the GIs, got to work to organize and defend the world against tyrannical and mad dictators.

Previous Hero generations came of age during wartime (Revolutionary, Civil, and WWI) and we are of course at war on many fronts. But the challenge that unites a Hero generation does not need to be war. It could, for instance, be a planetary threat -- like global warming -- that will need people to set aside politics to accomplish bold endeavor.

This notion of the generational styles shows up for me in many ways recently. In a blog over on theAppGap, for instance, I reflected on current criticism of why managers do not think deeply. I wonder if there is a generational aspect to this. Reading about Daniel Goleman in a recent strategy+business article, (perhaps a blog on this anon) I wonder if the organizational development movement is an aspect of self-introspective generational pattern coming of age.

And, in looking at notes provided to me by KMWorld speaker Peter Andrews of IBM, I see the the pattern anew as he distinguishes the current state and future state of workers, saying of the future state "Workers identify with peers" and "Work centers around the endeavor." Take this out of Andrew's organizational context, it's not hard to see these terms being applied to the GI generation.

Last, this past weekend walking my visiting cousins around the Revolutionary battlegrounds and the homes of Transcendalist writers (who, like us Boomers were of the "Prophet" archetype) I thought again about generations seized by ideas. Later, around the kitchen table with my cousins I thought of our own GI-generation mothers and of our grandmother, Alma, who raised ten children and who's laugh I can still hear. Alma, like many Americans (the work is decidedly US-specific) doesn't quite fit her generation -- the Lost Generation -- as she was born to Danish farmers in Wisconsin and married an immigrant Dane who shod horses.

Generations is a long and fascinating read and I suspect that when I finish I might start all over again. Having some fresh perspective will do odd things to you. As long as you keep your perspective about it.

Powerful new tools for Value Network Analysis

2008-08-27T11:02:00.000-07:00

Value Network Analysis (VNA) is one of the sense-making tools that I emphasize in my book, Net Work.
I have had the privilege of working with and learning from its inventor, Verna Allee, and have internalized the mapping of value exchanges into my consulting practice. Whether shared or created with the client or not, it's how I make sense of how a network of actors (inside an organization, or across multiple organizations) gets work done. The units of analysis in a VNA are (1) a role, for example, technical writer, software developer, or end user and (2) exchanges. Connections among roles represent exchanges of value that are either tangible deliverables (proposals, contracts, invoices, payments) or intangible (reputation, trust, well-being). In a VNA for an economic development engine for a Canadian province, we mapped the roles of the development engine, local ICT companies, schools, government agencies, and so on:

This mapping represents the first step in a VNA. Subsequent work would analyze the overall balance of the exchanges and for each of the exchanges, determine its current strengths/weaknesses and steps required for improvement, if any.

Translating this first output (which is almost always done with the stakeholders who represent each of the roles present) into readable and modifiable images for report or presentations, has been difficult, tedious, and mostly manual.

Which is why I am really excited about the announcement of the ValueNetworks.com application. Starting with a simple spreadsheet, I can now type in the roles and exchanges and let the hosted application create a VISIO file, PowerPoint slides, and the outline of a project report. Here's the VISIO from the above:

Now, I did have to tweak it somewhat, but the hard part was done for me.

Getting to a visual map quickly is just the beginning:

You can assign people to deliverables, establish relationships between deliverables and assets in the organization, and indicate the perceived value of a transaction to its recipient.
If the map represents a process, you can sequence the exchanges and get an animated view of the process.
It generates a report that tells you how the network is balanced (for example, number of tangible vs intangible exchanges, or how balanced each role is with respect to number of exchanges in vs exchanges out)

VNA will still need the human interaction required to build the base map, and now the tool has really been enhanced (it's like a new tool) to help projects with a detailed analysis and development of an action plan.

It's always nice to have a new tool for net work.

Recent AppGap Posts

2008-08-27T10:52:00.001-07:00

I post here less frequently these days, as I have a commitment to TheAppGap . Some of my recent posts there have touched on the topics of:

Roles and the changing nature of work (1) and (2)
Information overload and the loss of productivity
How social tools are changing the way we work

See you there, if not here.

The Class of 2012

2008-08-19T10:34:00.001-07:00

My alma mater, Beloit College, has been publishing a mindset list for the last eleven years. The mindset list is always an interesting reminder of the cultural touchstones that divide generations. The list contains reminders that the incoming class of Freshman, most of whom this year will be 18 years old, have never known or experienced. For example, for these students:

Martha Stewart Living has always been setting the style.
Clarence Thomas has always sat on the Supreme Court.
IBM has never made typewriters.
The Hubble Space Telescope has always been eavesdropping on the heavens.

I found it interesting, for example, to know that IBM actually did stop making typewriters in 1990 (the cutoff year for this mindset list). And that these kids won't understand the transcendental accomplishment of the Hubble any more than those of my generation can understand how our grandparents felt when they first saw airplanes.

There is some trivia in the list as well: For these students,

The Green Bay Packers (almost) always had the same starting quarterback.*
They have never known life without Seinfeld references from a show about �nothing.�

The list provides guidance for the professors and instructors at the college, so they can understand how the world occurs for their new students. It's always fun to read.

*At least that will change now. Having spent time with my cheese-head** family over the summer, I can attest to the wearying hourly updates on Brett Favre and the Packers decision processes.
**I am a cheese-head, I use the term only with great affection.

Map Reading

2008-07-29T18:11:00.000-07:00

I'm just getting Susan (our Tom-Tom) ready for a roadtrip to Wisconsin, clearing my desk, came back to notes from the excellent workshop on networks for social change I attended last week at IISC (Interaction Institute for Social Change). There was a rich mixture of attendees from the nonprofit area, including both projects and funders. I was also very happy to catch up with Marilyn Darling, who facilitated an Emergent Learning Map during the afternoon. It was a great refresher and a reminder that I need to use these maps more often.

I was gratified that Net Work is being received very well in this community, due in no small part to the endorsement of Roberto Cremonini was is doing wonderful things in his role as CKO of the Barr Foundation (and who was also at the workshop). I would like the book to sell better (without undue labor on my part, of course), but in the main I am really happy that people who are doing work that matters tell me that the book is making a difference for them.

Here is a wonderful quote that was on the wall during the session:

I am reminded the most important thing a map shows, if we pause to look at it long enough, if we travel on it widely enough, if we think about it hard enough, is all the things we do not know.

The quote is attributed to Stephen Hall, whom I assume to mean the science writer, Stephen Hall, who writes about maps.

Bruce Hoppe did a live network analysis to create a map of the people in the room, his response to the quote was to acknowledge that sometimes maps (especially network maps) can be very messy and ugly. For my part, I loved the resonance with what I try to install as a mantra when I teach organizational network analysis: "The maps don't tell you anything; they help you to ask better questions."

Diffusion Experiment

2008-07-20T10:14:00.001-07:00

From David Lazer, a little diffusion experiment I am happy to participate in. If you want to join in, and you have a blog or website, you can click "Spread It" to get the code.

(You may need to move the scroll bar down a bit to see and then grab the network image, which is the state of the diffusion at my posting time)

Valdis Kreb's New Blog

2008-06-30T09:19:00.000-07:00

One of the most insightful practitioners of social/organizational network analysis is Valdis Krebs, who has until now been blogging exclusively on Network Weaving, with June Holley and Jack Ricchiuto. On Sunday, Valdis announced that he is moving his posts that relate to concepts and thinking about "economies, organizations, communities and groups" to a new blog, TNT - The Network Thinker. This promises to be one of my "must reads" on my Bloglines feed.

As an added bonus, Valdis moved to this blog his posts on Network Weaving over to TNT. So the new blog has a lot of good tidbits, posts I had seen originally but that always bear a re-read. One was his posted reference to an article and podcast by Herminia Ibarra, professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD. The article is a rich and succinct summary of the importance of networking for successful managers.

Ibarra summarizes three distinct types of networks:

Organizational. This is the set of people we rely on to get work done. Most managers who attend courses at INSEAD have accomplised organizational networks.
Personal. This is the set of people who are "discretionary" contacts, people that make our networks diverse and let us extend ourselves into new areas of learning and social activity. Personal networking is often "an afterthought" for busy managers.
Strategic. These networks are the toughest to build and maintain but the most important for managers who what to be business leaders. The people in this network are peers and senior managers outside your company and beyond your industry who can help you learn new approaches in management, keep tabs on new developments, and see the bigger picture.

The article is extracted from a podcast that is definitely worth downloading and listening to (more than once).

wordle me this

2008-06-27T05:10:00.000-07:00

I've been cleaning up my tags in del.icio.us lately (preparing for a demo) and really thinking hard about tagging. I like word clouds a lot, and just came across wordle. Here's the tag cloud for mydelicious:

You can see that I've been preoccupied with enterprise 2.0 lately... especially looking for enterprise 2.0 software products that create social graphs. I didn't see many at the Enterprise 2.0 conference.

Blog Panel: The Comments Generated the Content

2008-06-10T15:04:00.000-07:00

I've drafted an unfinished post for the AppGap to pull together threads from Dave Weinberger's talk at Community 2.0 with a recent post by Shawn Callahan about conversation. Before I finish that, I need to do a quick recap on the Enterprise 2.0 panel that I participated on today, "What blogging brings to business." Last Friday, Jessica Lipnack, Bill Ives, Doug Cornelius, Cesar Brea and I had a great conversation about what blogging meant to our businesses (all but one of us is a consultant). We decided to recreate that conversation in front of the audience.

The audience turned out to be very large, filling the room. We had just got through two of the questions "Who do you blog for?" and "What value has come to you from blogging." It occurred to me as we opened the session, which we had planned to make interactive, to apply one of the conversation principles I've been integrating lately. That is, that content is in the conversation. In a blog sense, that means that a successful blog is one that generates a full and rich conversation (embodied by a long set of comments). For a panel that has decided on no slides, no pontification, then the important part was to generate conversation.

Jessica facilitated the session wonderfully, and as we drew the audience in we were reminded that some had attended to hear about what blogging brought to business, and were not all that interested in what blogging meant to us talking heads. The conversation shifted wonderfully to enable a set of examples and questions about what it means to bring blogging into a company, so that others could take lessons back to their companies.

Many of the questions offered rich meat for future conversations (or threads, or comments, somewhere):

When to blog in the light (public, external Web) and when to blog in the dark (inside the firewall)
Who should be allowed to blog? Should blogging be a privilege afforded only those who have presumably demonstrated that they have worthwhile knowledge and insights to share?
Has the action -- blogs as a source of connectedness -- shifted to microblogs (e.g. Twitter)?
If we take away the word "blog," and just talk about the need for communication, articulation, knowledge transfer in the company, what then becomes possible?

As the conversation unfolded, the panel becane co-participants, no longer the gurus at the head of the room, just people who are interested in what blogging brings (to business).

2008-06-08T05:21:00.000-07:00

I am excited about Enterprise 2.0, which starts in Boston tomorrow. (Not excited about the long daily commute and parking fees.) I'll be on a panel with some great folks to talk about blogging. It will be a conversation that invites the audience in. Our moderator, Jessica Lipnack, provides an introduction to this on her blog.

I will be blogging about the conference on the The Future of Work, where you can find my blogs about the Community 2.0 conference I attended in Las Vegas.

2008-06-05T14:11:00.000-07:00

In a nice postscript to Wednesday's post, I read David Weinberger's column in this month's issue of KMWorld. His thoughts on complexity spring from a comment by Vincent ("father of the Internet") Cerf in Esquire Magazine:

The closer you look at something, the more complex it seems to be.

Contrasting the emerging acceptance of complexity as our world view (pun intended) with that of classical Greece's fondess of the simplicity of logic, he makes the observation that we need to look at simplicity differently: complex events are generated by a host of extremely simple interactions.

Dave points out that as a father of the Internet, Cerf was instrumental in providing us with technology that make it possible for us to deal with complexity. With the web, Google, and social media we are now able to access many more of those simple interactions because we knowledge is longer constrained by the boundaries of libraries and book covers, and because the internet lets us connect with people who can help us integrate and make sense of what we find.

Complexity and Social Networks

2008-06-04T13:23:00.001-07:00

Ross Mayfield begins a blog on using wikis for team building with a quote from Socialtext CEO Eugene Lee:

Every time there is a new team member, it's a new team.

This is a great mantra for understanding the dynamics of social networks. It's easy to forget how the simple addition of one or two relationships can alter all the dynamics of a community or a network*. The structure changes slightly, but the collective changes in purpose, style, and value.

*Here's a paraphrased quote from Dave Weinberger's talk at Community 2.0. "A community is a network in which people care about each other more than they have to."

Net Work as Visualized by Nancy White

2008-05-24T08:14:00.001-07:00

To continue the visualization theme, I'm thrilled to show you the visualization that Nancy White did of my talk at Community 2.0.

In addition to vislogging the conference, Nancy did a marvelous interactive session wherein she created and developed a timeline and future for collaboration.

I'll be writing up and sharing my notes from the conference on my AppGap blog.