The Boston “Spring” 2005 KM Cluster went very well yesterday, despite the outide temperature of 5 degrees when we started out from Harvard in the morning. The event was very well designed by Kate Ehrlich, Bill Ives, and Peter Gloor.

I was really happy to have the opportunity (privilege, actually) of being on a panel with Steve Borgatti and Kate. My comments on the panel are a personal starting point for the next several months of work I’ll be doing on networks and complexity, so I’ve opted to start my next stream of work by including edited text of my remarks.

“I’m here because I was flung out of corporate America 3 years ago I knew that I needed to network. Bill Ives just talked about moving from an enterprise of 75,000 to an enterprise of 1 when he left Accenture. Many of us know what it is like, and when that happens we are told to “network.” So what did I do?

I called Gary Kahn (who had worked on a KM project with us at Digital). Gary told me about the Boston KM Forum, founded by Seth Earley and Roberto Cremonini, where I started to meet people. It was great to see Seth here at this KM Cluster, as it’s been some time since I’ve seen him. A few months into that, I gave a talk on social network analysis and met Mark Bonchek (who is facilitating panels here today). Mark invited me into Gennova, where I met Nat Welch (who codesigned the October KM Cluster) and Kate Ehrlich and later, Bill Ives who introduced me to Peter Gloor.

In this one story, I’m communicating my membership in 4 networks: people I worked with at Digital Equipment — and here today are Jessica Lipnack and Jeff Stamps, whom I met at Digital while they were consulting there and haven’t seen for 12 years — , KM Forum, Gennova, and the Boston KM clusters. If I list people I know in these networks, I can identify a bunch of other networks I “belong to.” CPsquare, the University of Virginia Network Roundtable, the IBM/Institute for Knowledge Management network, Cynefin, and the list goes on.

Is this story familiar to any of you? And how many of you are also working in a business or corporate environment where you must also maintain those networks of relationships?

Note that each of these is a unique network — they have names, attributes, boundaries, and ideas about governance. I have been in a long inquiry about the nature of these kinds of networks, as many of you know. What I’m also learning is about the nature of the identities I hold in each of these.

Yesterday at the Enterprise SNA workshop, I met a man who is doing SNA at Halliburton. We spoke about that and then he started talking about his interest in complexity. It was an interesting conversation and I realized as we talked that I felt that myidentity kept shifting as we spoke. We talked about the Rob Cross connection, where I have one identity, and the complexity work, where I have another role (also an identity). These identities have different dimensions. Am I leading or learning? Or switching between both? The first slide in the handouts has the following text:

• We do not have a single identity, but shift within and between multiple identities. Identity provides filters through which we make sense of the world

• Identity types : family, cultural, work, interest, learning, …
• Challenges to managing our identities

  -Cognitive overload
  
  -Privacy in a social software universe
  

I take the first item in this list from Cynefin, the framework for complexity and organizational change. The Welsh word cynefin actually means, “the place of my multiple belongings” and so has the notion of how I am in the world in different contexts. It is not only how I make sense of the world, but also the way (I think) that people see me.

I found a greeting card, “It’s not who you know, it’s who knows you”. But it is not just about being known, it’s about what you are known as and for. The challenges in participating in all of these networks are many — navigating different levels of trust, expenditures of time and commitment, building reputation, ensuring sufficient diversity. These are just a few of the issues many of which will come up over the rest of today.

I also want to bring up the notion of intentional personal “net work”. (Those of you who attended our KMcluster here in October will recall that the theme for that event was what we called “net work” — the work that we must do to develop and maintain networks to keep them from entropy. Rob Cross, whose initial work with 60 organizations while he was at IBM, has blended the work of organizational network analysis and personal network analysis, in an analysis software package that provides individual data to each survey participant.

If you want through the “personal network action plan” at the UVA Network Roundtable site. you’ll find a link to the result of the software developed at the University of Virginia. When people participate in a survey, they receive personalized feedback on the composition of their personal networks, including a walk through exercise to think through actions that could help to ensure that the network is more effective.

As a prelude to the rest of the day, I’ll just add another note that all I’ve talked about so far are the face-to-face networks and I haven’t even touched on the electronic social networks and the people I’ve “met” just through blogging or participating in online dialogues. And of course in this social internet space there is another set of problems and I’ll let others introduce those.“

I was preceded on the panel by Steve Borgatti, who showed a slide he had used last week at the CCCSN symposium at the Swiss Consulate in Cambridge. I’ll post it when I get a copy. It’s a very good model of the relationship of human capital (what you know) and social capital (who knows you) for results.

I hope that others will blog the event; stay tuned for listings.