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.