Work on Net Work continues. It is of course a study itself of net work, as I am drawing on and from my own network through, slogging through emails saved a year ago because there was a tidbit that might be useful, remembering people I haven’t talked to for a while, finding an old book on my bookshelf that has just the right quotation …

At the top of my pile cabinet right now is a recent MIT Sloan Management Review article, “Four Keys to Managing Emergence.” It’s a natural fit for the topic of managing the infrastructure that supports healthy networks, especially when the goal is innovation. Authors Ann Majchrzak, Dave Logan, Ron McCurdy, and Mathias Kirchmer.

Managers who excel at managing streams of “spurts” of innovation, they say, engage in four distinct practices:

• Continuous discourse with potential participants. The emphasis in discourse is on diversity of ideas, engagement, and a focus for action.
• Continuous updating of knowledge maps. The critical idea here is that “all members of an emergent enterprise maintain their own knowledge maps,” that is, everybody needs to know “who knows what” and “who needs what knowledge,” particularly in hand offs in the supply chain
• Blurring boundaries between those inside and those outside the organization. Include all stakeholders, employees, suppliers, partners, and customers.
• Governing through reputation networks. Providing ways for people to build credibility taps into the powerful motivator of acknowledgment

Simplified for Net Work, I’d say these are pretty good principles.