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March 19, 2014 by Patti

Changing the world of work: it takes a network

After a 3-year focus in the non-profit world where I have been supporting network weaving projects with social network surveys and analyses. (See Networks and NonProfits). I slowed, then dropped out of the social media stream of tweeting and blogging as my internal compass shifted.

I have been working regularly with a small number of outstanding consultants and organizations focused on understanding network-building as a development strategy and evaluating the impact of the investments in network-building. I love the people I work with, but it’s still been a bit lonely working primarily from my desk at home, interfacing with only a handful of the actual clients as my work became more and more narrowly focused into maps, spreadsheets, and the exchange of powerpoint files.

The last time I attended an Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston I came away totally frustrated. After 20+ years working with collaboration tools (beginning with a Lotus Notes precursors) I was seeing, demonstrated, that the future had finally arrived. Enterprise social network (ESN) platforms truly enabled work to happen in conversations and as a result of conversations. The 3rd generation of KM was imminent, where knowledge emerges from the network. Why frustrated?  I wanted to work in a big enterprise where people would be using these tools. I was nostalgic for the Camelot of Collaboration and being part of a company where sharing was culturally embedded and trust abounded or was, with the introduction of ESNs, plausibly possible . “Let me in, coach!”

What I missed out on, big time, was that there was a big enterprise that I actually was a part of but couldn’t see my way to participate in. My network of folks who are not part of corporate enterprises were there all the time, an emergent learning enterprise of hugely scaleable value. (Too many to list, but you know who you are; you are the big dark blue blob in my LinkedIn Network, below):

Patti's Linked Inmap

What happened? When my paid client work took my attention into the dark green blob, I changed my filters and stopped tuning into the conversational feeds where explorations into corporate structure, personal knowledge management and working out loud, continued good practice development in good old solid KM, innovation platforms and networks were continuing to produce awesome learning, insights, and models for the new world of work.

Then, miraculously, Susan Scrupski (who wasn’t even in the big blue blob) reached out to me to invite me, as a social network analysis expert, to join Change Agents Worldwide. Here, I have found many fellow travelers from my earlier days in KM and social media as well as new names and faces who are already enriching my understanding of work and how to work. Because guess what? They are using an ESN, Socialcast by VMware and gosh, it is nonstop conversations, ideas emerging from those conversations that are being captured and curated into an emerging framework for creating a shared business, a nonhierarchical enterprise of change agents with a common desire to make human work more meaningful. I joined too late to provide an essay for the inaugural publication: Changing the World of Work. And I am still easing my way into conversations that don’t pertain directly to social network analysis, but I think I will find my way in, and out back into KM and possibly even ESN projects.

Meanwhile, I am working to manage the CAWW flow and my flow as I experience this new world of working together, aloud. I just blogged, didn’t I?

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July 18, 2013 by Patti

Intentional Networking à la Engelbart

Doug Engelbart passed away last week, and there have been modest acknowledgments about his passing, and his accomplishments, among which, of course his most famous — the invention of the computer mouse. (The Economist had a nice obituary, too.)

The mouse was an element of Doug’s vision for how humans and computers could co-evolve to increase the intellectual potential of individuals and groups. Being able to interact with the computer and with others through the computer and becoming more adept at doing it was merely a hardware element.

I became familiar with the vision and much, much more, when I attended one of Doug’s Bootstrap Institute’s 3-day seminars at Stanford in March, 1991. Three days with Doug Engelbart did, I am sure, change many more lives than mine. He introduced a full new way of thinking about work in organizations and used language that today could fit into any knowledge management treatise, for example:

Giving knowledge workers new capabilities for coordinating their work concurrently, with instant access to the correct document, and all the supporting intelligence and dialog trails which led to key decisions, could dramatically reduce product-cycle time and improve first-time quality, boosting an organization’s capacity and momentum. (This text is from my hardcopy dated 11/5/90. Updated version is available on the Douglas Engelbart website.)

His approach for enhancing organizational effectiveness was the A-B-C model, in which the core business work is the (A) activity, and (B) activities were those in service of improving (A) through training, implementing new processes, introducing new tools, and the like. The third level, (C) activities, were those activities focused on getting better at learning, researching, finding, and figuring how to acquire and share the knowledge necessary for improving (B) so as to enhance (A).

He believed that (C) activities were in the main non-proprietary and could and should therefore be work that could be a collaboration across businesses and industries. He attracted many people to the Bootstrap Institute (which has since been renamed the Doug Engelbart Institute) to work together to create this (C) community. And because so much of his vision was tied to the use of computing infrastructure, he sought the support and attendance by many in the computer industry. I was invited to attend because there were several senior people in Digital Equipment at the time who were interested in participating in the effort.

Three intense days included time in Doug’s education lab (the first time I had ever participated in a training session in which all participants had computer screens to view and follow along the instructor’s screen), lots of “foils” (as they were called in that day, no screen display of powerpoint yet!) that expanded on the various elements of Doug’s theory of augmentation and the different cultural, organizational, and systemic ramifications… and lots of interesting people. Below is our group photo. Over 14 different computer hardware and/or software companies represented.

Bootstrap Seminar March 1991

(That’s me in the red shawl. Doug is 2 heads above me.)

Not much really happened with the Bootstrap Initiative as, like most of Doug’s work, he was ahead of his time and probably not a great salesmen nor business thinker. For human augmentation to really work well, computers needed to be interoperable — information from one computer system had to be accessible from any other — but  we were some (not a whole lot, but enough) years away from the environment we live in now with rapid publishing to the web, almost universal sharing through HTML and document publishing standards. All of which made knowledge management possible.

The Bootstrap seminar was one of the first formal intentional network building events I ever attended. Doug was very clear about how important it was for us to get to know each other and that the development of these relationships would make or break the Bootstrap endeavor. At each break, he instructed us to “talk with someone you don’t know or haven’t met yet!”  Not much came of the network, either, but that was possibly also because we didn’t yet quite have the technology for all these people in all these companies to have communications tools so we could communicate in a style that was comfortable for each of us. (Or, the purpose of the network wasn’t sufficiently articulated; or, there wasn’t enough structure for the network to collaborate; or we weren’t sure what the value of this network would be to each of our respective companies. Wish I’d known more back then.)
RIP, Doug Engelbart, and thanks for the gift of many concepts and a language that I believe has served me well.

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July 15, 2013 by Patti

The Net Work of Change Agents

Change management has been on my mind a bit of late — especially since I was invited to participate in a panel on the topic in the knowledge management track at the SLA annual conference in San Diego last month. It was a panel of two; I was pleased to be able to re-connect with a former colleague from my work with MITRE, Ethel Salonen, who was my co-panelist.

I began delving into my file cabinet and came up with the following articles spanning 25 years:

SLA 2013

Both long-time veterans of corporate change programs, Ethel and I were able to provide two different perspectives:

  • Naturally, my part was about the network perspective (understanding the organization, finding the influencers via social network analysis). I included some insights that I have learned from working with nonprofits who develop logic models supporting their theories of change
  • Ethel gave a historical and theoretical perspective based on types of change giving examples from MITRE, wrapping her talk around three types of change (incremental, paradigmatic, and cataclysmic) from work by Roger Greer.

It was a fun, engaging session with lots of Q&A (SLA is a great audience). The fact is I hadn’t originally intended to talk about change management and network analysis, and was planning to do a more KM-focused talk, but Ethel convinced me to give the network perspective, and that worked well.

What would have worked better is if I had seen the new HBR article, The Network Secrets of Great Change Agents a day or so before the talk. (It was not published until a week or so later, so I excuse myself.) (Also, hat tip to colleague Cai Kjaer at Optimice for posting a link in the SNAP Linked In Group.)

So, this article, by Julie Battilana and Tiziana Casciaro, identifies what the social networks of change agents should look like based on the type of change. The research base consisted of 68 change initiatives within the UK’s National Health Service. Building on the network concepts of bridging ties versus bonding ties, which they’ve articulated as bridging and cohesive network patterns, they found that:

  • For divergent change, that is, a change that requires “dramatic shifts in values and practices that have been taken for granted,” a bridging network (or bridging network strategy) is more effective. I suspect that divergent here might correspond to some combination of paradigmatic and cataclysmic in the Greer model)
  • For nondivergent change, that “builds on rather than disrupts existing norms and practices,” a cohesive (bonding) network or strategy is best

They also summarize the importance of looking at your personal network and seeing, within it, people who might be categorized as endorsers, fence-sitters, and resisters and the most effective strategies for working with people in each of these categories, again, based on how divergent the change is. The upshot? Focus on the fence-sitters, for either type of change. Deepening personal relationships with endorsers doesn’t add much value, and resistors should be kept at arm’s length. (Also on the change management front this past week: a new blog post from Maya Townsend on “Go Slow to Go Fast:” doing the careful work of talking to people before embarking on a change initiative. She doesn’t use the word “network,” but I believe she is talking about creating a solid network to support change.)

This is a good, quick, read that provides the kind of insight that I like to see from rigorous research. Next time I’m asked to give a talk on change management, I’ll update the network perspective.

 

 

 

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January 8, 2013 by Patti

Networks and NonProfits

I’ve had the good fortune over the past two years to see my work shift into the nonprofit space. I miss some of my corporate clients, but it has been both a rewarding and a good learning experience to participate in this other world. I’m getting ready to do a webinar [link updated 4/2 to take you to the full replay] on the 14th of January for the Leadership Learning Community. It’s titled Network Analysis (SNA/ONA) Methods for Assessment & Measurement. It’s the result of some thinking and working with June Holley and Claire Reinelt on the various things I’ve seen in the nonprofit world. June and Claire will also be sharing case studies on the webinar.

Part of what’s been interesting over the past years (as I was working on Net Work and thereafter) is the pick-up of interest in all things networks and nonprofits. I use this graphic in my workshops as a way to get people to talk about what they have (or might) read:

nonprofit reading

This is certainly not exhaustive, but it’s a pretty good list. So I have published this list (with hyperlinks) as Net Work’s NonProfit Reading List.

Two recent additions to the list (one made it into the graphic, the other not yet):

The LLC’s recent publication, Leadership & Networks (October 2012) by Claire Reinelt and Deborah Meehan. I am a contributing co-author on this paper, along with some great collaborators. The report is intended for “those who run and fund leadership programs that develop and support leadership for social change.” It highlights the importance of, and ways that, leaders in social change should be more network-aware and ways that programs can bring network literacy into their work.

I’ve also added an as-yet unpublished paper developed by Heather Creech and colleagues for IISD (especial thanks to co-author Michelle Laurie, for sharing this). I’ve been a fan of Heather’s for some time as she has been working in the development world for many years offering insights into how networks can support sustainable development. This new publication, Performance improvement and assessment of collaboration: starting points for networks and communities of practice provides a very good breakdown of types of communities of practice and suggestions for ways to measure value created by each.

Which brings me back to the topic of the webinar: it is important to understand not just how network analysis can support nonprofits in designing and assessing networks and measuring the impact of the network, but also to understand the limitations. It’s a topic of active inquiry for me — having been so immersed in SNA/ONA for so long, I am finding that it is important to be able to understand how network maps and metrics can be indicators of outcome. That’s the new net work.

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August 9, 2012 by Patti

Integrating Network Analysis into a Social Media/Collaboration Project

I have been recently been requested to participate in proposals (some leading to projects!) in which an organizational network analysis (ONA) is used in an integrated way during the development of a collaboration strategy. In each instance, I’ve found it necessary to write some educational “addenda” for attachment to the proposals. Much as ONA/SNA practitioners would like it to be otherwise, our discipline never went mainstream to the extent that the method and its uses are well known.

My colleague Dan Keldsen recently invited me to collaborate with him and others on such a proposal. Rather than attach my write-up as an addendum, he (social media guru that he is) published it as a blog on his Information Architected site. See Using Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) and let us know what you think.
And, if you are interested in learning ONA, I think there are still spaces available in the course I deliver with Optimice colleagues Cai Kjaer and Laurie Lock Lee. The four-session course includes access to the online ONA course I developed for Information Architected and that is hosted on Dan’s site. The course runs sessions based on Asia/Pacific, US, and European time zones. The next European session begins next week. Apart from the online course, we work to tailor the content to the needs of the students, that is, we talk about how to integrate an ONA project into the work challenges that they are facing right now.

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