net work

Archive

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.

TwitterFacebookDiigoStumbleUponTumblrDeliciousShare

Archive

April 4, 2012 by Patti

Network Tensions

I was reminded recently during a meeting with a client about the importance of both distinguishing and acknowledging the tensions inherent in intentional networks. The case in point: a very high-powered network of senior leaders in the nonprofit arena who had been carefully selected to be part of a facilitated network. The funder of this network supported network members by providing them sabbaticals; planning and facilitating shared learning experiences outside their geographic area; and giving them opportunities to meet, identify shared goals and possible areas for collaboration; and fostering their visibility to the wider nonprofit and political communities.

The funder did not set specific goals for the network. That is, there was nothing that they were expected to work on as a common effort. The intention was purely to provide a container that bounded the network and to stimulate the network in various ways to enable collaborative opportunities to emerge. And they did. Still, some people continued to question the “why” of this network. What were they supposed to do, exactly?

This tension, I noted, is one of the primary ones I exposed in Net Work: “Outcome v s. Discovery.” Tensions, I wrote, “are present all the time; both leaders and members of a network should be aware of how these tensions impact the health of a network. All networks will shift along these lines of tension as they respond to changes in the environment, changes in the demographics of their members, and changes in purpose, structure, and style.”

 

In one of those delightful moments of serendipity, I very shortly thereafter received via email from Andrew Rixon the following cartoon:

(Cartoonist: Simon Kneebone)

It’s always nice to hear that Net Work is being used, and useful and especially gladdening to see depictions such as this one.  Thanks, Andrew!

TwitterFacebookDiigoStumbleUponTumblrDeliciousShare

Archive

September 25, 2011 by Patti

Roles for Net Work

 

It’s always a rich pleasure to hear June Holley talk about network weaving. A few weeks ago, she talked about Network Weaving in the Leadership Learning Community’s ongoing seminar series.

In her talk, she outlined four key roles for network weavers and the primary activities for each.

Connector
  • Reach out to be more inclusive
  • Helping people find resources
  • Connecting people with common interests
Network facilitator
  • Coordinate working groups
  • Facilitate meetings
  • Help set up the structure of the network
Project Leader/Coordinator
  • Help people find others interested in the same things
  • Help people work together on projects
  • Help people keep organized
Network Guardian
  • Help set up good communication systems and resources
  • Set up training & support for network weavers
  • Make sure time is set aside for reflection

It’s not a stretch to think about these as progressive roles. In a network, everyone can (and should) be a connector. What’s important is to articulate it and be conscious of it. As June also says, the “Number one job” of network weavers is to help more people become weavers. And we can all do that. Moving along the progression, each role requires more skill, more experience, more thoughtfulness. And investment on the part of the stakeholders and funders of an intentional network. Fortunately for the growing number of nonprofits beginning to invest in networks and in network weavers/facilitators/guardians, June’s Network Weaver Handbook is close to completion and available for pre-ordering. I was privileged to get a peek at earlier versions, and it’s an amazing set of resources for planning  and running network weaving events, working with people to help them understand their current and needed skills, and so on.

Slides and a list of resources from this talk are available on the LLC’s Network Weaving Page. This includes the “Network Weavers Role Checklist,” so you can test yourself against the roles listed above.

(The next webinar, October 10, features another of my favorite network facilitators, Nancy White: Communities, Networks and Engagement: Finding a Place for Action. Nancy will talk about building online spaces for networks, a topic that is also a current passion of mine. Look for another blog post soon.)

TwitterFacebookDiigoStumbleUponTumblrDeliciousShare

Archive

July 7, 2011 by Patti

Net Work Investment

Since my book came out four years ago, I have been increasingly connecting with groups in the nonprofit sector, consulting with nonprofits, and trying to navigate the differences between enterprises and nonprofits. I have been saying, working from my gut feel, that nonprofits somehow have been sooner to “get it” about networks. There is now emerging a good body of case studies and examples of how intentional, actively supported — and funded — network building within the nonprofit space achieves remarkable results.

A recent webinar sponsored by Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO), “What is the role of Networks in creating scale?” highlighted  the work and thinking that is showing results (and is part of the ongoing learning dialogue). The panel for the webinar,  included Diana Scearce, of the Monitor Institute (co-author of Working Wikily and more recently, author of the awesome “Connected Citizens: The Power, Peril and Potential of Networks“); Roberto Cremonini of Cremonini Consulting Network (who led knowledge management and networking activities at the Barr Foundation in Boston for seven years); and Gayle Williams, Executive Director of the Mary Reynolds Babcock foundation, which is focused on alleviating poverty in the southern U.S.  Nancy Murphy, from GEO, facilitated the panel discussion and kept the remote audience engaged and interacting.

Diana set the stage by providing a framework for network thinking and development, an approach that blends traditional mechanisms for supporting social change initiatives with network-minded mechanisms:

 

Foundations like the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation and the Barr Foundation have been using the networked mindset, and these approaches, effectively, and are working through the challenges of working with multiple stakeholders and learning how to put structures in place that support networked action — and learning — that require giving up on linear thinking and working organically.

Roberto gave a terrific example of how the Barr Foundation managed its funding for Boston youth sports programs by showing, side-by-side, what Barr could accomplish using a traditional approach versus what it could (and did!) accomplish using networked thinking:

Both practitioners emphasized the emergent role of weaver, or facilitator, or “network officer” (as described in the linked document by the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation, a good and detailed description of the nitty-gritty of the work required); the need to work with the entire ecosystem; and the importance of understanding accountability.   The RE-AMP Energy Network case study provides a good example of building a network by starting with a systemic analysis of the ecosystem and the use of a skilled network facilitator.

A key audience question was, “How do you measure the success of the network?” Gayle Williams talked about the network that MRBF is funding to push tax policy legislation in Alabama. I liked her answer a lot: you can look at the results, actual changes in the tax policy, but also you need to be sure that the network is always asking the questions, “who else needs to be involved?”  How are the relationships? How easy is it for people to come into the network?” The speakers all agreed that organizational/social network analysis is playing a key role in helping people “see” their networks and understand how to improve connections.

This excellent webinar is available for replay at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYudIfermUg

I have always said (and written) that a network produces value based on its purpose, and also provides value to those in it. One of the cases mentioned in this webinar is one I have some personal connections to, the Barr Fellows program which is also supported by the Barr Foundation and facilitated by colleagues at IISC. My friend and colleague Claire Reinelt recently published a case study on this program, which weaves cohorts of nonprofit leaders in the Boston area. Fellows are given 3-month sabbaticals, a shared learning experience somewhere in the global south, and the opportunity to develop “authentic, honest, and accountable relationships with each other.”  It’s not hard to imagine the value to the city of Boston of such inter-connectivity across the Fellows, nor the amazing fund of social capital that each of the Fellows has to draw on.

This work, this investment, in networks and communities is one of the areas of commonality between what we are seeing in Enterprise 2.0 and the nonprofit world. In E2.0, the focus is on communities (see my comments on Rachel Happe‘s talk at the E2.0 conference — and her talk itself, The Strategic Imperative of Communities) but I refuse to get into the semantic arguments about the differences between networks and communities. For the purposes of declaring that work gets gone, goals get accomplished, and visions achieved best through connected sets of people, it doesn’t matter. Nor does it matter what we call them when there are opportunities to learn. The big learning so far this week: E2.0 and nonprofits agree. If you want to work successfully, you have to invest in networks. Community managers/facilitators/network officers/network weavers. Whatever you call them, you need them, and you need to invest in them.

TwitterFacebookDiigoStumbleUponTumblrDeliciousShare

Archive

May 18, 2011 by Patti

Leadership & Networks: Complexity & Self-Managed Teams

A visit to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts to see the marvelous glasswork of  Dale Chihuly resonated in many ways, but salient for me was how looking at and reading about how these works are put together. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about leadership and networks. One of the key “tenets” in my list is to “embrace complexity;” when I reach this part in my NetWorkShops I often use the Snowden Cynefin Framework, and then talk about how the leader has to let go of trying to define specific results and outcomes. Leadership is about setting and holding a vision, setting guide lines for accomplishing the work, providing tools, infrastructure, coaching, and political support so that people can self-organize to do the work, and watching for patterns to emerge.

I recently came across a couple of blogs that very nicely mapped this recipe to the concept of self-organizing teams. One, a very nice blog by Dave Gray who  continued his podular theme in a post, Give pods a chance. He likens pods to self-directed work teams, and then gives examples from 3M, Amazon, and the Chinese motorcycle industry.  He emphasizes that podular, modular design needs to happen in the context of a connected company. He says of Amazon:

Bezos does have an answer though: Break big problems down into small ones. Distribute authority, design, creativity and decision-making to the smallest possible units, and set them free to innovate. Small teams focus on small, measurable components that customers value.

Gray does not skirt the problem set: rewarding teams rather than individuals, dealing with loafers, and so on, but stresses that if you are in an industry in which complexity is increasing, you need to “take another look at organizational forms that play to natural human strengths, like ingenuity, curiosity, and the job of making a clear and recognizable impact on the world.”

Co-incidentally, Rachel Happe posted a vision of the social organization that provides additional detail about what it takes to provide an environment in which employees “self-commit” to projects that have been defined within the scope of the overall company strategy and direction. Managers are there to coach and support employees as they choose projects and navigate their careers. Rachel focuses on the social environment that is being enabled by the communications tools available to us; this is a nice counterpoint to Dave Gray’s description of how the pods (“projects”) innovate and create breakthroughs.

So, how did Dale Chihuly get me off my butt to finally write about this? It turns out that his projects are all about how he provides a vision, a set of guide lines, and a desired future state to the artists who work in his studio and who set up the art for exhibition. The Lime Green Icicle Towerconsists of over 2,400 individual pieces of glass that were blown and shipped to Boston. If you look at the video of its construction you may wonder about a detailed specification of how all the pieces were to be assembled. The fact is, there was nothing detailed. The parts were put together in Boston using the sense (vision) of what the finished piece was to look like, but was otherwise assembled in context, on the spot.

My sense of this is that the teams Chihuly is using are self-organized at two points in the artistic process: first, after he has a vision for a piece and describes the colors, shapes, and overall aesthetic that he is going for. Glassblowers work within these boundaries to create the amazing, individualistic shapes and contours of the pieces. Then, given boundaries for what the finished work is to be, they assemble those pieces, never entirely sure of what, exactly it will look like. The relationships among the pieces is always different, whenever a finished work is assembled, but the results are always true to a vision.

 

TwitterFacebookDiigoStumbleUponTumblrDeliciousShare
← Older posts
Newer posts →