Endless Knots

Eliza dot com

Oh What a Tangled Web We Weave

ink on paper
4.5" X 5"
2009

New website from Daughter #2. New work. New projects. New band. New cookbook-in-the-works. Etc.

The algorithm for happiness=3:1

I'm not kidding and where of all places did I discover it? The Sun, no less.

Those of you familiar with the magazine know that finding extraordinary pieces there is no surprise. But the April issue, with "The Science of Happiness," Angela Winter's interview with psychologist Barbara Frederickson, is surprising, not just because of the general idea--that there is a science to the upward turning corners of the mouth--but also because of Frederickson's "collaboration with business consultant Marcial Losada," to which I will return shortly but first a bit more on Frederickson's work.

Her new book is Positivity. Think less of the made-up-ness sound of the word (even if it is in the dictionary) and more of words like chemoreceptivity and hyposensitivity, in other words, science-y. The Kenan Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Principal Investigator of the Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Lab at the University of North Carolina, Frederickson has been asking why people have positive emotions for a long time. From the interview:

Positive emotions tell us not just what the body needs but what we need mentally and emotionally and what our future selves might need. They help us broaden our minds and our outlook and build our resources down the road. I call it the "broaden and build" effect.

So there's a lot to consider and I haven't read the book or anything else by her but...I was stopped when I came across the reference to Frederickson's work with Losada. Turns out that Losada, whose work I am not familiar with, specializes in high-performing teams. In his observations of sixty business teams, he found that:

...high-performing teams had about a six-to-one ratio of positive to negative statements, whereas the low-performing teams had ratios of less than one to one, meaning that more than half of what was said was negative. People on the high-performing teams had an even balance between asking questions and advocating for their own points of view, and also an equal measure of focusing outward and focusing within the group. The low-performing teams had asked almost no questions and almost never focused outside the group. They exhibited a self-absorbed advocacy: nobody was listening to each other--they were all just waiting to talk.

Apparently, mathematical modeling is Losada's hobby and working with nothing more than "a laptop on his dining-room table and loads of data from past observations of business teams...[he] wrote algebraic equations reflecting how each stream--the questioning, the positivity, and the outward-inward focus--related to the others."

What did he find? That his equations matched the Lorenz system, the bit of chaos theory that explains nothing less than the "butterfly effect"--you know, flap wings here, global economic meltdown there. In other words, positivity creates positivity (more complex than that as we're ultimately talking complexity theory here) and I want you to buy, nay, subscribe to The Sun (the ad-free, 35-year-old monthly, with nearly 70,000 subscribers).

But I can't get away with that, can I, say the complex systems theorists reading here. I quote Frederickson again:

Underneath the dynamics for the high-performing teams was what physicists call a "complex chaotic attractor," which produces unpredictable or novel outcomes. So high-performing teams produced novel creative results. Underneath the structure of low-performing teams was a "fixed-point attractor" that caused the teams to spiral down to a dead end. There were also medium-performing teams, which showed some creativity, and at times it looked as if a complex chaotic attractor was trying to emerge, but then a moment of intense negativity would occur, and they'd never bounce back. What's interesting is that the negativity always arose within the realm of self-absorbed advocacy and not asking any questions...

...Using the Lorenz equations we were able to algebraically predict that a ratio of three positive events to one negative event should be the tipping point where things become chaotic--in a good sense--and a medium-performing team becomes a high-performing one.

I'm so absorbed in looking at the article, typing sections here, then looking back (it's not online yet) that I risk just going on and on. You get the point. Teams, you must look in and out. Say/think/perform three positive things for every negative one.

What a simple formula for coaxing high-performance out of our teams.

Honoring Lisa Kimball (*lisa) on Ada Lovelace Day

First, the context. It's Ada Lovelace Day Day in honor of the world's first known programmer, Augusta Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace, and, yes, daughter of Lord Byron, yes, that Byron, the Romantic poet.

Though she lived only 36 years and those were in the 19th century (nearly the same years in fact as Margaret Fuller lived about whom much has been written here), Ada Lovelace did something no one else had ever done: she proposed "a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers with the Engine," the "engine" being Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine. Thus was born the world's first computer program, long before there actually was a computer and a full century before "software" was even much of a concept.

Incredibly, Ada Lovelace's groundbreaking work was nothing more than a set of notes that she appended to the translation of an Italian mathematician's memoir. But what notes they were, a sequence of instructions for making calculations with Babbage's device. And she went on to postulate that the engine, once programmed, as it were, “might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.”

If you're interested, you can find a ton of material about Ms. Lovelace around the web and at the site set up for today's celebration of her impact: bloggers around the world are participating in a "let's celebrate women in technology" day, each of us raising up someone whom we admire.

So with that background, I'm honoring the great, once, and future networker, Lisa Kimball. I met Lisa in the early '80s, when computer conferencing was just taking off. She was then joining Frank Burns in launching The Meta Network, an online discussion forum that has lasted ever since.

Thousands -- I'm not exaggerating -- thousands of conversations have been launched because of Lisa, who has the gift of online facilitation so needed today when digital "conversations" can be so reckless. She knows countless people in diverse fields. She's brilliant. She's funny. And she has the largest collections of Mexican folk art in any single residence (OK, I'm probably exaggerating because hers is the only one I'm familiar with but, trust me, it's immense.)

Professional-wise, her bio includes this: "executive producer and owner of Group Jazz, an organization devoted to supporting the efforts of teams, task forces, communities and organizations. She earned her doctorate in educational psychology, cognition and learning and is active in online community work, organizational development and is skilled in using complexity-inspired principles. She is also a Plexus Trustee." The also part is important as Lisa's been quite involved in Plexus Institute's work with hospitals and health care facilities to apply "Positive Deviance methodology" to "eliminating transmission of hospital acquired 'superbug' infections."

It's fitting. Lisa's always positive, always making connections you wouldn't necessarily think of yourself. She's a cofounder of the long-ago but not-forgotten Electronic Networking Association (I was there at the founding meeting too and get to call myself a co-founder but really Lisa did more work than anyone.)

I've written about Lisa before here and here. So admiring have we been of her networking talents that we profiled her in The Age of the Network ("All the Way to New York to Buy a Modem").

And why do we have the (*lisa) in the title? Because for many years, that's how she signed her emails.

Keep networking, Lisa. It's more than technology alone that builds the future.

PS: One tiny last thing: I trust Lisa so much that when I couldn't fulfill a speaking engagement in Japan, I turned it over to her - and they loved her.

Transparency for accountability as the funds roll out

Transparency was a keyword in Obama's run for the office and it's been a critical tenet of everything that he and his administration have spoken about since. The first presidential directives out of the gate for the new administration were focused on transparency and open government. And, it is central to the bailout-stimulus-rescue plans now underway and soon to come.

There are many potential traps in promoting transparency, of course, and each time something seems a little untransparent, the commentators are quick to wave the hypocrisy flag. Putting aside the media's lack of transparency, we want to focus on another aspect of transparency which is this: its ability to keep a clear focus on accountability. If we know what ends are sought and who's responsible for reaching them, then we have a clear roadmap of accountability.

But how do you have a clear roadmap when the thing itself is far more huge than anything has ever been before?

We talked a bit here about the need for clear maps during reorganization where enterprises are shrinking, but we haven't talked at all about the need for clear maps when organizations are growing, or exploding in size.

Take the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, whose head, Sheila Bair, has been one of those voices for greater transparency. Yay, Ms. Bair. We've spent a bit of time putting the top levels of FDIC into our US Government Map (go to Federal Agencies, at about 2 o'clock).

Thanks to the careful reporting of Eric Lipton in a NY Times Valentine Day post ("Failed Banks Pose Test for Regulators"), we learn that the work--and the budget--of FDIC increased astronomically from 2007 to 2008. FDIC, which has the thankless task of toxic clean-up of failed banks (and the businesses that led to their failures), had just three failed banks to scrub-rinse-repeat in '07. Number in '08? Twenty-five, or, arithmetic fans, eight times the number it had to launder, so to speak, just a year earlier. Given that, as of last week, thirteen more banks already have failed in '09 (and we're only halfway through February), a whole lot more are landing in FDIC's dirty laundry basket even as we write.

To provide some perspective, Lipton examines just one part of FDIC, its Division of Resolutions and Receiverships, whose 2008 budget was $75 million. The budget for 2009? $1 billion. Let's keep following this through. How does FDIC manage to negotiate the deals that allow billions of dollars in assets to move to higher ground?

It hires people. As of right now (or maybe a few weeks ago), FDIC employs 4800 people, according to Lipton's article. When it was last responsible for the prior big bank horror show in the '90s, it employed as many as 15,000. Given that the mess we're dealing with now is HUMUNGUSLY BIGGER than what transpired in the '90s, shall we speculate that perhaps FDIC may need to do more than triple its size? Will the FDIC grow to 30,000? 45,000?

To meet this challenge, it is only hiring 1500 new people. Lipton reports that $700 million (!) will be spent hiring contractors to provide the warm bodies to do the work. So like so much of the rest of corporate America, FDIC is outsourcing the work to avoid the painful ballooning up followed by the excruciating shrinking that always follows windfalls.

How will FDIC manage accountability across such a fast and vast ramp-up of its capabilities? Accountability is all the more important because of the "army of contractors."

Like the dozens of other agencies whose budgets are about to swell--at the national, state, and local levels, FDIC desperately needs to upgrade its accountability mechanisms. One fundamental way to do that is by establishing and maintaining org charts of the whole organization, which are literally the structure of accountability. We're putting in some time as a start to that process and we encourage FDIC and the other agencies and departments charged with implementing the stimulus and other spending to do the same.

With transparency you can see accountability which (re)builds trust.

Revolution in networks: applying the new science to organizations

As we posted earlier, the Discovery Network's Science Channel (thank you, Joe Wehr) premieres "Connected: The Real Matrix" tonight, Sunday, February 15, at 9pm EST (and PST). As our friends at Future of Work note in their cross-post, "the program will also be repeated on Monday, February 16, at 12:00 AM, and on Tuesday, February 17 at4 AM (again, EST and PST). Maybe not the greatest times, but you can always set your trusty DVR to pick it up for you."

The TV show emphasizes the general applicability of the new network science to complex systems. We here at NetAge have applied this same science to organizations. As we've written, OrgScope is the tool we developed to visualize and analyze organizations as networks. So the show is the perfect lead-in to the next installment of our NetAge Working Papers series on management science for networked organizations:

"Revolution in Networks: Applying the New Science of Networks to Organizations." (Download Revolution in Networks)

We present the concept of “organization network science” as an application of the new network science, as described in the "Connected" show. As described in this working paper, the new science includes the concept of “scale-free networks” and their signature pattern of hubs developed by Albert-László Barabási and others. A second stream of new network thinking, personified by Duncan Watts, reveals how a few “shortcuts” dramatically reduce path lengths to form “small-world networks.” We reframe generic network principles of growth and “preferential attachment” for use in understanding and managing organizations as networks. At the paper’s end, we retrace in organizational terms a Barabási simulation of how a network grows, and address the development of hierarchical networks.

Here are a few paragraphs from the paper:

Background on the Network Revolution

Over the past few years, a new “science of networks” has rapidly woven across the physical, biological, and social domains, bringing the simplicity of common characteristics to diverse complex systems.

Our field work at the leading edge of global organizational development confirms that this new “linked” science applies directly and immediately to highly-complex organizations. It is our hope that a true theory-based, data-driven, testable science of “organizational networks” will enable an historic step-change increase in human organizational capabilities. Great ambition, but even modest improvements in collaboration could have widespread application and deep impact. We believe this new knowledge can substantially improve our collective ability to work together better, a clear imperative imposed by the era’s economic interdependence, digital information technologies, accelerating globalization, and deepening human power to modify ourselves and the world around us.

So what’s new about networks according to the latest research? In a phrase, they are organic, scale-free, small worlds. The new network science grasps complex networks by their nodes and maps their links, generating useful metrics related to configurations that help identify hubs, shortcuts, and all manner of characteristics that are directly applicable to organizations.

Download Revolution in Networks

-- Jeff Stamps

"Connected: the real matrix" - see it Sunday on Discovery

"Nothing is more practical than a good theory."

So says Duncan Watts in a wonderful documentary on the new science of networks. "Connected: The Real Matrix" airs Sunday night at 9pm on the Discovery Channel in the US. The promo (see below) is enough to get us excited as it features Watts and Albert Laszlo Barabasi, who represent the two great streams of advances in network science in the last decade: small worlds (Watts) and scale-free networks (Barabasi). It was Barabasi's work that inspired us to apply the new network science to organizations, a subject we have been studying for almost three decades (see our Library). From that early investigation came our OrgScope tool that maps and analyzes organizations as networks. We've let Barabasi know how influential his work has been on ours and we're excited that this show will be on TV.

What's the "new" in the "new network science?" Two things: an unexpected discovery and a resolution to an old problem. Barabasi led the team that discovered "scale-free networks," non-random configurations with sparse but many-linked "hubs" that turn out to be key nodes in networks. With Steven Strogatz, Watts finally solved the "six-degrees of separation" conundrum by showing how a few "shortcuts" could dramatically decrease average communication distance.

These final two advances enlarged traditional ("old") network science (known as "graph theory") that underlies social network analysis (SNA) and created a remarkable general-purpose network paradigm that is immediately applicable to both people and organizations. Listen closely, and you will hear news in the program about a "general network theory," a mathematically-rooted, experimentally demonstrated, and highly practical theory that applies across physical, biological, and human domains. Our work shows that this same general network theory applies directly to networked organizations (see, for example, our paper, "Principles for Reorganization").

On Monday, February 16, we'll release "Revolution in Networks: Applying the New Science of Networks to Organizations," the next in our NetAge Working Papers series. There, we tell the story and examine the work of both Barabasi and Watts, elegantly platformed by the upcoming documentary.

Check out what's in store on the documentary:

-- Jeff Stamps

Nodes and links, technically speaking

Like the economy, old mental models of our organizations are bankrupt. We've been developing a new model of organization for many years, one we believe is fit for these times. We're collecting and posting the more technical aspects of this new model, a small book's worth, as NetAge Working Papers, of which we're posting the second today. We'll post several more over the coming weeks.

"Understanding Nodes and Links: Core Concepts of People, Positions, and Relationships," the second working paper, provides the technical background to the idea that all organizations, including hierarchies, are networks. This is a topic we've been beating to death in our writings and on this blog. So for you deep conceptual divers, this one's for you. (Download Understanding Nodes and Links)

A little more formally put, this paper contains the foundation for a management science of networked organizations. Networks are known by their nodes. Key to this approach to nodes is the idea of the position, the central ingredient integrating the ephemeral organization with the flesh-and-blood people who populate it. Connecting the nodes in networks, of course, are links. Here we lay out a taxonomy for these relationships: directed links, both horizontal and vertical, with strong and weak versions. Nodes and links together generate dynamic representations of organizational realities. These ideas contribute the conceptual basis for the design of OrgScope, our tool for mapping, navigating, and analyzing organizations as networks.

Here are the opening paragraphs of "Understanding Nodes and Links:"

What Are We?

A formal organization is an emergent network of positions, a configuration of roles filled by people.

Simple idea, yet significant in consequence. Who or what are we? What is the us that works together as an integrated whole, from families and teams to enterprises and nations. It takes but a small shift in perspective to see individual people working together as an organization that is tangible, knowable, and measurable. An organized us happens when we step into roles and bring a particular configuration of positions to life.

An organization is its people—simple and obvious.

Yes, but…is that all? Is there something more, or different, something that is human in essence but separate from the people who comprise the organization?

Every organization tells a story, is its own play. It has a cast of characters and a plot. To perform their parts, actors step into their roles. Different personalities and capabilities emerge, depending on which actor plays the role. Whether great or poor, an individual’s performance takes place within the same set of formal relationships any actor playing that role must contend with. Thus, the role or position is part of the play’s structure, existing quite independently of the person playing that role. King Lear is William Shakespeare’s play, King Lear is a role in the play, and Sir Lawrence Olivier played the King Lear role to great acclaim. Shakespeare and Olivier are dead. The play—and the King Lear role itself—lives on, and has for four hundred years.

When people step into positions, they take on roles that link into a network of other roles. But that doesn’t prevent them from being the people they are, who come to their jobs with their unique preferences and idiosyncrasies. Organizational life is both:

Formal, with its the network of positions, constituent units, and working groups that stand apart from the people; and

Informal, with its social interactions among particular people, who stand apart from the roles they occupy in and around the organization.

These two kinds of networks--organizational and social--are inextricable (see Figure 1). When we think about all the relationships relevant to organizational life, their entanglement contributes to our sense of chaotic complexity. But we can distinguish these two types of networks. By clearly defining and specifying the organizational network of positions, we can more easily identify relationships that make up social networks of people.

Currently, social scientists and management theorists are trying to understand group life largely by examining the network of relationships among the group’s members. Social relationships are not only highly complex themselves, but they are especially obscured because the formal organizational framework is itself dynamic.

The network of positions moves to its own beat while the entwined people network has its own different rhythms.

The complexity of these two fundamental sorts of human networks is awesome, understandably hindering our ability to develop social and organizational sciences. New insights from network and complexity sciences, however, help us establish a new management science of organizational networks.

(Download Understanding Nodes and Links)

-- Jeff Stamps

Data Behind Principles for Reorganization - A NetAge White Paper

"Principles for Reorganization: How To Mix Levels, Span, and Size to maximize Communication and Decision-Making" offers a more detailed look at the data behind the theory we presented in NetAge Report #4, "Organizing at the Edge of Chaos," and blogged here. It provides greater insight into the metrics that those responsible for enterprises can use to reduce risk of failure, extend leadership circles, and improve organizational designs. (Download Principles for Reorganization.)

NetAge Working Papers set out a new theory and practice for organizations. We feel compelled to publish these more technical papers now as an urgent response to the collapse of traditional hierarchies and bureaucracies as evidenced by the current economic debacle. As the economic crisis deepens in 2009, we believe that now is the time for new ideas, new frameworks, and new theory to come forward, approaches that will allow all kinds of organizations whether large or small to reorganize in smarter, better, and faster ways. 

Here are a few paragraphs from the "Principles" paper:

In this working paper, we present the data behind our theory of hierarchy as a network. We show how the complementary dynamics of communication and decision-making play out in the unexpected properties found in hierarchy. We provide more data detail because it allows a deeper look at the forces that shape the formal structure. These measurements of structures and forces enable organizations to predict and to prescribe, two hallmarks of science.

Accurate maps and data of organizational networks of positions help us see and understand the global configuration of relationships, which enables us to make better local decisions.

Our organizations are human. Humans organize themselves. They are self-organizations.

Self-organization, a term introduced in the 1940s by Ross Ashby, has been a foundation idea of cybernetics, systems science, and, more recently, complexity science. It refers to the ability to change and grow in complexity without outside guidance.

Self-organization is the only route to managing complexity writ large in a networked world. “It” must manage “itself.” Indeed, the organizational network is already managing itself, but remains largely unaware it is doing so.

As we said in NetAge Report #1, “The Digital Reorganization Chart,” start toward a conscious process of self-organization by mapping the current formal structure. Then assess the existing pattern of communication-decision dynamics as suggested by the Eleum example that follows here. This analysis is available to all organizations. It falls out of the reporting data already sitting in the enterprise data system, much of it gold-standard quality in terms of accuracy and completeness.

Use the global map to provide context for local mapping and design decisions. Bring local intelligence to bear on local questions of optimal fit for purpose. This is redesign from the inside out, local answers to factors of size, span, and levels to meet immediate conditions.

At the same time, local decisions roll up and effect organizational behavior at larger scales. It falls to the executive cadre, managers who are directing teams of teams, to balance the strategic direction of large-scale goals with the local tactical optimization solutions.

Simple sorts of size and span spotlight the hub positions and bring extra attention to those critical areas of the organization. In particular, an organization wants to highlight the hotspots. Is this dual-hub structure the right design for this set of circumstances? If so, are the right people in these high-stress positions?

As Eleum demonstrates, knowledge of the level, span, and size of every position is immediately useful information with many practical applications. And it’s not just about better, more adaptive organizational structures. It is easier to get the right people and skills into the right positions when you know the position’s multiple roles in the overall configuration.

For more, Download Principles for Reorganization

-- Jeff Stamps

NetAge Report #4: Organizing at the edge of chaos

There's an obvious subtitle for this post: "Stop before you chop." Fourth in our series of NetAge Reports on virtual reorganization, we address the hidden forces that sit behind how we shape our organizations. Since so many organizations are undertaking reorganization right now, we feel compelled to contribute what we know. And, we're concerned about mindless reorganization that doesn't take into account unintended consequences.

Driven by twin needs--to optimize communication while enhancing decision-making--organizations are in constant flux between centralization and its opposite, decentralization. But as we've said before, mindless flattening of organizations will be disastrous because it reduces the ability to respond intelligently to change.

In our post yesterday, we pointed out that Obama is "complexifying" government by creating more layers, adding cross-links, and multiplying leadership. At the end of the NYT article we referenced there, Karl Rove is quoted as saying that Obama's moves are likely to "create a more centralized and possibly incoherent policy process." Not surprisingly, Rove has it exactly wrong, calling Obama's reorganization centralizing moves. But Rove is hardly alone in this common misconception, even among our network-tuned friends. However, he does have it right that such rearrangements indeed may cause incoherence. This is why we have promoted the idea of visualizing and analyzing our organizations, so we can manage more complexity with less effort.

Here's NetAge Report #4:

Organizing at the Edge of Chaos

Early in the presidential contest between the newly-presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama and already named Republican John McCain, Elisabeth Bumiller published “Cast of 300 Advises Obama on Foreign Policy” to which the New York Times gave page-one real estate. Largely an insightful “who’s-who” of his advisers for this delicate area of national concern, the article also offers remarkable portraits of the stark contrast between the organizing styles of two the candidates. One was simple, the other complex. Guess who won.

Bumiller describes Obama’s apparatus as a “huge 300-person foreign policy campaign bureaucracy organized like a mini State Department to assist a candidate whose limited national security experience remains a concern to many voters.” The article goes on to describe an “infrastructure” of twenty teams that focus on regions (e.g., Asia and China) and issues (e.g., nuclear proliferation). By contrast, Bumiller describes John McCain’s approach as “a far smaller and looser foreign policy advisory operation, about 75 people in all, and none are organized into teams.”

So there you have it. McCain had direct input from 75 people, an incredibly large “span” of “direct reports” by any organizational measure and an extremely flat organization. No “middle” men or women. Perfect for simplicity and direct communication. McCain, the ostensibly more experienced of the two men in foreign policy, didn’t think he needed nuanced views regarding foreign policy, and he didn’t get many.

Obama organized differently, with a core team of six people managing twenty separate pipelines of progressively synthesized input from advisors with great depth of expertise. Larger teams had their own sub-teams, such as the forty-person nuclear proliferation team organized into eight working groups by Brookings Institution and National Security Council veteran Ivo Daalder.

Reorganization fever at the White House

Peter Baker has a great reorganization story in today's NY Times' Week in Review section, "And Now Let the Jockeying Begin." It neatly combines attention to the power of the position with the power of the person--twin dynamics that we've been writing about when discussing organization structure. Baker's story recaps many of the reorganization changes we've noted in posts over the past few weeks, and nicely platforms (stayed tuned) tomorrow's post, "Organizing at the Edge of Chaos." The Baker piece and those that we're adding here are not just about the Obama administration but also point to valuable insights for any organization facing redesign themselves in uncertain times, meaning now.

The Times piece notes, as have we, that Obama's government is becoming more complicated, with the appointment of "czars," special envoys, and task forces, which Baker describes as "overlaying an additional set of actors upon a bureaucracy already scratchy about who's in charge. Mr. Obama concluded that new high-powered figures are needed to force change but they pose a delicate management challenge."

These formal organizational overlays are precisely the virtual reorganization forms emerging to transform traditional bureaucracy. They represent a necessary "complexification" of government to match the complexification of problems we face. They also reflect the need for a more "leaderful" structure, a hallmark of the new networked organizations, whether hierarchies or more informal groupings. Such enterprises are, of course, more difficult to manage, but they're smarter. If there's one thing we need right now, it's intelligent organizations. Really, we have no choice.

The article notes the same new White House offices that we described in our recent "Reorganizing the Executive Office of the President"--offices to coordinate climate change and energy, urban policy, technology, and health. Vice President Biden's task force on the middle class is a great example of a coordination overlay that you can see in US Gov + Task Force map. We've also blogged about the unusual two-hatted organizational role assigned to the incoming HHS Secretary, who will also serve as an insider in the Exec Office of President, leading the Health Care Reform effort. This dual role is now threatened by a tax mess with an uncertain confirmation ahead.

According to Baker's article, John Podesta, who co-headed the transition effort, is an architect for many of these design changes. "There are things that cut across agency lines that needed real powerful White House cohesion, direction, and leadership," Mr. Podesta said.

These cross-cutting networks overlaying the hierarchy require new types of leaders who can operate in more complex environments. Thus, the choice of leaders follows the design requirements. "The structure that was built was done with due regard for the fact that there would be conflict. But the team we built was done with the idea that these people could work together," Podesta explained.

-- Jeff Stamps