Endless Knots

"The Republic of Letters:" The Electronic Enlightenment Project

Thanks to Tom Stewart, who in turn thanks John Hagel for this network discovery: 18th-century social network of ideas, carried out through letters, and now on YouTube, having been mapped by Stanford's "Mapping the Republic of Letters" study. Assistant French Professor Dan Edelstein, principal investigator, describes how ideas spread via letters. Voltaire, for example, wrote 15,000. Cynthia Haven reports:

Edelstein, principal investigator for "Mapping the Republic of Letters" with history Professor Paula Findlen, has mapped thousands of letters that were exchanged during the period of the Enlightenment to uncover hidden truths about the "Republic of Letters."   The latter is "a shorthand that scholars use to refer to writers and philosophers and clergymen and other early modern intellectuals who corresponded across Europe and even across the world," said Edelstein.

...According to Edelstein, "We tend to think of networks as a modern invention, something that only emerged in the Age of Information. In fact, going all the way back to the Renaissance, scholars have established themselves into networks in order to receive the latest news, find out the latest discoveries and circulate the ideas of others."

"We've known about these correspondences for a long time – some of them have been published – but no one has been able to piece together how these individual networks fit into a complete whole, something we call the Republic of Letters."

Bitt(s) and bytes: "Faster Slow Food"

The NY Times Magazine devoted its whole issue to food yesterday (October 11, 2009), in which Mark Bittman does a superb job ("Faster Slow Food") of explaining how IT can transform the online food shopping experience into something truly intelligent.

First he takes apart the obsession with high-end equipment and gadgets. What do we really need for cooking? A fridge and a stove. Not a $20,000 stove either. Oh, hot water too. Other than that, we really don't need any of the rest to make good (slow) food. Sorry, microwave cookers. He finds the must-have appliance irrelevant except for reheating leftovers and making popcorn, which, remarkably, we were able to do for quite a long time before it became the "it."  Dishwashers are nice, he says, (no kidding), as are slow cookers (yes! I've been learning their benefits of late), pressure cookers (never have liked them), and food processors (reminder to self: replace--you've waited so long to reorder the mixing bowl that the model is no longer made). But none of these is indispensable.

Just try cooking on a boat and you'll soon learn how little you need to make good food. My father-in-law, who achieved the (un)record(ed) for slowest circumnavigation of the globe in a 31.5-foot sailboat--12 years--built his own refrigerator from an air conditioner compressor and cooked on a two-burner propane-gas fired gimble stove (it rocks with the waves). Granted, he was hardly a cook (potatoes and rice might be dinner and I'm not saying this for effect) but I cooked on the boat and did just fine.

Back to Bitt. His ultimate point in this article is how smart online food shopping really can be. IT could, and apparently in some places already is able to, remember what you like (I always want avocados, and, sadly, they're never going to be local in Boston), issue alerts when items you want are available (seasonable vegetables--I do love broccoli), in his words:

You could also immortalize your preferences (“Never show me anything whose carbon footprint is bigger than that of my car”; “Show me no animals raised in cages”; “Don’t show me vegetables grown more than a thousand miles from my home”), along with any and all of your cooking quirks (“When I buy chicken, ask me if I want rosemary”). You would receive, if you wanted, an e-mail message when shipments of your favorite foods arrived at the store or went on sale; you could get recipe ideas, serving suggestions, shopping lists, nutritional information and cooking videos. If poor-quality food arrived — yellowing broccoli, stinky fish, whatever — you would receive store credit without any hassle. You might even, I suppose, be able to ask the store to limit the amount of impulse purchases that you make — forget that second pint of Ben & Jerry’s or those Cheez-Its you have trouble resisting.

So now for a bit of first-hand experience: since I've been spending so much time in NYC, where it's not that easy to shop for quantities unless you have a micro-portable U-Haul that is not a real vehicle (let me know when you find one), I've used Fresh Direct, which remembers your lists, allows you to shop for certain categories (organic, etc), tells you what's fresh now (apples, duh), and links to recipes. Works pretty well, though we did receive one rotten half turkey. For the next shopping, I repeated the menus I'd just cooked (they were well received) and thus repeated the memorized order, eliminating a few things that we didn't need. Food arrived smack dab in the two-hour time frame indicated, packed well in appropriate boxes, fridge things here, non-perishables there, and with the help of two-year-old Ben, was able to shelve everything pretty quickly (though a fair number of M&Ms were consumed as bribes, I mean treats, along the way).

My experience aside, IT innovators should listen to Bittman. Never mind that he has great restaurant recommendations, which is how I first became a fan, after following his advice to eat at Vijay's in Vancouver. So much to like about Bittman. Need I mention that he blogs?

GeekDoctor: Leading by clicking around

I'm doing a webcast on virtual leadership in a couple of weeks for eighty people, all situated virtually and all around the world. The link between the executive sponsoring the event and me  will be via Cisco's Telepresence -- though for everyone else, thank heavens, I won't be in high def.

In preparing for the webcast, I asked a few questions of one of my virtual leadership role models (scroll down for some great pics taken the same day this one was), John Halamka, CIO at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital, whose answers I thought others would enjoy seeing:

Q: You're on the move constantly. How do you maintain strong relationships with your direct reports?

*I live by Blackberry, laptop and conferencing technologies (Webex, iChat, Telepresence)

Q: What do you find most difficult as a "virtual" leader?

*Managing communications while constantly traveling is challenging.   My goal is to reduce the hours spent in airports through more virtual work

Q. What do you find to be easier when you're virtual?

*I eliminate many hassles - Parking, traffic, airport security lines, delayed flights, and lack of places to recharge my devices

Q. In terms of your reporting to your boss, how has your non-face-to-face presence affected your relationship?

*Paul [Levy, BIDMC's CEO] is just as virtual to me - we live in the world of social networking and web connectivity

Q. What advice on maintaining virtual connections with customers do you have for others who are very tech-savvy but whose customers may be less so?

*It's a journey. Start by eliminating as many face to face meetings as you can and set a goal of less travel/less in person meetings each year.

A little history on the Computer History Museum (and MassNet, RIP)

A comment today on another post by Harry Stevens prompts this post. Harry asks whether I've ever visited The Computer Museum in Boston and if so whether they would be interested in the donation of a server with his ground-breaking software, Participate, on it.

Long before most reading here were even thinking about email (or for that matter computers), Harry Stevens had developed Participate, computer conferencing software described below. Visionary and its basic design still underlies most really good discussion software.

Alas, The Computer Museum in Boston exists no more, having closed in 1996 (what does that say about our history), its collection now belonging to The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California (i.e. Silicon Valley), which opened in its current location in 2002. Watch what's coming there: next year they're opening an exhibit called "Computer History: The First 2000 Years." Bold. I also will refrain from commenting on the endless rivalry between Silicon Valley and Boston's MIT/Route 128 cultures, evidenced by the museum ending up in "their" vicinity rather than ours. Harrumph.

Why am I writing this post really? Because for a few years before and after 1995, a group of us, including Jeff Stamps and me, volunteered to create a new initiative here in Boston that would engender the kind of collaborative culture that, for all its cutthroat competitiveness has characterized Silicon Valley: "MassNet: Collaboration for the Commonwealth," which leaves but this small trace on an MIT server.

On a cold January day in 1995, MassNet brought together 250 representatives of each of the area's major sectors--from business, education, the denominations, foundations, healthcare, government...you name it, they were there. Among the event's sponsors was The Computer Museum, then housed next to Boston's incomparable Children's Museum right along Fort Point Channel, which provided the space for the event. (John Marchiony was then executive director of the museum--forever thanks, John).

When not talking about collaboration and how to forge strong links across the notoriously non-collaborative sectors in the area, participants wandered around looking at the first 1000 years of computer history. It was a beautiful space to hold this event and the cast of presenters and participants was stellar.

Among those who spoke: Congressman Ed Markey, an early visionary about telecommunications, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, the Harvard Business School prof and author who has written often about collaboration, Peter Drucker, yes, *the* Peter Drucker, who participated via videoconference from his home in Southern California, Drucker's grandson, Nova Spivack, late of Twine, Harry Saal, then CEO of Smart Valley, an initiative in Silicon Valley to wire the area (the digital divide was then the major topic among computer aficiandoes), Charlotte Kahn, who leads the Boston Indicators Project at the The Boston Foundation (and was my high school classmate), and others, including, need I say, moi. David Straus, founder of Interaction Associates, led the band of facilitators who conducted the breakout groups.

I could go on with all who participated and how ambitious our agenda was. Like so many great ideas, MassNet ran its course then died, having left a lot of people educated about the value of collaboration.

One last bit of personal history: Jeff's and my book, The Age of the Network, had its launch that night, also at The Computer Museum, where our publisher, Darryl Landvater of Oliver Wight, and our editor, Jim Childs, now publisher at Time Inc., hosted a book party

So, thanks, Harry, for giving me the opening to write about MassNet and...try The Computer History Museum. If they're not interested in a server loaded with Participate, they should be.

Webcom-Montreal 2009 - Wed, May 13, 2009 - 6th Intl Conference

What are you doing next Wed? Come to Montreal for Webcom 2009, where the themes are "Digital Identity, Innovation and Economic Development." I'm not entirely sure what digital identity is so I won't be talking about that but I will be holding forth in two sessions: "Leading Innovation When People Are Far Apart" and "The Digital Organization Chart: How to Encourage Transparency Across the Whole Enterprise."

Here's a little "facebook" of all the speakers.

What's extremely cool about this conference is that the afternoon keynotes are free and open to the public.

And there's a party that night. Thanks, organizers, for inviting me. I'll report back in after the event.

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.

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

Jeff Stamps on today: From polarity to complementarity

Barack Obama becomes the Chief Hierarch today. What is uniquely different about President Barack Hussein Obama is that he is the Chief Complement as well. This is his genius.

Like presidents before him, he occupies the root position of the Executive Branch of the US government tree.  His position stands for the whole executive function, but is a part of a larger whole, whose genesis is the US Constitution. These United States are themselves a whole, comprising states, counties, localities, neighborhoods, and residencies such as ours where people gather on January 20 to witness an inauguration. Hierarchy, nested whole-parts, is a universal organizing principle.

Everyone knows about hierarchy. Few are familiar with its complement.

 Complementarity is the second great universal organizing principle, bringing opposites together into one process. Like red states and blue states, the whole "tao" process is stirred by yin-yang opposites of dark and light, yielding and firm, female and male, receptivity and creativity. Each opposite includes and interpenetrates the other.

Neils Bohr, who proposed the wave-particle solution in quantum physics, adopted the yin-yang symbol for his coat-of-arms along with the inscription “Contraria sunt complementa,” opposites are complementary.

From the beginning of his quest, Obama has been the voice of complementarity amid the din of dualism. Black and white. Liberal and conservative. Listen and act. Be firm and be open. He embodies both-and, not either-or.

While other politicians have promised to “bridge the gap,” for Obama it is simply part of who he is. In her excellent NY Times page one piece, “From Books, New President Found Voice,”  Michiko Kakutani links the power of voice, the love of learning and thinking, and the “quest to understand his roots.” This quest of a “divided child” for self-creation, lies at the “intersection between the private and the political, time present and time past,” themes elaborated by his inaugural poet, Elizabeth Alexander.

Self-creation at the intersection of opposites is emergent. From a polarized nation to a complementary one is a transformational step. This will be Obama’s theme this inaugural day. Bringing together while respecting differences. Finding synergies and creativities in new collaborations. Hope and hard work. You and me, working together.

This is the essence of networks: me and we, independence with interdependence.

-- Jeff Stamps

Communicate, Collaborate, Coordinate, Decide: Part 5

Part 5, the conclusion of "Communicate, Collaborate, Coordinate, Decide: How IT Achieves Strategic Leadership," our article in Cutter IT Journal, November '08
Part 4 is here.
Part 3 is here.
Part 2 is here.
Part 1 is here.

Decisions: Making and Communicating Them

Network models also show the topology of the organization as a whole. The dance between centralization and decentralization plays out in the dynamics of organizational design and redesign as strategy changes to meet the ongoing rush of events. Today, in particularly uncertain times, adaptive strategies are more likely to succeed than “stay the course” approaches rooted in the slower Industrial Era.

By analyzing network maps of the organization, IT can identify and clarify the real leadership positions from the bottom up and the “edge in,” bringing attention to critical hotspots. These “hub” leadership positions are the highest-potential/highest-risk jobs in the organizational network — positions that are typically overloaded and underresourced. By providing such information to leaders at all levels, IT expands everyone’s idea of leadership and how to improve it — knowledge that is at once visionary-strategic and practical-tactical.

Leaders make decisions and then communicate them. They depend on their organizational hierarchies to gather information, formulate options, offer recommendations, and make final decisions. Then leaders turn around and use the formal reporting lines as their primary conduits for distributing the official goals, strategies, policies, procedures, and other messages from the top. These directives eventually land in the laps of line managers who lead staff teams.

Organizations swing between decision making, a comparatively complex process, and “decision telling,” which depends on communication. Hierarchies need to accommodate both — the capacity for making high-complexity decisions and communicating them along the shortest possible paths.

This brings us to the two opposing principles inherent in organizational structure:

1. Centralizing to optimize communications. Organizations do this by increasing manager reporting spans and decreasing the number of levels in the organization. Fewer levels indicate shorter communication paths from top to bottom.

2. Decentralizing for complex decision making. Smaller manager spans, meaning that managers have fewer people reporting to them, increase the number of organizational levels from top to bottom. More complex designs like these allow the organization to engage more specialties and devote time to deeper analysis before making complex decisions.

The dynamic of local optimization of communicating and decision making carves a hierarchical landscape that is high in some places, low in others. Many-tiered mountains of small decision-making teams optimized for complexity are scattered through low-elevation plains of large teams transmitting strategies, standards, and procedures. The local organizational design and appropriate balance of the tension between centralization and decentralization depend on which concerns are paramount at any moment.⁶

Overall, organizations need to accommodate added decision-making capability while becoming even smarter about communicating. How do they do this?

The answer lies in how they mix the ingredients of size, manager span, and number of top-to-bottom levels in different parts of the organization. Where communication is the dominant need, as it is in sales groups, manager reporting spans and teams are often larger, which reduces the path between senior and operating levels. Where decision making is paramount, as it is in research, there are apt to be more departments with smaller teams, which increases the path from top to bottom.

This is a critical consideration at a time when organizational change, redesign, and, yes, downsizing are hitting thousands of businesses, institutions, and agencies. The standing prescription for redesign today is to flatten the organization. This is a poor general rule. In some cases, flattening the organization may produce nothing more than an enhanced ability to communicate truly poor decisions.

People rarely call for more complexity within their organizations as a means of coping with an increasingly complex world beyond their own four walls. They should. A basic tenet of systems science is W. Ross Ashby’s “Law of Requisite Variety,” which essentially says that a system’s internal complexity must at least match that of its external environment. In practice, this means that greater diversity — of people, viewpoints, skills, disciplines, and the like — can generate more innovation and faster adaptation than can homogeneous teams. While there is likely some upper limit of diminishing returns here, it’s instructive for organizations to ponder this reality, especially as regards the advantages introduced by working virtually, which radically increases access to diversity.

Organizing for Communication

Management teams of solid-line reporting relationships are ideal vehicles for communication. Such teams are two-level organizations, with a manager and his or her direct reports just one link apart. Communication distance doesn’t get closer than one degree, whether in networks of family, friends, or coworkers. Every manager in the hierarchy has a one-degree team, a star-shaped cluster of closely related positions. The whole hierarchy is an interlocked set of one-degree management teams beginning at the top and reaching all the way to the bottom, regardless of whether or not any particular small group sees itself as a team.

From the executive perspective, messages stream down the hierarchy of reporting links in a progressively articulated tree akin to any wide-area communication system. In cable television transmission networks, for example, signals cascade from the “head end” (Level 1) through high-capacity trunk lines (Level 2) into lower-capacity branches (Level 3) and feeder lines (Level 4), finally “dropping” a thin wire to your home (Level 5). By analogy, the CEO is the head-end source of signal and content, with managers in between repeating and amplifying the source transmissions, ultimately dropping the messages at the “homes” of the staff.

Organizing for Making Decisions

In Western culture, our primary tool for tackling complex problems is analysis. “Breaking down” the problem divides something complicated into smaller, more comprehensible parts that may in turn be broken down further. In organizational structure, this problem-solving approach reveals itself in the propensity to differentiate and create more levels.

An organization tends to decrease manager span and increase levels when complexity increases and more decisions need to be made. Here, the hierarchy acts like a giant decision tree, a method used by operations researchers to analyze complex choices. At the highest level (Level 1 for our purposes here) is the final decision to be made (e.g., allocation of resources among major projects), with branches (Level 2) to each of the major option areas. Operations researchers map out successive levels of branching and analysis within each option until they have calculated all alternatives and values. The more complex the choice, the more decision branches they need to map.

Each team and team of teams must design itself to fit its basic mission. In simple terms, this is the recipe:

• To communicate better, make the organization’s structure flatter (i.e., reduce the number of levels and enlarge the size of the teams).
• To make better decisions, make the organization’s structure deeper (i.e., increase the number of levels and reduce the size of the teams).

For larger organizations, some parts will be more centralized, others more decentralized. No one design is best everywhere, and global edicts to flatten and simplify may, as we suggest above, undercut the organizational capability to cope with complexity. Indeed, collaborative technologies that connect people in all directions horizontally and vertically enable much faster and better communication pathways. So today’s fast-changing organizations can in fact become more complex to support better decisions, while also communicating faster through formal but nonhierarchical channels. The hierarchical design tradeoff between smarter decision making and better communication is being transformed into a “both/and” as the whole organization becomes interconnected at every scale from the single individual to the enterprise as a whole.

In the years and decades to come, organizations will need to morph to accommodate the pressing needs of the moment. But they can only do so if they can develop accurate, comprehensive mental models of themselves. And this is where IT comes in: using innovative tools, such as hyperbolic viewers and other network display technologies, it can map, navigate, and analyze the whole organization as a network.

Between Order and Chaos

Networks ripple. A small decision here plays out as major activity elsewhere in the web. Big effects arise from many small movements. Abstractions at a large scale become everyday local juggling acts for managers and staff across the hierarchy.

Organizations require both order and flexibility, stability and creativity. The structure must provide sufficient constraints to maintain integrity and enough freedom to innovate and adapt. Sufficient sameness and commonality have to mix with requisite variety and difference. If not, the organization will be either completely moribund or a total madhouse. Organizations change and rewire themselves as strategies shift and refocus, or they fail to adapt and eventually disappear.

Executives struggle to manage these contrasting forces. They find themselves simultaneously bringing some things to the center and pushing other things out, simplifying in some places and “complexifying” in others. They push for greater collaboration over here (perhaps to better deliver services) and greater competition over there (perhaps to control costs).

Three core functions — IT, HR, and finance — all have data with which to construct the basic network of how positions interconnect, in hierarchy trees and other networks of interdependent links. However, only IT has readily available and reliable data on both hierarchical and nonhierarchical relationships, including key contractors, formal teams, and patterns of inter-job/ inter-person communications (i.e., where working communication interweaves with social networks).

IT has its finger on the pulse of complexity. It can help the entire organization achieve a dynamic balance between order and chaos, providing stability while enhancing innovation. It can advocate for, then deliver, a new generation of the four strategic capabilities that enable people in the organization to more effectively communicate, collaborate, coordinate, and decide.

This is a powerful foundation for organizational wisdom that IT brings to the senior table.