As promised, the excerpt from The Age of the Network, Chapter 7, featuring Elizabeth Lorentz, sparked in her networking by meeting Seymour Sarason:
“THE COORDINATOR,” STARRING MRS. DEWAR
Coordinators appear everywhere in the Age of the Network, not
just in new realms of cyberspace.
Networks began developing new leaders long before
computers enhanced their reach. In a richly connected environment where many
potential projects are sparking, growing, diminishing, and disappearing, a new
role arises, that of the coordinator, whose distinguishing characteristic is
the ability to see “connections” among people.
Elizabeth Meyer Lorentz will not
receive the fame she deserves in her lifetime. Then again, she just might. As
we write this, she is 81 and still networking.
With a small network that coalesced around the work of Yale psychology
professor Seymour Sarason, Elizabeth has invented, commented on, and superbly
played the role of the Coordinator. It has to be capitalized because it is so
important. The network depends upon it.
The Coordinator brings the network to
life, matching needs with resources. It’s a vital role, and Lorentz and company
have been lending it legitimacy for nearly a quarter of a century. Elizabeth
models coordinators after the role of the Oxford tutor, who “links students to
the possibilities of the university and the world outside.” Links.
Possibilities.
Having just read Seymour’s book, The Creation of Settings and the Future Societies, she met him for
lunch in the early 1970s at the Yale Faculty Club. “We were walking in the
street when I said how great I thought his book was,” she recalls. “Seymour
stopped, turned, and said, ‘Please don’t be brief.’” It was a good beginning to
a long collaboration.
In their two books that followed, Elizabeth appears as the
central character, Mrs. Dewar (pronounce it to understand it: “do-er”).
As a trustee
of her local hospital for more than 15 years, Elizabeth chaired the long-range
planning committee. At the same time, Seymour and his colleagues had a federal
grant to study networks. “Mrs. Dewar’s network” became the object of their
study, with her as the Coordinator Extraordinaire, involving the whole
community, everyone who had a stake in the future of the hospital.
“I survived three executive and presidential changes,” she
recalls,“ and I learned how the executives try to bypass the board. They were always
plotting, so I’d plot back.” Which she did by being a world-class coordinator.
“It’s a radar type of mind that sees things and connections in
the social fog that most people cannot,” her peers reported. “I get lost trying
to follow the connections she comes up with.”
“FINDING” PEOPLE
“The coordinator is a scanner of possibilities,” Elizabeth says.
To “design configurations of people,” as she puts it, the coordinator must first
“find” them.
So, Elizabeth invented a one-hour interview that usually turned into
five. “They’d start canceling appointments left and right, and then I knew I
was on track,” she recalls. “The interviews help you ‘find’ the person.”
“Finding” means identifying the person’s full range of possibility,
capability, skill, expertise, and talent. Elizabeth calls it “mapping a
person’s terrain, asset hunting instead of looking for what’s wrong with
people. A certain characteristic may be an asset, depending on what you match
it with.” She advises interviewers to:
- Think while you talk. Mentally match this person
with others in the network. “Your job is to think, ‘for whom is this an
opportunity?'"
- Make sure that the first vital phone call is
made, even if you have to make it yourself for people who are reluctant.
- Get a real kick out of making a match; it’s the
coordinator’s “reward.... An inner integration reflecting the outer one takes place,”
she says.
- Be ready to demean yourself and have no pride.
“Like a little poodle, the coordinator has to gallop after people, asking their
plans and reminding them by example that they are not a twosome but a part of a
network.”
Knowing the people in any network, not just in a community
service one, is critical. Because it is a dynamic rather than a static
organization, a network needs someone to coordinate the flow of people. No
network survives without connections and coordination; for the techies, call it
“gateways” and “network managers.” It’s all the same.
Yet, key practical questions remain unanswered. People will pay
for technology network managers and infrastructure support, but will they pay
for coordinators on the people side? Who trains them? How do you convince
people that coordination is not an add-on to an existing job?