Endless Knots

"Collective Sensemaking:" Author Nancy Dixon looking for participants

My colleague, Nancy Dixon, author, knowledge expert, and insightful thinker, is writing a new book about "Collective Sensemaking," which happens, she posits, as part of the perpetual motion of teams -- sometimes together, sometimes apart -- and is looking for teams to interview. I asked her to send a few paragraphs re: what she's looking for. Sounds like an interesting book!

"If an organization wants to be agile, which requires employees to quickly change what they are doing, they will have to make employees a part of creating the change rather than trying to “sell” it, or implementing lengthy change management processes, to try to convince employees to change.  Making employees a part of creating the change has the great advantage of accessing their collective intelligence, thus increasing the likelihood that the change is both in the right direction and implementable.  Collective Sensemaking is the conversational process of employees thinking together about where they are and where they need to go. Depending on the size of the unit that needs to change, Collective Sensemaking conversations can take place in a team, department, or whole organization.  There is skill in creating the structure of Collective Sensemaking conversations, it is clearly not a series of presentations, typical of most quarterly or annual meetings.

A number of virtual teams, distributed project teams, as well as whole organizations, have found advantage in oscillating between distributed work and coming together for Collective Sensemaking.  I am writing a book about this pattern of oscillation and about how to make Collective Sensemaking work. I currently have cases written about three  organizations that use this pattern, a consulting company, software project team, and a government agency.  I am looking for positive examples from other industries.  The process I use to develop the cases is to interview 5-12  employees over Skype or Google Hangout, write the case based on the processes they describe and connect those processes to Collective Sensemaking concepts and research that helps to explain why it works.   I  return the case to the interviewees to review and correct. I give the organization and individuals the option of using real or fictitious names in the case. The benefit to the organization is a deeper understanding of their processes and the opportunity to review the cases from other organization which can provide them new ideas to support their own work.

If your organizations does this kind of oscillation, even if you don’t call it Collective Sensemaking, :) I’d be very interested in have an exploratory call with you. You can reach me at [email protected]"

 

Enterprise 2.0: Leading Collaborative Teams

Having spent the past two centuries working on this topic, it seemed only  appropriate to organize a panel at Enterprise 2.0. Thus, we've convinced two of our favorite colleagues, Virginia Adamson from Volvo IT and Mike Prevou from Strategic Knowledge Solutions to schlep to Boston and hold forth with us.

We've carried on projects with both Virginia and Mike over the past few years. Each is doing different but related things to make it easier for distant teams to work together. Here's the scoop. Another panel worth attending:

Leading Collaborative Teams: How Volvo IT and the US Army Enhance Performance with New Behaviors and Tools #e2conf41 (Location: Carlton)

Wednesday, June 24 - 3:30 pm–4:30 pm

What happens when enterprises take a broader approach to collaboration? These two organizations—the global technology provider for one of the world's leading enterprises and the knowledge unit of one of the world's preeminent military units—chose to invest in both technology and people. Their experiences incorporate new behaviors that are critical to driving true collaboration alongside new ways to use tools, such as SharePoint. In both cases, unusually high levels of performance have followed from their approaches.

Moderator - Jessica Lipnack, CEO, NetAge

(Enough already about me)

Jessica Lipnack writes, speaks, and consults about collaboration. Co-author of six books, she is an expert on virtual teams, networked organizations, and social media. A long-term member of the Enterprise 2.0 Advisory Board, she stays in touch with a wide network of practitioners and thinkers, including the participants in her sessions.

Speaker - Jeffrey Stamps, Chief Scientist, NetAge

Jeff Stamps is co-author of numerous books and articles, including Virtual Teams and The Age of the Network. His early insights into what makes collaboration work have been picked up by organizations around the world, including Volvo and the US Army, where he has designed methods and tools for cross-boundary work that drive extraordinary performance.**

Jeff Stamps is co-author of numerous books and articles, including Virtual Teams and The Age of the Network. His early insights into what makes collaboration work have been picked up by organizations around the world, including Volvo and the US Army, where he has designed methods and tools for cross-boundary work that drive extraordinary performance.

Speaker - Michael Prevou, Phd, LTC, US Army Retired and Chief of Knowledge Strategies and Innovation, SKS, Inc.

Mike Prevou specializes in collaboration for knowledge and learning solutions. He has been involved with numerous collaboration initiatives for the Army, including being responsible for designing, deploying and maintaining Army communities of practice; developing knowledge assessment process; and co-authoring and leading workshops around the Battle Command Knowledge Systems' "Teams of Leaders Handbook." A 24-year Army veteran, he holds a Ph.D. in Education from the University of Kansas along with two master's degrees and leads numerous transformational change initiatives both within the Army as well as other organizations.

Mike Prevou specializes in collaboration for knowledge and learning solutions. He has been involved with numerous collaboration initiatives for the Army, including being responsible for designing, deploying and maintaining Army communities of practice; developing knowledge assessment process; and co-authoring and leading workshops around the Battle Command Knowledge Systems' "Teams of Leaders Handbook." A 24-year Army veteran, he holds a Ph.D. in Education from the University of Kansas along with two master's degrees and leads numerous transformational change initiatives both within the Army as well as other organizations.

Speaker - Virginia Adamson, Senior Business Consultant, Content & Collaboration Services, Volvo Information Technology

With more than 25 years in the Volvo Group and an Engineering background, Virginia Adamson has experience ranging from product development to business and strategy development. She has worked for AB Volvo, Volvo Trucks and Volvo Information Technology in Greensboro, NC, as well as Gothenburg and Umeå in Sweden. In her current position Virginia provides consulting services to help customers develop collaboration strategies, utilize collaboration tools, and learn to work more effectively across all boundaries whether cultural, organizational, or geographical.

**Jeff at work

Icfai Business School's Effective Executive Interviews ... us!

We (not the royal - just Jeff Stamps and I) were pleased to participate in an interview on "Building High Performance Teams" for the May 2009 issue of Icfai Business School's publication, Effective Executive. Quite distinguished company we're in: others in the series include, well, all the big business-writer-types. You can download the interview by registering...and the print publication is quite lovely too.

I love this interview process. With the questions submitted in "writing," i.e. via email, one has time to think about the answers. Jeff took some of the questions, I took others, and presto, changeo, we submitted and, within a week or so, the print publication arrived.

Thanks to Dr. Nagendra V. Chowdary, who conducted the interview, and to V. Devi, who handled the logistics, including pestering us to make the deadline.

"Let's take that online" -- Boston KM Forum

Lovely day spent with the Boston KM Forum's "Leveraging Virtual Teams & Social Tools for Business Advantage: Blogs, Wikis, Twitter, et al. Here's the group, snapped with my phone, just as Jeff and I started our tap dance on virtual teams.

We were followed by WBUR's New Media Director, Ken George, who showed how blurry the lines have become between different kinds of media. Here he asks whether what he's pointing to is a radio program or a web page. The answer? Both - plus a lot more because it's also a place for listeners to participate.

Next up, Suzanne Minassian who took us inside IBM's social media developments. I looked around the room while she was talking and realized that social media had taken over the crowd as a number of people were tweeting as she spoke (including yours t.). Narry a laptop in sight. A big change from just a year ago, when live blogging was the advance guard at this event.

After lunch, Sadie Van Buren from Knowledge Management Associates got best-in-show for her truly beautiful slides. Her four rules for social media are worth repeating (which I tweeted in real time, natch): reciprocate, meaning that it's wise to acknowledge all that comes your way, socially speaking; comment on what you "like" when perusing social sites because this adds to the ongoing promotion of good stuff out there; follow back/accept friend requests/link when people do the same for you (within reason, she pointed out, because the self-promoters will always be out there selling you snake oil); and give it away, meaning post, provide, share, and all the other positive tendencies that are in our nature when we're feeling good about ourselves.

Now to the reason for the title of this post: after our presentation, someone came up to me (apologies to whomever it was and please comment should you see this) to talk about a key point I made about conference calls. Status reporting, research indicates, is one of the worst uses of conference calls. Precious real time should be saved for the tough stuff - disagreements, decisions, conflict resolution, that kind of messiness. Whoever the brilliant person was who spoke to me pointed out that when things get tense on a call, people often say, "Let's take that offline," which led us to agree that the tendency should be just the opposite. Instead, best practice should be to "take that online," air the differences, and move beyond the problem as quickly as possible.

Thanks, all. Great day, and a big round of applause for Lynda Moulton and Larry Chait, who do the heavy lifting for these events.

Mapping the recovery - "follow the money" - part 2

Lost in the firestorm over AIG bonuses yesterday was a quiet announcement by Attorney General Eric Holder that laid another solid plank in the government's structure of transparency and accountability. Michael J. Sniffen's AP story, "AG overturns strict Bush-era information disclosure rules," has a cutline summarizing the change underway in Washington: "Agencies urged to release records unless law forbids," i.e. there's an a priori bent toward openness. The AG was way ahead of schedule with this, acting earlier even than the May 21st deadline for policy directives implementing President Obama's Open Government initiative, established by the very first acts of his administration (see "Obama's Midnight Memos).

With the presumption of release of government information, transparency and trust take a big step forward. Which brings us to the second part of "Mapping the Recovery" (see part 1) in our NetAge Reports series. Here, we address the specifics of the data that will be used to provide transparency and accountability for the chunks (block grants) of spending, particularly of the $787 billion passed by Congress in February.

It is especially important that tracking the expenditures be done correctly and that it truly makes responsibility and accountability clear. Renewed public trust rides so heavily on how this money is spent. While AIG's shenanigans show how difficult it can be to engender trust at the recipient end of spending, particularly in the private sector, the government has an opportunity to increase trust in itself, in how it is handling this money, and making sure responsibilities are clear. Done properly, this builds social capital, quite literally, that will make other parts of the multiple critical agendas possible.

Geek (or wonk) warning: this part of the story, below the break, is more than a little geeky (and plenty wonky--a bit of each). We discuss the data that is required for reporting the recovery funds, then what's missing. Specifically, what's missing is the organizational chart of responsibilities--which is not so hard to fix.

We've created a prototype map of the network of relationships called for in OMB's recovery reporting requirements. We illustrate our example with a dummy grant at the end of a real recovery program, which we show in four views: the government agency responsible for the grant, the grant recipient (whom we're inventing in this example) who will be held accountable, the physical location of the grantee, and and the overall purpose of the grant program. You can see the recovery network model live in your browser (wait a moment for the Java to load), and trace the grant along four axis as described below.

-- Jeff Stamps

What’s in the Recovery Picture?

Accountability starts with transparency of details. What, exactly, will we know about each block of money? How will we find it, track it, and understand it?

In network lingo, the recovery data model laid out in the OMB memo specifies six nodes, including the grant node. Each node has a unique ID situated in a defined classification system, and it has a line of text that describes it, a memo field, if you will, providing a name or title. The six nodes are:

• Grant block, a chunk of money with its record ID;

• Responsible agency, with a Treasury Account Symbol (TAS) code;
• Program vehicle, identified by a code in the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA) which provides a wealth of purpose-related categories to sort grants by;
• Agency account, the extension of Treasury’s TAS code;
• Recipient of the funds, identified by a Dun & Bradstreet number (DUNS), which, like the program’s CFDA code, provides entry to an array of associated details and purpose-related classification systems (e.g., sector, industry); and
• Place, the physical location of the recipient, completely defined in the data model by an address with a zip code and a city, county, and state Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) code, which enable easy association with political districts benefiting from the funds.

The grant block record laid out in the initial guidance (see Figure 2) means, for example, we can follow a grant to a zip code, which puts this chunk of money in the context of a nested set of legal and political jurisdictions capped by states. Simultaneously, the same record can be represented in a variety of other classification systems, such as one organized by purpose (CFDA, the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance) or by a chart of accounts (TAS).

Links between nodes are either contained in the data record for each grant block (e.g., all the levels of address are specified) or are implied by an external classification system (e.g., the program code is part of the CFDA and nestled in tree structures there).

The grant block record laid out in the initial guidance (see Figure 2) means, for example, we can follow a grant to a zip code, which puts this chunk of money in the context of a nested set of legal and political jurisdictions capped by states. Simultaneously, the same record can be represented in a variety of other classification systems, such as one organized by purpose (CFDA, the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance) or by a chart of accounts (TAS).

Links between nodes are either contained in the data record for each grant block (e.g., all the levels of address are specified) or are implied by an external classification system (e.g., the program code is part of the CFDA and nestled in tree structures there).

What’s Missing? Responsibility

The OMB model for “following the money” is missing the organization itself, the codes that place the grant within a chart of responsibilities.

There are two pieces of data missing.

• First is the position responsible for each grant; and

• Second, where appropriate, the name of the person serving in the authorizing position.

Thus, for completeness and transparency on the input side—not just the output side–two more fields (with both a unique ID and a name/title) need adding to the recovery data model (see Figure 3).

Making the Recovery Map

The network logic of responsibility-accountability—a directed link between two nodes—provides a simple way to connect the key elements associated with each chunk of money. To illustrate, we connected four trees into a prototype network map of the recovery spending, including the missing organizational hierarchy. Each chunk, each block grant, shows up in four ways: by granting organization, recipient of the grant, the program and purpose for which it is used, and the recipient location.

As recovery dollars flow, so will the data stream start, and the mapping will be easiest. We have created an OrgScope model to demonstrate what a cross-linked network model might look like using an actual grant program by the NIH for external research facilities and an illustrative grant to a hospital in our city of Newton, MA (see org chart strip in Figure 1 in part 1).

• For the organizational side, we used our network map of the top levels of the US Government (click to see this map live). To the existing org chart, which included NIH, we added the string of positions ending in a specific (dummy) grant block to Newton-Wellesley Hospital;

• Program category and type is modeled with a simplified outline of the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (see CFDA.gov);
• Recipient type is illustrated through general categories of sector and industry; and
• Place is represented by a location map of Massachusetts organized by county (Middlesex), city (Newton), and zip code (02462, Newton Lower Falls).

Relationship chains relating a grant to the four major spokes of the recovery-spending wheel can be seen in the Figure 4 overview and the strings of connection shown in Figure 5 (see the live OrgScope map of these relationships). Of these, three have well-established classification systems (zips, DUNS numbers, CFDA). For the fourth, the government chart of responsibility for the funds, our digital org chart is a start to locating the program within the government structure. However, the government’s map of itself could and should extend to reach at least the program, if not the program officer levels.

It would not be too difficult to create an open government network map. At the top of departments and agencies, a few thousand positions in total are detailed in org charts that can be easily connected together, as we have shown in our publicly available USGov OrgScope map of many of these positions. For the two million or so civil service jobs, much of the information needed to assemble them almost automatically into org charts is just sitting there in federal financial systems. OMB may have much of it. The rest is in the many government human resource and information technology systems. Hooking the whole thing together is mostly a one-time expense of time and IT resources, and a process can easily be set up to refresh the basic data.

Transparency of organizational structure enables people both inside and outside the government to understand better the bureaucratic whole. By connecting the many bits of information into a coherent, shareable picture of our common government, we develop trust, hold one another accountable, and think through solutions with many minds.

Figure 5: Illustrative Grant in Four Interrelated Contexts

 

Knowledge management at Mitre

Our friend Rick Swanborg of ICEX has a piece in CIO about "Mitre's Knowledge Management Journey," detailing what Mitre's done in regard to knowledge management. Take a look. Nice work, Rick. A bit of it here:

February 27, 2009 — CIO — Since knowledge management (KM) first bubbled up in the mid-1990s, many organizations have tried and failed to reap its benefits. Certain enterprises never gave up. Mitre, operator of three federally funded research and development centers, is one of them. Over the past 13 years, it built a comprehensive KM environment through experimentation and internal sponsorship. The company fosters a knowledge-sharing culture to bring its extensive expertise to bear on customer needs.

The Situation: With more than 6,000 Mitre scientists, engineers and professional staff, the opportunity for staff to tap each others' experience is high. The challenge is to do this efficiently and with low overhead, while employees simultaneously work on hundreds of projects.

What They Did: Mitre started by creating a straightforward people locator as part of the Mitre Information Infrastructure (MII). This locator, or "phone book," relied on existing data from project management, time sheet and human resource systems to identify which employees worked on various assignments over time. As KM Director Jean Tatalias states, "This capability connected people to projects to organizations and to their open document spaces, allowing staff to navigate across all these dimensions."

Leveraging Virtual Teams & Social Tools: Boston KM Forum - March 31

Long title for what promises to be a good day with the Boston KM Forum on March 31: "Leveraging Virtual Teams & Social Tools for Business Advantage: Blogs, Wikis, Twitter, et al."

Larry Chait, managing director of Chait and Associates, moderates a full program that includes, guess who, along with some truly worthwhile speakers, including my virtual pal, Ken George, who commandeers new media at WBUR, our local public radio station (OK, we also have WGBH - no offense, friends-over-there):

We’re all aware of the explosion in the use of social tools—teenagers embrace them, our new President used them extensively in his recent campaign, and the press is full of hype about their potential.  And books and articles on virtual teaming abound.

But what value have they had for business enterprises?  Who is really getting value from them?

In this symposium, we will explore virtual teams and social tools—and their value in leveraging knowledge.  We will discuss tools and techniques, share learnings, and hear case examples. Our speakers will be: Jessica Lipnack, CEO of NetAge and co-author of Virtual Teams, and Suzanne O. Minassian, Lotus Connections Product Manager, IBM,  Ken George, New Media Manager at WBUR, Chuck Hollis of EMC, and Sadalit Van Buren of Knowledge Management Associates.

Register here
8:15 AM - 4:00 PM, March 31, 2009
Bentley College, Adamian Campus Center, Waltham, MA

How IT can track accountability from the get-go

This post is for IT departments. It offers some tips for tracking accountability through corporate data systems, a huge concern for the large number of organizations at both the federal, state, and local levels that will receive funds as part of the US rescue programs.

For months, we've been writing about how to reorganize for greater effectiveness with the smaller footprints. Over the past few days we've been writing about the opposite problem: reorganizing for expansion. The stimulus and other rescue funding is causing some organizations to grow, i.e. those responsible for managing the torrential funding stream (see "Transparency for accountability as the funds roll out" and "Accounting for trillions through OMB").

"Responsible," or accountable, are the operative words here. With a large number of new hires and even larger number of contractors flooding selected departments and agencies at the federal and state levels, the possibility of losing our "whose responsible" handle on the funds and their effectiveness is very high indeed.

There's something IT departments can do something right at the beginning, right now, to help. IT can do its part to ensure that org charts (what we're calling accountability maps) are naturally built into the system as people come on board. To do this, IT needs to collect two simple bits of data for each new "hire," whether employee or contractor:

1. A position title keyed to a unique ID representing its place in the organization's structure (separate from the person's name and unique personnel ID); and
2. A link to the supervisor position directly responsible for this job-holder (its "parent," in logical terms).

Large-scale enterprise data systems held by finance, HR, and IT departments usually house this information already. Finance tracks jobs for accounting purposes and HR tracks people's employment records, enabling them to automatically generate their own internal accountability charts. While most organizations, and certainly government, has this information, it is rarely rendered as a whole (see our USGov map of executive branch accountability.)

While IT often has this information (typically, in its LDAP directory), it sometimes has something more, the logins of all the contracted positions whose work is important enough to require access to internal information systems. If a contractor has access to the organization's network, there's usually a record of who authorized this access, i.e. the contractor's "parent."

Contractors are the "dark matter" of organizations, the great bulk of personnel who are not recognized by most finance and HR systems, except as line items and lump sums. If contractors are hired as a group, perhaps from an outsourcing firm, their from-to, parent-child links should connect to a lead contractor who in turn plugs into a particular supervisor, manager, or point of contact in the host organization.

If this information is collected at the beginning of the expansion wave, then you can automatically generate maps of the growing organization as it grows, attaching budgets, funds, deals, and other information as responsibilities are assigned. Thus, transparency for accountability is in place at the start, not after the fact. It enables complexity to be mapped and understanding to develop in real-time so changes and improvements can be made that are vital to success.

This simple recommendation--to gather and store job titles and parent links for all employees and contractors--is how any organization--public, semi-public, or private--develops its own charts of accountability. These connections serve  as the foundation for the much greater participation and collaboration required to make the new organizations work in a time of tumult and uncertainty.

-- 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