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January 8, 2013 by Patti

Networks and NonProfits

I’ve had the good fortune over the past two years to see my work shift into the nonprofit space. I miss some of my corporate clients, but it has been both a rewarding and a good learning experience to participate in this other world. I’m getting ready to do a webinar [link updated 4/2 to take you to the full replay] on the 14th of January for the Leadership Learning Community. It’s titled Network Analysis (SNA/ONA) Methods for Assessment & Measurement. It’s the result of some thinking and working with June Holley and Claire Reinelt on the various things I’ve seen in the nonprofit world. June and Claire will also be sharing case studies on the webinar.

Part of what’s been interesting over the past years (as I was working on Net Work and thereafter) is the pick-up of interest in all things networks and nonprofits. I use this graphic in my workshops as a way to get people to talk about what they have (or might) read:

nonprofit reading

This is certainly not exhaustive, but it’s a pretty good list. So I have published this list (with hyperlinks) as Net Work’s NonProfit Reading List.

Two recent additions to the list (one made it into the graphic, the other not yet):

The LLC’s recent publication, Leadership & Networks (October 2012) by Claire Reinelt and Deborah Meehan. I am a contributing co-author on this paper, along with some great collaborators. The report is intended for “those who run and fund leadership programs that develop and support leadership for social change.” It highlights the importance of, and ways that, leaders in social change should be more network-aware and ways that programs can bring network literacy into their work.

I’ve also added an as-yet unpublished paper developed by Heather Creech and colleagues for IISD (especial thanks to co-author Michelle Laurie, for sharing this). I’ve been a fan of Heather’s for some time as she has been working in the development world for many years offering insights into how networks can support sustainable development. This new publication, Performance improvement and assessment of collaboration: starting points for networks and communities of practice provides a very good breakdown of types of communities of practice and suggestions for ways to measure value created by each.

Which brings me back to the topic of the webinar: it is important to understand not just how network analysis can support nonprofits in designing and assessing networks and measuring the impact of the network, but also to understand the limitations. It’s a topic of active inquiry for me — having been so immersed in SNA/ONA for so long, I am finding that it is important to be able to understand how network maps and metrics can be indicators of outcome. That’s the new net work.

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April 18, 2012 by Patti

New ONA Resources

This past week brought a few nodes in the interconnected map of resources (articles, papers, blogs) related to organizational network analysis (ONA).

Maya Townsend (@mayapar), Partnering Resources, has begun to blog on Change, Talent, Strategy, and Collaboration. Two of her first posts reveal how intimately she combines her expertise in ONA with her organizational development and strategic consulting expertise. One, The Most Important Positions in Your Company, provides a nice summary of three key roles in networks: hubs, gatekeepers, and pulse takers. The post links to a short white paper that expand on the topic. If you are interested in networks and organizational development, you’ll find a number of gems on Maya’s site, as she is very generous with her tools, exercises, and cases. (She was a great partner to me in a NetWorkShop I conducted for the Boston Facilitator’s Roundtable last December.)

Meanwhile, over at Activate Networks‘ blog (written by Steve Wardell) references a good article from People and Strategy last year on organizational network analysis. Authors Dan Novak, Mark Rennaker, and Paulette Turner set the stage nicely for talking about the need for ONA as follows:

Using structure to articulate the intent of an organization creates a challenge for leaders because it creates a perception of stability…However in knowledge intensive organizations, people and information need to be brought together in adaptable and flexible ways.

They present five brief case studies focused on culture change in silo’d organizations. In the concluding case study, the COO offered after-action insights, including this echo of the above:

Leaders may expect a neat and clean [organizational] design, but complex, networked realities may appear messy.

I always like a good ONA read. Keeps the juices flowing. Other flows in progress:

  • My Optimice colleagues Cai Kjaer, Laurie Lock Lee and I have just completed module 2 of 3 in our first running of the ONA Online Practitioner Course. We complete Module 3 next week when Marc Smith takes the student cohort into NodeXL territory. It’s not too late to sign up for the U.S. course that runs April 25 - May 22, with the interactive sessions May 8, May 15, and May 22.

And just to boggle my brain a bit, I’m attending the Collective Intelligence symposium at M.I.T. tomorrow and Friday. I hope to tweet from there (my twittering is a bit rusty, but I can still count to 140.)

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May 18, 2011 by Patti

Leadership & Networks: Complexity & Self-Managed Teams

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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May 10, 2011 by Patti

Co-Creation — because the knowledge is in the network

I heard a great talk this morning by Francis Gouillart, who along with Venkat Ramaswamy, authored The Power of Co-Creation: Build It with Them to Boost Growth, Productivity, and Profits. I’ve been hearing the term “co-creation” in a number of contexts, so it was really good to get a real feel for what’s been happening with the concept, and hear real stories about it.

The concept is not unfamiliar to those of us who were engaged in various forms of process, work, and product design in the early 90s. As Francis talked, I wrote down “participatory design,” and “socio-technical” as those early approaches came to mind as he emphasized the core aspect of co-creation: working with all the constituents in the ecosystem of a product or process to understand their needs and working with them to design the product, process, or system.

He shared a great story about how the French postal service used co-creation as the starting point to address problems of low employee morale and declining revenues. The story illustrated, through increments, some of the principles of co-creation:

  • Stakeholder won’t participate in customer co-creation unless it creates value for them. By letting employees determine their own hours, the postal service was able to decrease absenteeism.
  • The best way to co-create value is to focus on the experiences of all stakeholders. Once postal employees began talking to customers, they discovered that much of the dissatisfaction with the postal service was because of the restrictions on their hours of service (closed from 12 - 2:00pm for lunch as is French custom) The postal service expanded its hours to match the times that people were normally in town for market (in rural areas) and even until 8pm in cities.
  • Stakeholders must be able to interact directly with one another. Bringing customers and postal employees directly into conversation was the path to understanding the customer experience and how to improve it. They had to talk to each other.
  • Companies should provide platforms that allow stakeholders to interact and share their experiences. In many cases, platforms these days are interactive (more on this in a later post). But in the case of the postal service, La Poste started having small meetings to coach customers about selling on e-Bay. This had the effect of greater use of e-Bay and (guess what?) more business for La Poste!

(I have taken the principles, bolded above, directly from the HBR article by Gouillart and Ramaswamy on this topic.)

A number of the themes within this concept resonated strongly with me. First and foremost, it’s a network story. I strongly believe, and have articulated many times, that “knowledge is in the network,” and that the future belongs to those who understand how to tap into, and to learn how to weave and leverage strong networks. In the HBR article, the story of how the Indian company ITC transformed their agricultural business in India — and the lives and welfare of the farmers on whom they depend — by creating a network built around e-choupals, internet kiosks spread across the countryside that provided information in local dialects on the daily weather, crop prices, and other news; advice on farming methods; and an email service that let farmers interact directly with scientists.

But the kiosks were only part of the “platform.” The real power in the network came as ITC identified lead farmers to manage the kiosks and create local networks around them. The conversations generated around the e-choupals identified new ways that farmers wanted to interact with ITC, so that ultimately ITC created a network of hub facilities, each of which provided higher-level services to 40 or 50 e-choupals.  These networks continue to create value for ITC at the same time that the experiences of the farmers are continually enriched.

The second theme that emerged for me in listening to Francis is how the process relates to, or could leverage value network analysis. (See also here.) Engaging all the stakeholders in understanding the ecosystem is a core part of the VNA methodology. Also critical is that, as the value network mapping process proceeds with stakeholders identifying each of the exchanges (tangible and intangible) that they have with one another, conversations emerge that speak to the quality of those exchanges. In co-creation terms, it’s about the interactions. I sense something a bit different about how the co-creation process goes a level farther (or deeper) than the VNA mapping and it will take me some time to think about how to introduce this into my VNA practice. But the end result is the same: ensuring that every member of the network receives value from the exchanges, and that ultimately the value network itself is creating value as an ecosystem.

I was still a little curious about how co-creation differs from its socio-tech ancestors, but didn’t get a chance to ask the question. Fortunately, @jackvinson was there and he offered the cogent insight that what is truly different is that the leadership that is promoting the process redesign have, in successful cases of co-creation, let go of requiring a specific result. That is (in complexity terms), in the old days management created too many constraints on the outcome whereas they must now be comfortable with setting looser boundaries and letting real value emerge. (I’ve been thinking a lot about the role of leaders and setting boundaries the past few days as well, after recent posts by @snowded and @davegray on self-manged teams, but I’ll save that for another post as well). And, of course, social media has transformed our ability to engage stakeholders in real, ongoing, deeply engaged conversations. What a great new world!

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March 22, 2011 by Patti

It takes a network: strategic planning

The Leadership Learning Community hosted a very good webinar this afternoon with Eugene Eric Kim, who talked about the process  to develop a movement-wide strategy for the Wikimedia foundation.  He spoke to the central question, inherent in creating large networks, is how to position and leverage the planning process to engage the network itself. Slides are here.

What it comes down to is that the more people you engage in the strategic planning process itself, the more committed and active contributors you will have in the network going forward. Eugene summarized five basic principles:

  1. Focus on questions. Questions generate, but they also — and this I found very compelling — build capacity in the network. The goal of the planning process is not a detailed plan that lays out five years of specific work and activity, it is alignment around the mission, goals, and priorities. The power of the questions is that it helps to build that alignment.
  2. Create a space.  I talk about space as one of the key elements of Style  in Net Work. Locus — place, space, and pace — gives the network its feel, its sense of comfort, color, and continuity. The WikiMedia planning process was driven by many face-to-face meetings that defined what it meant to be in the network.
  3. It’s all about people. Identifying members, asking  them in, building relationships. Eugene made an interesting planning point here. They used the 90-9-1 rule as a way to work through how many people they would have in the network and the number of people they would, in the end, count on being active. Across the Wikimedia landscape, there were some 700 projects, so starting with an estimate of 1 person per project led them to assume they would have 70 or so actual contributors. This turned out to be very close.
  4. Model transparently.  Some people think that shifting to a network mindset means giving up control, but it is actually learning to share control. (In my leadership NetWorkShops, I emphasize leadership rather than control, but the focus absolutely on sharing.) All network leaders need to be open to change, but also to keep things moving toward that ultimate goal.
  5. Fail forward fast. Networks are complex. You can’t predict outcomes, and you often have to go with what you’ve got and to make adjustments as you go.

The result of the planning process Eugene outlined is the Wikimedia Strategic Plan. It’s a testament to the power of using a network: an elegant document that captures the alignment of 1,000 people who contributed in 50 languages. This network’s mission: Making a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Now, that takes a network.

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