Full Circle Associates

CTC Live blogging, Tuesday June 20

Live blogging caveats apply. Note: these notes really need the visuals they shared of their new application

Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps, NetAge

Show and Tell: Collaborating in the Networked Organization

“Only connect” – EM Forster

That’s what comes from the inside. Spirit and heart. Not because we are told to, but collaboration is a basic human urge. We are in a difficult situation right now. We are all, how many of you have an org chart that looks like a tree. The world looks like a network.

We were working on the reinventing government project with Al Gore. Kept talking to me about networks. We can’t solve 21^st century problems with 19^th century organizations. From the CIA guy. We are in worlds that are described by the left, working on the right (diagram)

How do you go from hierarchy to networked organizations. Now the question is flipped. The hierarchy is a network. The whole foundation of network thinking and science has changed in the last few years. Used to think about static systems that didn’t go very far, strict rigid systems. In natural systems there are hubs, some with many and some with few links.

We invented a tool to fly through organizations to make them transparent. We have ot find a way to bring down the walls and see through. See transparently, I want to see me and how I fit in. All the way up to the global sense of the o… lost power missed a bit

Large organization in a dangerous industry wanted more transparency. They thought their org was 5 levels deep, but was 9 levels. The people at the top can only see down a couple of levels. If someone hands you the org chart, how many boxes are on the chart. 20 – 30 in a 5000 person org. Cannot get it on one page.

Typical way of sending messages down the organization, was because most of the managers were in the middle, so went from a cascade, turned it on its side, now hitting all 800 managers at once.

We assume organizations are pyramids, but they are really diamonds. We need to think about the middle, reach the middle as quickly as possible. Not only as you model an organization, navigate, fly thorugh, you can do some network analysis of the organization itself. Where you expected a slope, you find a curve, a diamond.

Second remarkable thing, coming back to emergence, is if the organization itself is an emergent phenomenon. The average number of reports to a manager 7? More like a power curve. 20% have 15 or more. Very few have 7 or 8. There are no “normal managers.” Barrier, scale free. People moving in and out.

Now demo the tool. Hyperbolic viewer from Xerox Parc. Model the organization. Can change the nodes from org, to positions, the same formal org chart wrapped around a globe to see all positions at once. This is fed by data from SAP system, fed directly in . Positions, reports-to, no extra work involved to use the large scale org map. At each step you can develop metrics. Link to organization, role, personal identity, geo-location à can turn into a series of metrics. Something you know locally, but rarely at an organizational/global basis.

This is just the start as if you were building the ground truth of the organization. Analogize to google maps. The hierarchy represents the terrain. It is about classification, not control. On top you can add all kinds of other links. Turn them off and on. Create networks on top of your organizational maps. Hierarchy is stability. Map other types on top.

Are there hubs in an organization. Will we find them? Are they natural in organization? What is the quantity of spam for each manager? As IT people, when you start think about it, in terms of support, not everyone is the same. The more connected needs different and more complex tools. Not a homogenous set of users.

Knowing where people are, what nations they are in ..

Phone rang and missed the end.