Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Real-Time SNA at the Trainers' Roundtable

Last Friday I presented to the Trainers' Roundtable. My friend Michele Simos was very kind to share the action shot at right, in which I am talking about David Krackhardt's seminal case study.

If you're interested in HR, facilitating, and training, and live in the Boston area, I highly recommend the Trainers' Roundtable to you. It's a very sharp group.

The highlight of the meeting for me (and I think for the audience too) was a real-time social network analysis. We went through the entire process, from goal-setting and survey design, to data collection, analysis, and discussion, all "in the room." The only paper we used was a flipchart at the front, and I administered the survey verbally while typing UCINET coordinates into my laptop. With twenty people attending, we had more than enough to make the network perspective very enlightening, but not so many to get bogged down in data collection. We found a not-surprising cluster of leadership at the center, as well as a very intriguing boundary-spanner.

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