When not to connect the dots

Perhaps as a direct counterargument to previous NY Times-run network maps of government scandal, this week's Sunday NY Times Magazine cover features a set of unconnected dots in a story about Washington's black market in information as traded between self-interested gossipers from the highest ranks of government and journalism.
Author Max Frankel, former executive editor of the NY Times, argues that this devious information underworld is ugly but also an essential pillar of our democracy. Frankel explains what happens when prosecutors would have judges and grand juries (and eventually the rest of us) know exactly who told whom what, and when. More often than not, Frankel concludes, our country would be better off if more prosecutors would just "butt out" and leave the information-sharing unmapped.

In the less powerful but no less political worlds of business and community networks, this story speaks to the dangers of damaging an organization by putting too much stock in measuring it. Such measurements surely do have a place, but we must be careful not to take them too far, especially outside the safely double-blinded protocols of academic research.

As someone who spends a lot more sharing results with clients than anonymizing results into publishable research papers, I appreciate such a clear embrace of the inherently healthy messy squishiness of information sharing.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License and is copyrighted (c) 2007 by Connective Associates except where otherwise noted.

Organizational bypass and collective leadership

Recently I presented a social network case study to a group that included a few senior faculty from the local business school. The case study is the story of Commonwealth Software and its CEO, who wanted to use organizational network analysis to better identify and develop emerging leaders in his growing 50-person company.

Everyone's favorite network map from the case study seems to be the following "organizational bypass" chart.
Black links represent formal supervising relationships (the org chart) with CEO Frank at the center. Red links represent supervising relationships that are "bypassed." For example, Ochs reports to Xavier in the lower left, but Ochs goes to Ethos and Halston for organizational advice even more often than Ochs goes to Xavier. Hence the supervising relationship between Ochs and Xavier is red and Ochs' preferred organizational advice sources are linked with blue.

Most notable in this chart is the star of red links to CEO Frank, who is surrounded by a circle of blue links representing the fact that his senior management team consult each other more often than they consult him.

Interpreting the "so what" of this or any network map always depends on specific context. In this case, we see validation that Frank is a good delegater with a strong team of leaders who are not held back by Frank's focus on relationships that are external to Commonwealth Software (which you can't see in this map but shows up dramatically in other maps from the case study).

File this case study under collective leadership--a big topic of research and discussion, including the upcoming annual meeting of the Leadership Learning Community, Baltimore, MD, April 11-13.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License and is copyrighted (c) 2007 by Connective Associates except where otherwise noted.

del.icio.us tagometer and board interlocks

It's spring break at BU. While my students are away, I am doing a bit of housekeeping and finishing my online introduction to network mathematics.

For housekeeping, I have upgraded Connectedness to the new Blogger platform, and I just added a new feature to the sidebar--the del.icio.us Tag-o-Meter. There you can see the tags used most often to describe this blog, according to users of del.icio.us (one of the most popular social bookmarking services). By clicking on any one of the tags, it's easy to explore the most popular tangents to our own eclectic posts. For example: socialnetworks, collaboration, business, and community. The Tag-o-Meter is a great example of dynamically generated content; it summarizes Connectedness reader feedback with no mediation on my part. Something like the Referrer Feed (farther down in the sidebar).

Mathematically speaking, del.icio.us tags are just like corporate boardrooms. Both are examples of bipartite networks, which link two distinct types of nodes (red and blue in the example at right) that otherwise do not connect to each other. For example, tags relate to other tags only indirectly through their shared links to website URLs. Similarly, boards link to their members and through those links develop interlocks with other boards. See They Run Richmond and TheyRule.net for great stories emerging from bipartite networks.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License and is copyrighted (c) 2007 by Connective Associates except where otherwise noted.