Net-work, not more teamwork (2)

Following form the previous post, what can one do? For starters, don’t oppose people spending some time networking inside the firm. If you have a formal IT system for that, you are well advanced. Many organisations are just beginning to come to terms with the idea that people are connecting and will continue to connect routinely outside the boundaries of the division, team or department. But is this not something that even traditional management wanted to do?
Promote the idea that people should go ‘outside’ for questions and answers. ‘Outside’ may just mean inside the company, but in another division or affiliate. People should pick up the phone and be able to ask a colleague miles away, perhaps somebody they have never even met, how they solved problem A. Going beyond the natural boundaries should be the norm, not the exception. These are not behaviours reserved for one-off situations or annual internal company conventions, where so-called Best Practices are shared. This is not enough. We need real time sharing of those best practices or best ideas.
We simply need the ability for somebody in sales in the South of the country to be able to shout, “Houston, we have a problem” and then get help/an answer almost on the spot, because he is reaching an entire network of potential experts for solving the problem. Not just his peers, not just his immediate team, not just his boss. And frankly, if you think this can be done via email, forget it.
You need to accept that it is much messier than organisation chart management and a command-and-control style of leadership, but you can no longer afford people on the payroll who are only good at the internal dynamics of the team. Chances are you have lots of those already. You need net-working as a routine process and this is different from the standard networking: something that usually has the emphasis on the net, not the work.
Teams are predictable structures. They are very good for operational delivery, but not so good for strategy or innovation. A certain degree of ‘groupthink’ is always present. Putting the net-work before the teamwork ensures the continuous flow of new ideas. If the old saying “If you have two people who think the same, fire one of them!” were to be applied to teams, the world population of teams would shrink by 50%.

Difference in conduit of change

That brings me to item 7 on my list: the difference between traditional change management and Viral Change concerning the conduit of change, i.e. how change flows through the organisation.

Following the conventional approach, the primary vehicle for the change is the management tree/structure represented in the organisation chart. VPs fire the shots and take care of directors so they are on board. Directors repeat this at their level, involving managers and their groups, sections or divisions. Managers take care of their own trees. Change is created by a sequential cascade down, via ‘the plumbing system’ of ‘burning platform signals’, communications and activities, training and review processes. Buy-in is assumed as part of the rational process. All people are equal under the tsunami!

However, in Viral Change, networks of people are the primary conduit. Signals (language, strategy, ‘burning platforms’ and directions of change) may have been started at the top, and indeed communicated down via hierarchical ‘pipes’, but change is created by social imitation in networks of influence and driven by few individuals who act as key nodes. They constitute either an informal, natural network, or they may be aided by a designed network of ‘change agents’ or ‘Change Champions’. Viral Change does not subscribe to an egalitarian view: there is no point in communicating to all and cascading down as the only mechanism to spreading change.

If you want to read more about Viral Change, you can read it all in my book of the same title: Viral Change: the alternative to slow, painful and unsuccessful management of change in organisations

Leading change through the business-technology interaction in the ‘Enterprise 2.0’ culture.

Dr Leandro Herrero has been invited to speak at the quarterly meeting of CIO Connect in London (29 January 2008). He will show how you can lead change the Viral Change-way in the ‘Enterprise 2.0’ culture through the business-technology interaction.

The title of his presentation is: 'Viral Change: the alternative to traditional management of change processes. Leading change through the business-technology interaction of the 'Enterprise 2.0' culture.'

CIO Connect is the London-based networking organisation to which top CIOs and their core teams below. The quarterly meeting is a top networking event open to all CIO Connect members.

For more information on CIO Connect and to contact them to become a member, please click here.

The answer to myth 5: Everybody needs to be involved in the change

This is an obvious desideratum. But very often it’s unrealistic. Conventional management approaches tell us that we have to communicate everything to everybody so that everybody feels involved. There are different versions of this. In some cases what it means is ‘we really need to involve everybody’. In other cases, it means we need to ‘reach everybody’ so that (a) everybody has a chance to jump in or (b) nobody can say that they haven’t been ‘involved’…

Since traditional management and conventional management of change use ‘communication-to-all’ as a default vehicle, it is not surprising that the tsunami approach is the prevailing one. (I describe two different approaches to change management in my book, Viral Change: the tsunami approach – where big actions are taken, big communication and training programmes to all, washing over the entire company like a tsunami – and the butterfly approach – Viral Change at its best: small events/actions making big changes.) However, our understanding of networks in general and social networks in particular has changed things forever. A small percentage of the organisation is highly connected and is potentially of high influence. Communication-to-all is the most ineffective way to convey the rationale for changes and for expecting that involvement will follow.

You are better off using networks as a vehicle. I am not suggesting that communication is not needed. It is, but we usually have ‘massive communication’ as the single mechanism of hope. Viral Change uses the power of internal networks and their small worlds to effectively reach everybody, but not in the supposedly democratic way of the Town Hall meeting roll-outs. At any point in time, there will be different levels of ‘receptiveness’ in the population and the spread will happen in an erratic way. However, when this is happening, it is not just ‘communication’ as a currency that will follow through. It is endorsement, new behaviours, reinforcements and changes, all in one. Viral Change likes to talk less and do more... with better and faster results.

If you want to read more about Viral Change, or want to revisit some of the other myths, you can read it all again in my book of the same title: Viral Change: the alternative to slow, painful and unsuccessful management of change in organisations.

Social networks inside (and the structured/un-structured dilemma)

I have been answering some LinkedIn questions and I thought I would post one of them. The question was about the use of internal (to the firm) Linked-In type of tools and, by default, the structure/unstructured sides of the organizations. This are my comments:

This is at the core of my work as organizational consultant. I have developed the theme of structured/non structured collaboration –within a given organization – in my book Viral Change™ Although the book ( as my own work) is geared towards change in organizations, the basis for change lies on ‘what kind of model of organization’ one has in mind. The traditional top-down and ‘organization-chart structure’ ‘requires’ the cascade-down conventional change management programme designed by academics and sold by consultants where everything is linear and sequential. I call it ‘Tsunami approach’. The understanding of the organization as a network-base biological organism will not cope with that approach. Viral Change™ occurs when a small set of behaviours, is modelled and spread by a small number of people through their networks of influence (‘Butterfly approach’) creating tipping points where new routines become visible and established. It is infection versus cascade down ‘rational appeal to all’.

There are some organizations that have been designed from the decentralised, network based angle and, as such, there will be examples in their own rights. The best compilation I have seen of such examples is in the book The Starfish and the spider. There is a website http://www.starfishandspider.com/. Visa is featured ( as pointed out by Andrew in your answers). BUT, the point I am making in my book (and work) is that ALL organizations have a component of network-based, un-structured communication and collaboration, largely (but not totally) invisible and traditionally ignored by management (‘if we don’t see it we can’t manage it’) There is always a tension between the structured and unstructured sides of the organization and the results of that tension dictates many aspects of their effectiveness.

Looking at examples such as Google (which contains by the way a great percentage of ‘structured’) or Selmer’s only, may be misleading since the average corporation (my clients!) will never go that way! My work focuses on trying to make the leadership of the organization understand the hidden networks first and then embrace their invisibility. Viral Change is just one application of that change of mindset.

Finally, the use of intra-firm social networks tools for the hidden, largely invisible side of the firm is almost unknown in large corporations. Those tools would replace a great deal of email, traffic. Extra problem is that if management hijacks them they will be effectively ‘structuring’ an un-structured collaboration, which will write its death certificate. I could go for hours here (!) but I hope my comments help

Networks, economics and politics

Albert-László Barabási is a physicist whose study of networks has brought good light to the understanding of many network-phenomena. I quote his work in depth in the book Viral Change because his approach is crucial to understand how change works inside the organization. To my knowledge my book is pioneer in the application of network theory to the specifics of change management. Now Albert-László Barabási with another physicist has come to the rescue to the socio-political question of why some countries develop in different ways, from economic and political perspective. This is of course a.. er… small question.

Two economists and two physicists get together and map the products developed by some countries and their associate complexity in development. A full article in Slate is s good summary of the authors paper in Science. Here is a quote from the article: "The physicists' map shows each economy in this network of products, by highlighting the products each country exported. Over time, economies move across the product map as their export mix changes. Rich countries have larger, more diversified economies, and so produce lots of products—especially products close to the densely connected heart of the network. East Asian economies look very different, with a big cluster around textiles and another around electronics manufacturing, and—contrary to the hype—not much activity in the products produced by rich countries. African countries tend to produce a
few products with no great similarity to any others." Worth reading.