(Cross posted, in part, to my blog) I attended the session by Patti Anklam on Net Work: The New Leadership Challenge. Patti blogs at Networks, Complexity, and Relatedness and she has an Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) page. Her slides will be posted to one of her sites and to the Leadership and Management Division page.
Patti provided an excellent overview of how exploring, mapping, and understanding your organization's networks can enable or strengthen collaboration, innovation, efficiency, and can improve the bottom line. She explained that strong networks are correlated with health both in the personal sense and for companies which can become “more flexible, adaptive and resilient.” She also appreciates how librarians can be central to this effort because of our positions.
A network, very simply, is a set of relationships. The relationships can be person-person, group-group, or information artifacts.
The patterns that show up in these maps tend to fall into categories:
- silos or stovepipes
- isolated clusters
- highly central people or functions
- marginalized voices
- external connectivity
- distinct roles and influence
She distilled her process for doing ONA down into general steps
- start with a business objective
- design the project
- ready the organization
- conduct survey
- review the results
- explore metrics (structural vs. centrality)
- validate results (surprises? Does it make sense?)
- what-if, simulation of network w/out key players
- figure out what action to take (“interventions”)
- follow-up
She finished with a discussion of ways to build networks. This should be done taking into account the purpose, policies, leadership. It is also important to allow for flexibility and organic growth. Finally, plan for evaluation/assessment.
Thank you, LMD for inviting Patti and Patti, thank you for coming!
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