Notable roles in living systems 28 Sep 2009, 11:06 am

Measuring and mapping networks can help us understand a system holistically.

With that in mind, I paused a week ago to read an obituary in the NY Times: "Lawrence B. Slobodkin, Pioneering Ecologist, Dies at 81." Curious to see what had made Slobodkin a pioneer in his own systems-oriented field, I read on and discovered his most famous paper. Published in 1960 as "Community Structure, Population Control and Competition," the paper's four pages contain a grand overview of how terrestrial ecosystems work, and is still widely discussed today.

Slobodkin and his co-authors present these distinct roles in the terrestrial ecosystem:

• fossil fuels
• sunlight
• producers (e.g., plants)
  
• decomposers
  
• herbivores
• carnivores

They then tackle the overarching question: for each role above, what is the critical factor that limits its growth? For example, in which roles are peers competing for scarce resources, and in which roles are populations controlled not by scarce resources but by predation?

Somehow, I am convinced that these roles map in a meaningful way more recent natural systems such as the world economy or American healthcare. Which parts of these systems correspond to which of the above roles in the terrestrial biosphere? Any ideas, anyone?

One thing that surprised me about Slobodkin's map of the biosphere was its early and explicit inclusion of fossil fuels. This inclusion makes a lot more sense to me now that I am reading (coincidentally) Michael Pollan's Ominivore's Dilemma, which also speaks to a holistic view of the terrestrial biosphere. One of the darker themes of the book is that human desire for productivity leads people to feed plants with fossil fuels instead of sunlight.

The same day Slobodkin's obituary was published, the NY Times also featured this headline: "Emphasis on growth is called misguided," reporting a paper commissioned by Nicolas Sarkozy and written by a pair of Nobel-laureate economists.

It's a lot to absorb. But strikes me as relevant to those of us interested in metrics that pertain to well-being.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2009 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.

Interesting Webinar 9/14: Leadership for a New Era 8 Sep 2009, 4:53 pm

The wonderful Claire Reinelt recently shared this with me:


We invite ALL members of the leadership development community to join a free introductory webinar to the Leadership for a New Era (LNE) initiative on September 14th at 12:30 EDT (9:30 PDT). LNE is a collaborative learning initiative developed by the Leadership Learning Community (LLC), a nonprofit organization focused on connecting organizations and individuals in the leadership development field with a commitment to social equity. Through LNE we are establishing partnerships (such as these) to influence our current leadership development thinking and practice, and to promote a shift from a model of leadership focused on individual skills and attributes to a model of leadership that is inclusive, rooted in community, networked, and action-oriented. For additional information please visit the LNE website: http://leadershipforanewera.com

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2009 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.

Influence and social capital of 21st century leaders 27 Aug 2009, 11:08 am

My previous post summarized "four fundamentals of networks" with special emphasis on the context of leadership. Today I'll take a closer look at the foundation of the four fundamentals: personal influence. This foundation is highlighted in the bottom two quadrants below, which share a network focus on influential positions and roles:
These two quadrants provide a good foundation for at least a couple reasons:

First, most of us naturally equate leadership with positions of personal influence. In their excellent article "Social Capital of Twenty-First Century Leaders," Dan Brass and David Krackhardt begin by saying, "Accomplishing work through others has always been the essence of leadership"; later in the chapter they simplify this to "Influence is the essence of leadership." As I summarized in this post, Brass and Krackhardt then describe how aspiring leaders can use social networks to gain as much influence as quickly as possible. (Their article really is outstanding, FYI.)

Second, centrality and structural holes--the network concepts underlying the highlighted two quadrants--are the two most intuitive notions of network structure. If you find "structural holes" less intuitive than "centrality," then just substitute "clustering" in place of "structural holes." Clustering refers to groups, structural holes to the gaps between groups: Just like foreground and background, they define each other in complementary partnership.

The topic of personal influence in social networks gets lots of attention. For example, this announcement crossed my desk last week: "'Influence is the future of media'. Influence is the hottest topic in marketing, advertising, media and social media today. Find out how to tap the power of influence." It's not too late to sign up for http://www.futureofinfluencesummit.com/.

Another view of influence and social networks crossed my desk a month ago: Duncan Watts, Columbia sociologist and principal research scientist for Yahoo, told Fast Company magazine his opinion of the idea that a subgroup of "influentials" is largely responsible for trend-setting: "It sort of sounds cool, but it's wonderfully persuasive only for as long as you don't think about it." Later in the article, Watts concludes: "If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one--and if it isn't, then almost no one can."

Are these views of influence hopelessly at odds? Perhaps not. As I explore that, I'll move to the top half of the four fundamentals of networks.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2009 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.

Four fundamentals of networks 18 Aug 2009, 9:33 am

Claire Reinelt and I just contributed a chapter, "Social Networks," to appear in Political and Civic Leadership, edited by Richard Couto and produced by Sage Publications.

Political and Civic Leadership provides a comprehensive undergraduate-level overview of the field of leadership and includes 100 chapters in two volumes. We are happy to be included in an all-star cast of contributors (academics and practitioners of leadership); and we are also happy to be done!

Richard has structured the book as a reference, with each chapter standing on its own, so that readers can flip to a topic of interest (e.g., "decisions," "ethics," "globalization," "philanthropy") without having to read the preceding 500 pages. Nevertheless, there is an overarching structure to the 100 chapters that is not alphabetical. They are divided into these 11 thematic sections:

1. Introduction To Politics And Civic Leadership
2. Philosophy And Theories Of Political And Civic Leadership
3. Purposes Of Political And Civic Leadership
4. The Failure Of Politics
5. The Processes Of Political And Civic Leadership
6. The Institutions Of Political And Civic Leadership
7. The Contexts Of Public Leadership
8. The Psychology Of Public Leadership
9. The Tasks And Tools Of Political And Civic Leadership
10. The Competencies Of Public Leadership
11. Depictions Of Public Leadership

Our chapter will appear in Section 9: "The Tasks and Tools of Political and Civic Leadership."

The writing process helped us to deepen the foundations of our framework of four kinds of leadership networks. We considered three different perspectives, each of which describes a different set of four fundamentals of networks:

Kilduff and Tsai describe four orienting concepts of network thinking:

• Embeddedness: How are organizations and behavior influenced by social relations?
  
• Social Capital: What is the value of a person's connections to others?
  
• Centrality: What is the influence of a person according to his position?
  
• Structural Holes: Where are there gaps between distinct social groups?
  

Borgatti and Foster describe four primary aspects of the network paradigm, based on the following two questions: First, Do we care more about improving performance internally, or expanding impact externally? Second, Do we care more about the structural position of individuals, or the flow of communication? These priorities give us four categories:

• Social access to resources: Focused on communication flow and internal performance
  
• Structural capital: Focused on network position and internal performance
  
• Environmental shaping: Focused on network position and external impact
  
• Contagion: Focused on communication flow and external impact
  

In our work, we have encountered four main types of leadership networks:

• Peer leadership networks: Focused on building trust among leaders
  
• Organizational leadership networks: Focused on leveraging network position
  
• Field-policy leadership networks: Focused on shaping the environment
  
• Collective leadership networks: Focused on unleashing innovation
  

Each of the above "four fundamentals of networks" is a list that stands on its own. In the process of writing our chapter for Sage, we synthesized them all into this chart:


What does all that mean? Mostly these two things: (1) more blogging from me soon, with case studies from each of the quadrants above, and (2) pondering why the above four quadrants do not correspond to my beloved "holy trinity of network power," nor to the esteemed standard text SNA: Methods and Applications by Wasserman and Faust.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2009 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.

New Yorker vs Wired: Is Free the Future? 2 Jul 2009, 2:19 pm

This week's New Yorker has a fun piece by Malcolm Gladwell, "Priced to Sell: Is Free the Future?" in which he takes on Chris Anderson's new book: Free: The Future of a Radical Price.

Chris Anderson is the editor of Wired and is famous for coining the phrase "Long Tail." He blogs at http://thelongtail.com and most recently posted, "Dear Malcolm: Why So Threatened?"

I rather enjoy it when the New Yorker takes a smack at Wired. Back in 2006, John Cassidy wrote a NYer article "Going Long: In the new “long tail” marketplace, has the blockbuster met its match?" in which he critiqued The Long Tail (i.e., the book by Chris Anderson).

That article by John Cassidy remains my all-time favorite description of Webonomics (especially in terms of learning a lot by reading a little). I highly recommend Cassidy's and Gladwell's articles as a matched set.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2009 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.

Tweet of submission: @behoppe 29 Jun 2009, 3:45 pm

Claire Reinelt has won me over. My first tweet is this quote from Frederick Douglass:

"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2009 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.

Following the world's greatest RSS feed 25 Jun 2009, 9:18 am

Thank you Paul Toms for sharing your Twitter experiences and other reminisces in response to my last post. I like the Will Leitch article ("Why Twitter is more fun the less you use it") and your quote from it: "Twitter is the world's greatest RSS feed."

Like Paul and Will, I am a fan of RSS. (For those unfamiliar with RSS, it is New Media's version of the AP News Wire; see "RSS in plain English" by Common Craft.)

Much like Will, I find RSS (e.g., Twitter) to be more fun the less I use it. But my idea of "using" is different than Will's. I consider reading to be "using" whereas Will considers reading to be "not using."

A couple examples of how I use and follow RSS feeds without reading:

• Over the years I have subscribed to hundreds of blogs and other RSS feeds using NewsGator. Rather than read them, I simply let NewsGator dump them into my Outlook mailbox. Once the content is in my mailbox, my cheap mongo-hard-drive and my free desktop search software (Copernic) keep all that content ready for me. For example, now that I am curious to read about Twitter, I can search my hard drive for "Twitter" and see that Nova Spivak blogged a few months ago that "In the world of Twitter things happen in real-time, not Internet-time. It's even faster than the world of the 1990's and the early 2000's." He goes on to chronicle the acceleration of our lives, concluding: "Twitter is simply faster.... Twitter may overcome the asynchronous nature of the Web. Even search may go 'real-time.'" Having waited 4 months for the moment when I actually care to read Nova's post, I will wait a while longer before I respond to his hope that Twitter will help us "overcome the asynchronous nature of the Web" and make "search go 'real-time'"--two statements that beg for rebuttal.
  
• Another one of my favorite uses of RSS is the right sidebar of the Leadership Networks site, "Recently Noted Links." The links in this sidebar come from an RSS feed that provides Leadership Networks with a non-stop news-ticker of content that is relevant and useful to the audience of the site. Furthermore, this one RSS feed represents the synthesis of hundreds of RSS feeds. You can glimpse under the hood here. It's similar to the previous example, except that the content scrolls down the Leadership Networks sidebar instead of getting archived to my hard drive. I guess the content of that sidebar is my version of what Nova Spivak calls "real-time search." Because I see it that way, the content is presented to embody (not to overcome) the asynchronous nature of the Web: It's available but not interrupting, there when you want it.
  

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2009 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.

Twitter: timing is everything...? 23 Jun 2009, 1:53 pm

The majority of my clients and colleagues are using it, but I have not uttered the word until now: TWITTER. I was convinced to break my silence when I saw Time magazine: "How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live."

Here is my version of Time's story: Twitter does to texting what blogging did to email.

So let's get to the root of the matter: Texting. John Cassidy says it better than I can in the October 2008 New Yorker, "Thumbspeak: Is Texting Here to Stay?" Summary of Cassidy: We may be helplessly addicted to crackberries etc, but we are not addicted to typing words with numeric keypads. As soon as we all have QWERTY in our palms, we will then do away with the 140-character barrier and, with that, all the quirks that make txt msgs distinct from emails will quickly die a natural death.

If texting becomes indistinguishable from emailing (grant me that hypothetical just for a moment) how then will Tweeting differ from blogging? I am curious.

[The editor pauses... almost publishes the post... then takes a phone call from a colleague with more Twitter stories. A change of heart occurs.]

No, wait, I have glossed over something fundamental: Timing. Words have rhythm. Even if my version of the Twitter story is technically true (which I think it is), it misses the whole timing thing. That is a big deal, experientially if not technically.

Comments, anyone?

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2009 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.

Beginner's mind and collective intelligence 22 Jun 2009, 9:49 am

It's five years to the day since the first post on Connectedness.

An unspoken theme of those five years deserves recognition today: Beginner's Mind. I heard the phrase last September, when Fred Small preached his very first sermon as the new senior minister at my church.

Without Fred's flair for story-telling, Wikipedia still does a good job of explaining beginner's mind:

"Beginner's mind ... refers to having an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions when studying a subject, even when studying at an advanced level, just as a beginner in that subject would. The term is especially used in the study of Zen Buddhism and Japanese martial arts.

"The phrase was also used as the title of Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki's book: Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, which reflects a saying of his regarding the way to approach Zen practice: In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few."

My fascination with beginner's mind often puts me in a bind: In my consulting and my teaching, I am usually invited to take the role of expert, the perspective that will reduce the confusion of many possibilities to the simplicity of the few and the best. Rarely am I invited to help experts take off the focused blinders of their hard-won experience.

Beginner's mind is easily left behind and forgotten. For example, consider that exemplar of communal beginner's knowledge: Wikipedia. The scope and accuracy of this site are deservedly celebrated: Rob Laubacher, Executive Director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, notes that Harvard medical school students prepare for exams using Wikipedia. But where do beginners turn for an introduction to anatomy, once Harvard medical students have claimed Wikipedia as their study guide? I posed that question to Rob. He said it was the first time he had heard the notion that Wikipedia was evolving into a collection of specialized expert-driven beginner-unfriendly articles. We wondered if my experience of Wikipedia being advanced and not at all beginner-friendly was related to the topic my students most want to learn: Web technology.

To a point, perhaps. As a case study of how Wikipedia takes a simple non-Web idea and moves it beyond the grasp of beginners, consider the notion of probability as introduced by Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica. Within its first few paragraphs, before citing a single concrete example of probability (e.g., flipping a coin, rolling dice), Wikipedia asserts thatwhich is easy for them to say. And I mean that truly. Once you have mastered such notation, explaining probability with a language as imprecise as English is really hard. Yet English is the language spoken most often by American students. So where are they to turn? Read Britannica and see for yourself.

When Wikipedia introduces probability as is that what we mean by "collective intelligence," "working wikily," or "wikinomics"? Probably not. But you have to admit it makes sense for Wikipedia to explain probability to us in that way. Why should privileged experts with mastery of a valuable language such as probability theory make it easy for ignorant beginners to join them? The simplest answer is, "Because Encyclopedia Britannica pays them to." In conversations with Rob and others, I have heard of other sensible and even uplifting answers to this question. And so I hope that ignorant and expert alike may be blessed with Beginner's Mind.


PS: See James Surowiecki for a good argument that high-quality information requires high-quality compensation.

PPS: My last sustained post along these lines was this one, in reference to John Ziman's 1968 monograph Public Knowledge--An Essay Concerning the Social Dimension of Science, specifically in the chapter "Community and Communications."

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2009 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.

Organizational network analysis utility: Unleashed 5 Jun 2009, 11:53 am

Back in November 2005 I posted an organizational network analysis utility — a spreadsheet to help process network survey data and load it into network analysis software like UCINET (which is one of my faves, just behind NetDraw and Visone).

Since then, the spreadsheet has been available via email. But I confess that I have more than occasionally fallen behind in emailing copies to those who have requested. Sorry about that.

Now the spreadsheet is available by direct download from the Leadership Networks site here. No more waiting for emails from me.

Not coincidentally, I have been reading posts by Claire Reinelt about unleashing leadership networks — as opposed to sustaining them. Summarizing Ed O'Malley who directs the Kansas Leadership Center, Claire lists 7 practices for unleashing. The 3rd is "let go of the control."

In other words, it's time for me to stop being a bottleneck! Below is more information about the spreadsheet utility, copied from the original Nov 2005 post:

---

Organizational network analysis provides intuitively compelling pictures of how work really happens, giving us a handle on slippery intangibles that drive the future success of an enterprise.

Although this kind of intuitive analytical power has very wide appeal, its usefulness is limited right now by the unwieldy software tools currently available.

Deep down, making good simple network pictures is inherently complicated, but using network visualization software doesn't have to be. Progress is being made every day. See the newly updated list of SNA software in the right sidebar for some great examples. (And please let me know if I'm missing something.)

Even with the simplest of these tools, my non-technical clients often get hung up right away with the basic task of getting the data in. We power-users can easily forget how hard it was to build our first network, until we see someone else learning for the first time.

Here's an Excel spreadsheet utility my clients and I find helpful. I now make it freely available, in the hopes that more people will enjoy the benefits of seeing the big picture of the network perspective.

The spreadsheet includes three worksheets. One worksheet is the actual survey, which can be modified to suit the specific project. It automatically incorporates the names of the survey population into a drop-down list.
After distributing the survey via email, collected responses can be pasted in any order into a "compiled survey" worksheet:

Then an "automatrix" worksheet converts the compiled results into square matrices that can easily be pasted into available network analysis tools. The matrix calculator makes it easy to manage who opts in or out of the survey, and it provides access to multiple relationships.

If you'd like a copy of the spreadsheet, which includes a copy of a great California Computer case study (permission granted by David Krackhardt), you can download it here.




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2009 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.

Searchable leadership networks bibliography 27 May 2009, 7:38 am

Our new Link-to-Results site features a categorized searchable bibliography. Of all the pages on the site, this one has generated by far the most feedback. Those whose work we overlooked have been kind to let us know and share with us.

We attempted to synthesize many different fields of work in the bibliography (e.g., leadership development, business, sociology, mathematics). Rather than categorize our references according to their traditional fields, we categorized the references according to why we were interested in them:

• Leadership Development
• Performance & Innovation
• Community & Social Change
• Group Incentives
• Evaluation
• Social Capital
• Social Networks
• Network Building
• Network Analysis
• Software and Visualization

Click on each link above and you can see our list of references for that category.

Citing references, categorizing, naming things. These are essential to learning and yet get in the way too. I close with thoughts on naming things, quoting from the Tao Te Ching.

---

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth. The named is the mother of ten thousand things. Ever desireless, one can see the mystery. Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations. These two spring from the same source but differ in name; this appears as darkness. Darkness within darkness. The gate to all mystery. --Lao Tsu, Translated by Gia-Fu Feng.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2009 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.

Leadership for a New Era 26 May 2009, 4:10 pm

"You cannot solve problems with the same level of consciousness that was used to create them."
Leadership for a New Era is an initiative led by the Leadership Learning Community (LLC) with the mission to transform individuals and society by connecting the learning and practice of those who support leadership that is committed to promoting social and economic equity.

Claire Reinelt, Director of Research and Evaluation at LLC, says the initiative is focused on "contributing to a shift in our current leadership thinking from a primary focus on the individual to approaches that support leadership in the context of collective work, networks, communities and social movements...."

Today Claire invites you to share your leadership and learning. She posts on the Leadership Networks discussion forum:

"What do we know about leadership networks that others may not have considered or that they have a tendency to forget? As part of the Leadership for a New Era collaborative learning initiative, we want to share this wisdom with leadership programs and community initiatives, many of which seek to build social capital and network capacity. Here is what I came up with.

• Successful networks are not sustained they are unleashed.
• Remember that people are nodes in multiple networks.
• Bridging across boundaries increases the probability of innovation.
• Those on the periphery of a network offer pathways to new allies.

"What is your wisdom?"

I am especially fond of the first bullet! You can respond to Claire here.

PS: For extra credit, I will add this to Claire's question: In reference to the Einstein quote above, what different level of consciousness do we need to solve (as opposed to create) our problems? For example: higher or lower? Someday, perhaps, I will post on why I personally favor the "lower" path.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2009 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.

New resource on leadership networks 22 May 2009, 10:23 am

Claire Reinelt and I have just turned our paper "SNA and the Evaluation of Leadership Networks" (to appear in Leadership Quarterly (Elsevier)) into a full-blown website where practitioners of leadership development can find and share resources: http://link-to-results.com. The site includes the paper, a tagged & searchable database of our bibliography, a discussion forum, case studies, and other resources related to leadership networks.

Below is one of the introductory pages on the site, "Kinds of Leadership Networks":

---

Leadership networks provide resources and support for leaders, and increase the scope and scale of impact leaders can have individually and collectively. We find it helpful to distinguish four types of leadership networks:
Our choice to focus on these four types of networks grows out of our experience as consultants with clients who fund, run, and catalyze leadership networks. Often our clients are interested in using network mapping or other tools to increase the awareness of leaders about the power of networks, to further catalyze relationships and connections, and to strengthen the capacity of the network to act collectively. There is also growing interest in knowing what difference leadership networks are making.

Our leadership network classification framework is also influenced by the work of Borgatti and Foster (2003), Plastrik and Taylor (2006), among others. We compare these three frameworks with the tables below:

Our Framework
Type of Network	Description of Network
Peer Leadership Network	Leaders who are connected through shared interests and commitments, shared work, or shared experiences. Leaders in the network share information, provide advice and support, learn from one another, and occasionally collaborate together.
Organizational Leadership Network	Leaders who connect to increase performance. Often these are informal connections joining people who are employees of the same organization, such as when an employee seeks advice from a colleague other than her supervisor.
Field-Policy Leadership Network	Leaders who have a shared commitment to influencing the world around them (e.g., the framing of a particular issue, underlying assumptions, and standards for how things get done). These networks make it easier for leaders to find common ground, mobilize support, and influence policy and the allocation of resources.
Collective Leadership Network	People who self-organize around a common cause. Network members exercise leadership locally and sometimes connect on a large scale. These networks may be driven by a desire to achieve a specific goal, or simply by the desire of each member to belong to something larger than oneself.

Borgatti and Foster approach networks with a more conceptual emphasis than ours. They present a very broad network paradigm within a two-by-two matrix. We highlight below how the four quadrants of their matrix correspond most closely to our framework of four types of leadership networks:

Borgatti and Foster (2003)
		Goal used to explain network
		Actor performance evaluation	Properties of resource diffusion
Mechanism used to explain network	Structural position of actors in network	Structural Capital (Organizational)	Environmental Shaping (Field-Policy)
	Flow of resources through ties	Social access to resources (Peer)	Contagion (Collective)

Plastrik and Taylor's Net Gains handbook speaks directly to practitioners (network builders) seeking social change. Their framework also maps neatly onto ours:

Plastrik and Taylor (2006)
	Connectivity Network (Peer)	Alignment Network (Organizational)	Production Network (Field-Policy)
Definition	Connects people to allow easy flow of and access to information and transactions	Aligns people to develop and spread an identity and collective value proposition	Fosters joint action for specialized outcomes by aligned people
Desired Network Effects	Rapid growth and diffusion, small-world reach, resilience	Adaptive capacity, small-world reach, rapid growth and diffusion	Rapid growth and diffusion, small-world reach, resilience, adaptive capacity
Key Task of Network Builder	Weaving-help people meet each other, increase ease of sharing and searching for information	Facilitating-helping people to explore potential shared identity and value propositions	Coordinating- helping people plan and implement collaborative actions

The fundamental goal of our framework is to help practitioners of leadership development - to explain when and how to use social network analysis as an evaluation and capacity-building tool.

All people who are dedicated to developing and supporting the emergence of leadership must understand how to create, develop, and transform leadership networks. We hope our work will inspire more evaluation research on leadership networks and on how to harness and use the power of social network analysis for the collective good.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2009 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.

Student leadership: thank you Sidney Efromovich 14 May 2009, 5:00 pm

Collaborating with Nat Welch of CFAR has taught me the virtues of Found Pilots and the Campaign Approach to Change -- the progress you seek already exists as deviant behavior within the present moment.

I was "lucky" (I keep telling myself) to find lots of deviant behavior among my most recent cohort of students at Boston University. For example, the most popular student project featured a wonderfully deviant title: "Ben Timmins worked a ton, and all he got was this website."

My favorite found pilot was the unauthorized work of one Sidney Efromovich, BU '09, founder of the Hug Don't Hate Movement. Starting from day one, Sidney typed all my lectures into an encyclopedic set of Web pages. The whole semester -- every example I explained, every diagram I drew, every definition, equation, formula -- all of it Sidney not only included in his site but also improved in the process.
Having worked 3 years (a lifetime?) to develop a beginner-friendly and conceptually rigorous curriculum for the undocumented field of Web Science, I am very grateful to Sidney for so artfully, faithfully recording our spring 2009 improvisation on that theme. I am even more grateful to Sidney for giving me every artifact of his Web site as a parting gift. An honor and a privilege to have worked with you, Sidney!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2009 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.

SNA and Leadership Networks 23 Mar 2009, 11:22 am

Claire Reinelt and I are pleased to share our paper, "Social Network Analysis and the Evaluation of Leadership Networks, " which is due for publication in a special issue of Leadership Quarterly (Elsevier) on the topic of evaluating leadership. Look for it on news stands in early 2010.

Bruce Hoppe, PhD Connective Associates LLC

Claire Reinelt, PhD Leadership Learning Community

Abstract
Leadership development practitioners have become increasingly interested in networks as a way to strengthen relationships among leaders in fields, communities, and organizations. This paper offers a framework for conceptualizing different types of leadership networks and uses case examples to identify outcomes typically associated with each type of network. One challenge for the field of leadership development has been how to evaluate leadership networks. Social Network Analysis (SNA) is a promising evaluation approach that uses mathematics and visualization to represent the structure of relationships between people, organizations, goals, interests, and other entities within a larger system. Core social network concepts are introduced and explained to illuminate the value of SNA as an evaluation and capacity-building tool.

Table of Contents

Introduction	1
Classifying Leadership Networks	3
Introducing Social Network Analysis	4
Evaluating Leadership Networks	8
Peer Leadership Networks	10
Organizational Leadership Networks	14
Field-Policy Leadership Networks	19
Collective Leadership Networks	24
Issues and Risks of SNA	28
Future research	33
Conclusion	36
Bibliography	37

Full Paper here.

It has been great to work with Claire on this paper, and we are grateful to the folks at Leadership Quarterly for providing us with helpful editorial suggestions and generous permission to post this version of the paper.

Stay tuned for posts about specific excerpts & themes of the paper...

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2009 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.

Evil-Doers at Sunbelt in San Diego 10 Mar 2009, 12:43 pm

Tomorrow I fly to San Diego to attend Sunbelt, the annual SNA extravaganza.

The keynote address, by Phillip Bonacich, is "Using Social Networks for Evil":

"Many uses of the network approach in sociology involve pro-social behavior.... Yet, individuals use the networks they are involved in for their own selfish and malign purposes....

"As those who have studied social dilemmas have demonstrated, anti-social behavior can be fun and profitable.

"What I wish to explore in this talk is one form of anti-social behavior, one that I have been thinking about recently - the exploitation of the weak and dependent in networks of social exchange and violations of the norm of reciprocity."

I am looking forward to hearing more about that! And perhaps I will meet some of you (readers) in San Diego this week.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2009 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.

Role ecologies in online networks: Gleave, Welser, Lento, Smith 20 Feb 2009, 10:19 am

Marc Smith, who until recently was chief sociologist in residence at Microsoft, writes a notable blog at http://www.connectedaction.net. A couple weeks ago Marc posted this award-winning paper, co-authored by Eric Gleave, Howard "Ted" Welser, and Tom Lento: “A conceptual and operational definition of 'Social Role' in Online Community”. It's a great piece of work.

One of the stated goals of the paper is to encourage future research into "the analysis of communities as role ecologies."

As my contribution to that goal, I'd like to point out another notable paper: “Network Role Analysis in the Study of Food Webs: An Application of Regular Role Coloration” published by Johnson, Borgatti, Luczkovich and Everett in 2003.

Johnson et al also state their goal clearly: "With this paper we hope to begin a dialogue between the fields [of ecosystem ecology and social network analysis], by applying advanced social role theory and methods to the study of food webs. "

I am a bit puzzled that those who would encourage future research into the analysis of communities as role ecologies do not cite the work that actual ecologists are doing in network role analysis. Perhaps if I knew more sociology or more ecology I would appreciate the reasons for this.

However it works out, it would be fitting if two different camps researching "role ecologies" were to find themselves at a loss to cross-fertilize. For as we celebrate the extended 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, author of "On the Origin of Species," let us note that one of the most practical definitions of a species is this: a population of organisms that can create offspring with their cohorts but not with anyone else. In other words, once a species comes to exist, never again will it cross-fertilize with other species. The result is Darwin's famous "Tree of Life," the one and only figure in his most famous book:
As I learned while reading Darwin's 200th essays in the NY Times last week, the one-way branching of this tree -- the permanent disabling of cross-fertilizing -- seems to be closely related to the same genetic mechanisms that protect a species from disease. (Intrepid cross-fertilizers should compare this to Ron Burt's notes on network closure.)

A "tree" is also a very specific kind of network, described very nicely in a recent paper by Skye Bender-deMoll on SNA & human rights. For those still celebrating Darwin's birthday, Bender-deMoll's definition is deliciously ironic: "Trees are hierarchies.... Pure trees are not found very often in naturally-occurring networks, but they are frequently used in classification systems or any situation where a strict hierarchy is imposed." Purposeful classification & hierarchy... just the things that Darwin so controversially discarded from the ecological world-view when he theorized the purposelessness of natural selection.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2009 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.

Six ways to make Web 2.0 work: Hoppe vs McKinsey 19 Feb 2009, 11:39 am

Nat Welch brought to my attention "Six ways to make Web 2.0 work" in the McKinsey Quarterly of Feb 2009.

Here are the six ways (quoted verbatim):

1. The transformation to a bottom-up culture needs help from the top
2. The best uses come from users -- but they need help to scale
3. What's in the workflow is what gets used
4. Appeal to the particpants' egos and needs -- not just their wallets
5. The right solution comes from the right participants
6. Balance the top-down and self-management of risk

Maybe it's because I am jealous of the clout wielded by McKinsey, but I do find the above list awfully repetitive. Someone please help me understand the important distinctions between numbers 1, 2, 5, and 6. I'll give the benefit of the doubt to 3 & 4 for being not repeats of 1, 2, 5, 6.

In preparation for an upcoming Web 2.0 panel discussion hosted by the Boston Club, I made my own list--with inspiration & edits from Nat W.

Bruce's Technology Tips

Focus on your business goals and let those drive your technology strategy. For example, consider the following goals:

• Sales
• Marketing
• Recruiting
• Talent management
• Business development
• Innovation of core products & services

Each one of those goals implies a different technology strategy, so it's important to know which goals matter as a basis for evaluating which technologies are helpful.

Web 2.0 Strategy Map

Technology for business is largely about storing, finding, synthesizing, and communicating information. Think about how these different tasks relate to your specific business goals. The table below summarizes how some Web 2.0 technologies relate to finding and synthesizing information:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2009 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.

Ethics, Social Networks, and Web 2.0 11 Feb 2009, 8:39 am

Earlier this week the Human Resource Planning Society hosted a convention on Social Networks and Web 2.0. Nat Welch (CFAR) and I co-led a session on "Organizational Barriers and Web 2.0: Don't just sit there; find something." Afterward we were part of a panel discussion on ethics, social networks, and Web 2.0.

Somewhere there is a joke to be written about the time when a lawyer, a computational sociologist, and a human resource director all answer questions from St. Peter about ethics. Playing the straight man in the joke, my conversation with St. Peter will be a discussion about informed consent. Do people in my life know what they are getting into, and can they exercise choice based on that knowledge?

In many ways, the "informed" part is far slipperier than the "consensual" part of this combination (e.g., dating). And so it is with social network surveys. Years ago I read Borgatti and Molina's framework for ethics and SNA, and their paper has been a trusted compass of mine ever since. Mostly, it reminds me to respect the privacy of my clients and their employees (i.e., to offer them informed consent). Based my experiences since then, I have made the following chart that summarizes how privacy and informed consent are so problematic in a network context:

Lack of Privacy in Network Surveys
	Traditional survey	Network survey
Questions: 1st-person vs. 3rd-person	Each individual reports information about himself.	Each individual reports information about others by name.
Results: averages vs. specifics	Responses are aggregated so that individual respondents and non-respondents cannot be distinguished.	The presentation of results reveals specific responses attributed to specific individuals.
Visibility: informed consent vs. leap of faith	Survey results allow each individual to compare himself silently with the group average. Each individual can then decide what to share about himself with whom.	Survey results expose how each individual is seen by others. Each individual has no ability to preview what others have said about him before it is published.

For me the insight of the above chart is the separation of all three rows. Each of the them can be considered as an independent risk factor with its own unique set of mitigation strategies.

All the LinkedIns and Facebooks of the world are tackling these three issues head-on (and surely more that I have not thought of).

As for social network surveys, I am not aware of one that allows truly informed consent: the ability to preview what others say about you before consenting to publication of that information. Perhaps my readers can enlighten me.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2009 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.

Lincoln and Darwin on Networks and Web 2.0 5 Feb 2009, 9:35 am

"Online social tools are great weapons for world peace and unity."

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2009 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.

In praise of editing 21 Jan 2009, 9:37 am

Thank you to everyone who commented on the Working Wikily thread. Comments on this blog are rare (which is probably to be expected) and 99% of them are complaints about kitchen appliances (which is agonizingly hilarious), and so it is a wonderful surprise to receive comments about a topic of ongoing interest to me.

A blizzard of holiday celebrations have passed since then, so to recap: In my Working Wikily series of posts, I spoke to the healthy priorities of those who do not write and publish on wikis and merely use information shared by others. This seemed to provoke violent agreement.

During the holiday season, I thought a great deal about those who do write and publish. The contemplation was entirely self-serving: Claire Reinelt and I spent those months slavishly editing our paper, "SNA and Evaluation of Leadership Networks."

We are optimistic that the result will be accepted for publication in Leadership Quarterly (LQ), and hopeful that LQ will allow us to share the manuscript before its estimated publishing date in 2010. You'll see it here first, if/when LQ does allow us to share it.

Most germane to this post, Claire and I are incredibly grateful to the anonymous reviewers of LQ. Their extremely pointed criticisms and their constructive suggestions for improvements enabled Claire and me to improve our originally submitted draft into something exponentially better. The extra time also gave Claire a chance to convince me to read Skye Bender-deMoll's overview of SNA. Again, I am grateful.

In my networked world, I very rarely encounter editorial demands as stringent as those imposed by an old-school academic peer-reviewed printed-on-paper journal. What an invaluable experience this has been.

More often in a networked world, editorial demands are sub-consciously self-imposed. Every day, it gets easier to avoid those with a different point of view and simply google our way to information that confirms what we already believed. That, at least, is what is suggested by this recent press release from the NSF, which I originally commented about here. Of course, the NSF only suggests that this phenomenon applies to the behavior scientists. Perhaps we non-scientists are more dedicated to the tireless pursuit of truth.

Certainly I credit Skye Bender-deMoll for scientific pursuit of truth. In this May 2008 paper, Skye presents the network Tree of Knowledge; then presents the Babel-izing confounding of terminology and lack of synthesis that characterize the field; and then suggests some editorial advice that is worth taking. For example:

"Although many people are advocating that network techniques will help a great deal with evaluation tasks, there have not been any large scale systematic studies comparing the various pilot projects. Most projects have been fairly small, both in sizes of networks and numbers of participants.

"The majority of projects appear to be doing more diagnosis than assessment. This may be partially because in most cases there is no “known standard” for comparing assessments. Also, researchers tend to be cautious because the data collection is not rigorous or comprehensive enough to be safely used for evaluation at this time.

"Although a few of the academic studies show high methodological maturity, much of the work still seems quite exploratory. In several papers the insight appears to come more from the in-depth interviews and data collection process, with the network analysis component serving as a parallel approach."

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2009 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.

Wikis, surveys, and webwhompers 11 Dec 2008, 4:58 pm

Continuing on the thread of when have I seen wikis work the best... In my last post I answered that I have seen wikis work quite well when they are tightly controlled. I described the LeaderNetwork wiki, which only allows editing by Claire Reinelt and me.

Another good way of controlling a wiki is not by limiting the number of editors (as in the previous example) but by limiting the contributions asked of each editor.

Used in this way, a wiki is quite similar to an online survey. The wiki begins with a clear list of questions and a well-defined framework to hold each response contributed by each wiki editor --- just like SurveyMonkey. However, a wiki-survey has two important differences:

1. Transparent sharing of all wiki-survey responses is a given. There is no waiting for the survey administrator to publish anything, no option for the survey administrator to hold anything back.
   
2. The questions themselves can be added to and/or edited on the fly by wiki-survey respondents. This frees the survey administrator from having to ask just the right questions; if someone does not see the question they wanted to answer, they can add that question in a place where everyone can respond to it.

One of my favorite wiki-surveys is this one, which I have used to run a contest that recognizes the most popular student project of the semester. It is a simple and effective wiki-survey that leverages option #1 heavily and ignores option #2. I have previously posted two case studies about its use on these pages: "Pros and cons of male enhancement" and "Delete all your links, except to me." I have modified it for use in many client engagements as well, fully leveraging both options #1 and #2.

This fall I significantly upgraded my pseudo-survey technology by abandoning the wiki platform altogether. You can see my post-wiki pseudo-survey at http://webwhompers.net, where the blood from my students' recently fought competition is still fresh.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2008 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.

Wiki Whomping 4 Dec 2008, 4:54 pm

"When have I seen wikis work the best?" Thanks to Noah Flower for posting his thoughtful response to my last post (about working wikily), and closing with that question.

By way of answering, I'd like to quote from the pre-eminent prophet of working wikily, Clay Shirky. In his award-winning essay "A group is its own worst enemy," Shirky states, "Prior to the Internet, the last technology that had any real effect on the way people sat down and talked together was the table."

You can click here to read my original argument that Shirky is crazy if he really believes that. Today, instead of arguing against Shirky, I'd like to use his quote to put Noah's question in clearer context:

"When have you seen tables work the best?"

If you find that question confusing, good. Tables are such a fantastic technology for collaboration, and so flexible in the ways we can use them, that asking for "best example of using a table" is more of a Rorschach test than a question. More specifically, it's a great question for a furniture salesman to ask, as the person answering will suddenly feel an urge to find some connection between tables and whatever "works the best."

Answering Noah more earnestly (sort of), I have seen wikis work very well when they are tightly controlled. For example, Claire Reinelt and I use a wiki to publish our favorite reading list about SNA and leadership networks for social change. Our reading list is a joint effort that neither of us could have assembled alone. The most important feature of the site, however, is that no one can edit the wiki but me and Claire.

I'll close today's post with this passage from Wikipedia. It's from an article on participation inequality, but it also works well as a manifesto for Wikipedia's own governance, which is much more tightly controlled than it used to be:

"A major reason why user-contributed content rarely turns into a true community is that ... a few users contribute the overwhelming majority of the content, while most users either post very rarely or not at all. Unfortunately, those people who have nothing better to do than post on the Internet all day long are rarely the ones who have the most insights. In other words, it is inherent in the nature of the Internet that any unedited stream of user-contributed content will be dominated by uninteresting material."

Next time we'll answer the question, "When have I seen social bookmarking work the best?"

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2008 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.

Working Wikily 2 Dec 2008, 3:42 pm

Last month the Monitor Institute launched a blog http://workingwikily.net about how the social sector is adopting the new tools, strategies, and practices of networking.

They explain here that "Working Wikily" was coined "to describe the new ways that people are applying network theory and networked technology to do the work they’ve always done in a more collaborative form and also to begin working in new ways altogether."

As my contribution to "Working Wikily," I'd like to offer a reality check on what happens when people use a wiki. Before I continue, however, let me make clear that (1) collaboration is great, (2) wikis are great, and (3) the reality check I am about to deliver is aimed at people who associate "collaboration" with "wiki" and thereby set themselves up for disappointment when they learn this the hard way:

Jakob Nielsen summarizes Web collaboration in general with the 90-9-1 rule as pictured below.
90% do nothing, 9% do a little, and 1% do practically everything.

Blogs are even more skewed than average Web sites, with 95% doing nothing, 4.9% doing a little, and 0.1% doing practically everything.

Wikis are the most skewed of all.

Most community facilitators I know who have set up wikis lament that they can't get anyone else to edit it without resorting to bribery. That is 100% doing nothing while one outsider does everything.

With a hugely successful wiki like Wikipedia, the ratio is slightly better, 99.8% percent do nothing, 0.197% do very little, and 0.003% do practically everything.

The above dose of reality is called "participation inequality" by Nielsen. Let me reiterate that I do not see this inequality as a problem, even though Nielsen presents it that way (as would, I suspect, many who set out to "work wikily" and end up proving Nielsen's point).

Thank you to Laurie Damianos for alerting me to these statistics during her presentation on MITRE's use of social bookmarking on their corporate intranet. Her experience at MITRE was consistent with the general trends claimed by Nielsen. Unlike many others in her position, though, she did not get discouraged by low participation, nor did she try to change it. Instead, she did a great job explaining to the powers-that-be that MITRE's social bookmarking system was working great, even with most people contributing nothing.

So let's raise a toast to the 99.8% who have perfected the most popular way of "working wikily" -- those who do nothing and, when they feel like it, coast off the hard work of the 0.003% who give it all away.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2008 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.

Geographic networks 21 Nov 2008, 11:05 am

Geography (or spatial arrangement) of nodes is often an important factor in network dynamics. Though it is straightforward to map geographical information by itself, mapping that information simultaneously with network data is quite a challenge.

In collaboration with Holly Massett and her team at the National Cancer Institute, I have been tackling the geographic + network mapping problem head on. Holly and I recently presented some of our results, and she graciously gave me permission to share them.

What happens when we draw a network map with geographically located nodes? We get a map with lines on it:
The geography is plainly apparent, but the network structure is all but invisible. That's a shame, because the network structure hidden above is actually quite striking when you redraw the above network using traditional network layout techniques:
Now we can clearly see that there is one node that bridges between two distinct clusters.

As a simple first step toward integrating these two important views of the above collaboration network, I created this slide show, which morphs back and forth between pure geography and pure network information, showing the interaction of the two along the way (RSS readers must view my actual blog to see this):


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2008 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.