Social Network Stimulation

Successful people in organisations are always well connected; they are within a few phone calls of everyone else in the organisation. When a person joins a large organization, how long does it take until he or she is within a few phone calls of everyone else in the organization? Years? What if you could condense that time into a few months? How would that impact the organisation’s ability to respond to change?

Social Network Stimulation (SNS) aims to intervene in an organisation in such a way as to reduce years of casual acquaintance into months or weeks. The type of problems addressed by SNS include the perennial issues of cross-silo collaboration within and across the boundaries or organisations; the production of locally situated solutions that can utilize local cultures and capabilities, rather than attempting to impose a homogeneous solution developed in one culture and learning environment; and to provide an alternative mechanism for the distribution of constrained resources.

SNS is a technique that replicates the process by which informal trusted communities form, to reduce the overall degrees of separation within the organisation considered as a function of trust tagging. Trust tagging is a natural human phenomenon that is critical to knowledge transfer and the validation of authority as well as general problem solving.

Description

Over time, and with varying speed, most people build social networks. Through working with people in various projects, participating in social activities, and migrating from one job to the next, people accumulate a collection of residual relations. Eventually these relations coalesce into informal networks over which serendipitous social paths can be traced. We experience these paths in our lives every day, like when we need a good real estate agent and our neighbour knows the cousin of one.

Serendipitous social paths develop naturally within any group of people, given enough time. They cannot be created by mandate, but the conditions under which they arise can be encouraged. Globalisation and increased turnover have reduced some of the conditions that created serendipitous social paths in the past, and the rate of integration has correspondingly declined. This can be a vicious cycle, because the less people feel connected to an organisation, the more likely they are to move on to the next thing. It can also be a virtuous cycle – but getting there in practice has proved difficult for many organisations. Formal communities of practice, organisational memory databases, and other methods have suffered from a lack of interest in participation.

The purpose of SNS can thus be summarised as, the stimulation of the organisation to reveal current and possible future patterns of trusted relationships that will aid organisational planning and intervention design by management.

The context

Important questions are answered with respect to the existing state of informal communications within the community (or within and between merging communities). For example, geographic and divisional demographics, turnover rates, existing formal communities, regular meetings, and other “state of affairs” information help provide a starting point. Narrative methods, Social Network Analysis, observation, and interviewing are used as appropriate to determine demographic and cultural parameters. It is not necessary or even possible to assess the state of affairs in great detail, because the very observation will affect the state of affairs. However, it is necessary to gather a broad awareness of the organisation so that a diverse response can emerge.

One of the ways that a learning community forms, where the participants are not trust tagged or previously known to each other, is that a disparate group of individuals come together and through some common activity form a trusted bond that persists beyond the activity itself. For example, a group of management trainees joining a company fresh from different universities create the potential for such a new community, and such communities will frequently form. The fact that this particular group has been selected by management does not mean that they will form a sustainable bond over time, and in practice there may be major differences. However, the probability is that different sub-groups will form which will persist over the following decades, sometimes with overlaps of membership (boundary spanners in the language of [Social Network Analysis]. Some project teams create an identity which persists beyond the end of the project, but not all project teams even when formed under similar circumstances persist.

The Elements of SNS

SNS design is predicated on the understanding that there is a need for some form of problem-solving environment or common threat/opportunity, together with the introduction of novel new contacts to allow new identities to form. Based on the current state of affairs, one or more "noble purposes" are identified. These are purposes that everyone agrees are worth doing but that no one can find time for or resource to resolve.

The number of purposes, their scope, and how they are derived, can vary. It is best to derive them using narrative methods, but they can also be set by executive management. They must be purposes around which people have untapped creative energy. The noble purposes actually matter less than the connectivity achieved in pursuing them, but progress on them is a beneficial side effect. Group membership is volunteer only – no official time set aside – but is rewarded in a meaningful way.

However, natural processes take time and the intrinsic rewards of social interaction that act as their own reward take time to build in other than crisis situations. As a result, in SNS design, we build in more explicit rules that force diversity into team formation plus a third element - the use of explicit reward structures together with a process to engender engagement.

The three elements are then:

1. An intractable problem(s). Intractable problems are suitable for informal networks; they are generally those which cannot be solved by normal techniques and may be difficult to understand or define. They are also attractive for experimental projects, as the past failure creates a greater willingness for risk-taking. It is also important to create a measure of successful resolution of the problem that is objective in nature, and which cannot be perceived to be subject to internal patronage.

2. A reward normally achievable through patronage . These are many and various. They can (and have) included promotion, access to senior management development programmes, sabbaticals or even tickets for a football match. Such rewards are often not available to mavericks in organisations, whose "troublesome" nature exclude them from the normal power relationships, but more often making them suitable for innovative ideas and solutions. The reward needs to be broad enough in scope to be allocated to a team.

Rewards should be surprising, high-visibility and full of meaning for the particular population. For example, if travel is ordinarily a problem, the whole group can meet in a tropical location for a week to pursue the noble purpose. Or if travel is unimportant but the promotion structure is important, the group who wins a competition receives promotions all around. Or if time is limited, the whole group gets one Friday a month to devote to nothing but the noble purpose. The idea is to find a trigger that releases creative energy.

3. A set of boundary conditions or rules within which a team is permitted to form. Besides providing a reward mechanism for existing groups, the purpose of rules is to create new identities. Rules will need to be explicit and based on readily available data which can be rendered into search mechanisms so that people can construct teams. For example, for the technique used to merge silos post-merger, then a rule might be that one-third of the team has to come from the organisation A and two-thirds of the team from organisation B. The asymmetry is to avoid conflict, as 50-50 rules tend to engender dominance games in the context of a merger. Another rule might require one member of the team to have an arts degree, or less than three months' service. As an overall constraint, a team could be limited to 15 members or less.

Sequence of A SNS Programme

The basic theme of SNS is then to link the patronage reward to the ability of a team to form and resolve the intractable problem. The sequence of a SNS programme is as follows:

1. Identify an intractable problem or problems and a patronage reward or rewards. This can range from a simple one-to-one coupling to complex menus of options in which people choose rewards and/or problems, possibly balancing the ease of resolution with desirability of reward.

2. Modeling the impact of different rules. Gather all possible demographic and related "factual" data and model the impact of different rules on team formation in terms of the speed in which a dense network could form. This modeling can be done by discussion and a back-of-the-envelope calculation but is best achieved through agent-based modeling software which can provide a staged delivery in its own right, demonstrating the sensitivity of the network to different starting conditions.

3. Initiate the programme and facilitate team formation. If the rules have been designed correctly, it will be difficult for people to create a team from their existing social networks, although a core group of two to three may be able to form. To gather the rest of the team will require assistance: methods that can work include the use of dating agency software (matching rules is rather like filling in a form to say what sort of characteristics you have and are looking for in a partner), speed dating and virtual or physical hiring fairs in which people can encounter others and form teams based on who they choose to work with.

4. Programme is run. The programme runs for a designated period as intractable problems are solved and rewards are allocated. This can be continuous, or event-based and/or first-come-first-served based or various permutations thereof. What is vital is that there is no element of judgement involved in the determination of success - if it's achieved you get the reward.

Key Roles and Responsibilities

Facilitators

The Facilitator will act both as a catalyst and as a guide during the workshop. The Facilitator must have some experience with complexity facilitation of small groups and Cognitive Edge methods. The facilitation is generally done in a way to be as unobtrusive as possible whilst observing the following “golden rules”:

• Never as a direct question as this does not stimulate a diverse response
• Never give an example that has similarity with the workshop participants common background or shared experience as this could entrain their thinking and limit the groups self-description

Participants

The participants in the workshops will normally have some form of common or shared experience. This common or shared experience may be as intimate as working along side each other on a particular project, or may be as abstract as working in the same organisation.

All that is required from the participants is just that, to participate in the workshop. You will find in most instances it is ideal to have people of similar ‘rank’ or role or position in the workshop. If one person is present who is ‘Senior’ they can adversely impact the workshop and inhibit other participants in their willingness to share stories.

Some of the interventions ideal for SNS include:

• in KM programmes to focus on the channels through which knowledge will flow, rather than trying to manage knowledge itself
• in organisation change: fleshing out the details of change by seeing how people self organise around a general framework before designing the details (most organisation change fails not on the broad vision, but on the details)
• in innovation programmes - most organisations are aware that someone somewhere knows something, the problem is knowing who that someone is

The function of a SNS is not to determine the way that a problem is solved or to define the acceptable types of solutions; rather it is to create a framework within which a network can itself solve problems in novel and unconventional ways, tapping into the considerable knowledge residing in information networks both within and without the organisation.

Like the Grameen bank, the method sets the boundaries and attractors and allows beneficial patterns to emerge. The founder of Grameen did not tell people which lending community they should be part of; neither did he set up a cross-community working party. Instead the lending community is self-selecting; the barriers are the rules for community formation and the attractor is the loan itself and the lack of bureaucracy. SNS works in similar ways; SNS is radically different from HR or senior management creating cross-silo or functional teams.

While SNS builds on the principles of SNA, SNS is an intervention technique designed to use the power of self-forming volunteer networks to tap into informal as well as formal knowledge bases, and to create novel solutions to seemingly intractable problems.

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