Whose truth?

What do you do if you work with groups of people who tell you a completely different story about the same event? Do you choose one of them and decide that this one is telling you the truth while the rest are lying? How do you choose this one honest one? Because of his/her honest [...]

Researcher, Facilitator, Advocate?

I just talked with a colleague who wants to do some Net-Map research about water governance in a big irrigation project in Africa, where commercial interests and small farmer needs clash. She has a number of different goals with her research, ranging from “getting a PhD” through “doing high quality exciting research” to “facilitating a [...]

The trust you need for the evil deed

Isn’t “trust” a beautiful and positive attribute of the relationship between humans? We trust our friends. We argue that trust within or between organizations furthers good knowledge management and fosters innovation. Societies where people have lost trust in their neighbors (e.g. after a civil war) are defunct and dreadful places to live in. Trust is [...]

Cool NGOs fearlessly change their networking style

In the past most NGOs communicated with their members in a typical hub-and-spoke network: The NGO sits in the middle, information flows from this center to the members, money flows back from the members to the NGO. David Wilcox has written an interesting post about the ways how that is model was successful in the [...]

Best guess is a good guess

There is one thing that I often hear, when I do Net-Map interviews: People admit that they are not quite sure about the influence of actors, the networks that connect them , the how and the why. The easiest solution is to let them off the hook and say: Well, if you’re not sure, let’s [...]

What if we’re not quite sure?

Normally the aim of research is to find things out and to present results that we are sure of and clear about. What a pain that reality is often so messy and opaque and no matter how well research is done, when it comes to social phenomena, different people might see them in different ways!
So [...]

Similar people – different people

Social network analysts find this again and again:
1. Most networks have the tendency to age towards homophily. That means: The longer a network is active, the more it tends to consist of similar people.
2. Heterogeneity and boundary spanning between different kinds of networks lead to innovation.
I have been thinking about this a lot lately. Because [...]

Something more Philosophical

Another web-find that made me think beyond my everyday thoughts. How can it be that sometimes other people can explain to you how you think, even though they don’t even know you?
I have often marveled at people with very precise plans and goals and also felt a slightly uncomfortable pressure to set goals, because if [...]

The structural logic behind corruption

When discussing corruption, a lot of people from less corrupt systems talk about blatantly corrupt systems and you can hear a condescending undercurrent of: “These amoral corrupt people…” in their assessment of the situation. As if it was always the decision of this one corrupt individual to take or give bribes. And, understanding where they [...]

Scale Free Thinking

Most of what I write (here and elsewhere) is rather concrete, drawing from real world examples, own experience, pushing some hands-on ideas. That’s because most of my learning is people-to-people learning, through hearing stories, making experiences and linking unusual things to each other.
However, every once in a while  I read something that is more on [...]