People (boxes) who tweet and core words (bubbles) they use

The fact that today’s social movements, from Occupy Wall Street to the Arab Spring, rely so heavily on twitter and similar communication tools, pose an amazing chance for researchers and other curious people who want to understand who moves these movements. The other day I discussed with a friend what kind of networks you want to look at to better understand this and I’d propose three different kinds: People networks, semantic networks and two-mode people/semantic networks.

People networks are the easy intuitive ones: Who follows whom? Who re-tweets whom? Looking at this will help you understand who the leaders, boundary spanners, broad-casters are.  Most likely, for an issue that manages the step from tweet to action successfully, you will look at a core-periphery structure, with a small inter-connected core (who might also communicate regularly outside of twitter) and a large periphery of followers, who are less inter-connected but look at the core for calls to action and thought leadership. Over time, different clusters might pop up as their own sub-cores or even take over from those initially starting the debate.

Semantic networks look at which words appear together in the same document (a document could be a single tweet, a string, all tweets from one person, whichever works). This can tell you something about the discourse around your issue: Is it just one large well connected issue or are there different schools of thought (more moderate and more radical for example or more philosophical versus more pragmatic and logistics oriented)? You might see that things evolve over time, for example it might be that the movement starts out united behind one cause (“Let’s overthrow the government!”) and after that is achieved, the debate disintegrates in many different camps (moderate and radical islamists, market oriented democrats, socialists etc.).

And to really understand how this development of the debate and the connections between the tweeters hang together, you want to look at two-mode networks. But I have to warn you, they are the least intuitive. In a two mode-network you look at two different categories of things, for example people and words and how they connect to each other. So, there are no direct links within one category (no people-to-people links or word-to-word links). This picture shows you: Who uses which words? Who is connected by being part of the same discourse (even if they have no direct link to each other)?

By looking at all three of these together, you can see who the leaders are, what their role (content) in the movement is and how that develops over time. And if you can compare either different incidents or different points in time, you will learn something about the network structures that are best suited to lead from tweet to action.

Beyond the org. chart: Conflict and personal friendships influencing innovation

“It’s time to re-invent management. You can help!”

That’s how the Management Innovation Challenge is introduced on their website, and I though: “Well, if you think so, I’ll help…” So together with my colleague Michael Lennon I contributed a Hack that describes how you can use Net-Map as an easy and approachable tool to discover hidden influencers.  How do you teach people on all levels of an organization how to effectively navigate the “people aspect” of achieving your goals?

If you are a regular reader (or even fan???) of this blog, you know what I’m talking about. If not, it’s a rather brief read. But whether new to Net-Map or experienced Net-Mapper yourself, head over to

http://www.managementexchange.com/hack-129

Look at what we have to say and give us some love by rating our hack and commenting on it.

Oh, and beyond this shameless self-promotion I’d also recommend you go there and read what everybody has to say. Some amazing contributions, all bundled under such inspiring moon shots as:

• Humanize the language of business
• Capture the advantage of diversity
• Make direction setting bottom-up and outside-in
• Build natural, flexible hierarchies.

I’m not writing about this, because there is a right and a wrong approach to mapping out information networks. I think it is important to know about the (potential) connections as well as the flow. And depending on your underlying question and motivations, one might be more crucial than the other. But what is important is to be aware of what you are mapping, just like my friend was, otherwise it is so easy to misinterpret the answers and make up very bleak or overly optimistic stories about the connections that people  have access to or actually use.

The key to the alignment strategy being used in this project is to start at District rather than National level, to create a model of coordination that can be used to advocate for scaling up to other areas or even other countries. Ministry staffing is minimal at District level, so I aimed to interview everybody employed in each District Ministry, from the Directors down to technical officers (around 5 people per ministry), and to snowball out from there to anyone else who came up in the interviews as crucial to the process.

This being the first time I had used NetMap, I was unsure how it would be received- how would people react to being asked to give up an hour or more of their day to draw pictures with an outsider? In anticipation of rejection, I made sure the process looked as professional as possible- putting together a regulation NetMap kit, sending formal letters of invitation to interviews, hiring a highly professional local assistant, and dressing as smartly as I possibly could in sweltering pre-rains temperatures. But the method held true, and just following the steps from actors to links to influence engaged everyone from the moment we started- as I had been promised it would!

Being on a smaller scale than much national-level research I have seen that uses social network analysis, I had wondered if I could use NetMap at the individual level; that is, could I map not only the formal interactions but also the informal interactions between individual players within each Ministry, since it is very likely that personal relationships shape collaboration, particularly in such a small population as in the district capital (a small, one-road town). One of my pre-defined links therefore was informal interactions, and my questions attempted to probe whether person X might have family ties to person Y, or whether person A drinks in the evenings with person B. But it turned out in pre-test that even small-town rural Zambia had too many players in this field for everyone to know everyone; people knew which organizations were doing what with nutrition, but not who was doing it, and the method defaulted pretty quickly back to looking at organizations rather than individuals. Still a very interesting picture, but I wonder if there might be something in this for my future research…

So, now I have a collection of beautifully colorful maps to process and a good idea of local views on the alignment of sectors for nutrition in rural Zambia, so watch this space…

Doodledidoo... (copyright by lourdieee on flickr)

Are you like me, when you try to explain something complicated (or exciting) to others, you quickly grab pen and paper and draw some weird picture or graph that makes absolute sense to you, helps you structure your thoughts and maybe (or not) helps the other person understand what you are trying to say?

The other day I realized that Net-Map is often just that, but taken to a higher level of general understanding and inviting others to co-doodle with you. By providing some basic steps to the doodling: first actors, then links, then motivations, then influence, Net-Map helps keeping the complex story on track and allows everyone to chip in and add their contribution.

As a facilitator some of my favorite Net-Map experiences (both with groups and individuals) were when the people I worked with just told their story like they would to a friend and I visualized this flow by writing the names they mentioned in the unfolding narrative on actor cards, sketching out the relations as they told me what happened. I think this is one of the reasons I enjoy Net-Mapping so much, because it can feel like you are just two people having a conversation – and not like being an interviewer who interviews someone or a person with a method which dominates the interaction (e.g. a closed ended questionnaire, where, every time the interview partner wants to tell you their view or experience, you have to say: “please just rate it on a scale from 1-5″. Or “possible answers are yes, no, don’t know”).

I guess that has something to do with respect: If I ask you to take some time out of your busy day to answer my questions, I want to show you I am really interested in your (own) answers and want to learn something I didn’t know before. I know that for a lot of quantitative analysis you need standardized questions and answers and it is great to be able to say something statistically significant about things… but I personally just prefer a situation where I can really connect with the other person and listen to what they have to say.

Listen to her introduction of Shadow Elites at the Freie Universitaet Berlin, Germany:

Do you feel competent when you stand on your head and play the guitar? Add it to your list (copyright by ibm4381 on flickr)

I love making lists. Especially when I am sitting somewhere waiting, e.g. on the Metro. It might be alphabetical lists of just about anything to entertain myself and occupy my brain (e.g. “things that stink” or “things that make me happy” from A to Z) or to-do-lists to organize my next steps. Yesterday I experienced the power of making a list of: “When do I feel competent / What makes me feel competent?” Try it out. And feel free to add whatever small or big thing it is, not just professional skills. I feel very competent when baking and cooking with my toddler daughter. It makes me feel competent both as a mother and as a cook/baker. And that has just as much value and beauty as feeling competent when a stranger from the other side of the world sends me a tricky question about how to best implement Net-Map to understand human rights abuses. Or when a friend asks about advice on how to deal with an unclear situation at her workplace or how to find out what she really wants to do and be in this world.

I guess to answer this last question: “What do I want to do, who do I want to be?” I would recommend that she makes a list of the situations in which she really feels competent and takes it from there. Not: What kinds of certificates do you have, what does the outside world tell you? But what are the kinds of situations in which you feel strong and confident and useful and very much like you are living up to your potential? Have a look at your list and see if you can find common threads. Analyze it with a rational, structured focus, looking for categories etc. But also see what it makes you feel like. Enjoy and connect to the good feeling that you have when you read this beautiful list of everything you are good at and enjoy doing. Put it away for now and have another look at it next Sunday. See if this ever growing and changing list can guide you towards spending more time doing things you feel competent and content with and less that the make you feel like you are just not the right fit.

I’m interested in understanding the complex relational dynamics occuring in a bilateral cooperation project in which I was directly involved with a managing role.
While running a net-map interview with one very experienced, highly placed French project manager, who lived and worked in international development in Burundi for 28 years and is married to a Burundian, I was struck by one of his comments. I asked: “What is the most important gain this Burundian ministry officer wants to get out this project?” He answered: “He wants to become richer in obligations.” At first I didn’t really get what he was meaning and I was clearly puzzled, so he continued: “You see, the real currency here is not the Burundian Franc, it’s finer than that. Sure, money is important to them, but what really counts is the favours someone can do and consequently the credits that these constitute for the future. That is to be powerful: to know that you have plenty of people that owe you something and that you can draw on that “bank” when you need.” No big news – you may say – this is true everywhere, not just in Burundi! Yes indeed, I may agree, and yet it was an eye opener for me, something I hadn’t really understood that clearly in my 5 years living here. In fact I hadn’t realised the adaptive potential of such strategy that, in my view, is much more than solidarity. Obligations do not expire and in a world where everything is still quite uncertain and precarious, and even more so after 15 years long ethnic war has quaked all landmarks, where the right of law is not assured and a minister today can become a taxi driver tomorrow, you may well prefer to invest time and effort in strenghtening your social relationships, so that they can be loaded with obligations, like savoury Parma hams hanging in an Italian Delicatessen, seasoning for the right moment to pick them down. This is their priority – increasing resilience through social bonds – rather than implementing project activities timely, according to the blueprint, as we expats expect. Call me naïve, I hadn’t gotten it, and I suspect many other development agents haven’t either, as the mainstream tendency is to focus on the content of what is done or has to be done and to neglect the importance of the impalbable web of social networks (which has little to do with the social networks on the web .

The body is more than a pile of sticks - group brain is more than a pile of brains (picture copyright by perpetualplum on flickr)

I love reading books by great thinkers, who (that’s how I imagine it) sit in their cabin in the forest, have amazing ideas that they slowly work through (or that hit them like lightening) and that they put on paper in solitary contemplation. And while most of us might not be at that level of genius, there is something to be said for solitary, in-depth thinking within the confines of your own brain. No matter how difficult that is getting with the increasing disturbance through social media (and social friends…).

Now crowd sourcing seems to be at the other end of the spectrum, solving problems by tapping into the minds of millions, letting everyone who wants contribute and improve the outcome. That makes it possible to integrate more diverging views, knowledge from more different domains and something we vaguely call collective wisdom.

But then, a lot of crowd sourcing is actually facilitated by mechanisms that help us pile our individual thoughts on top of each other, compiling contributions of single minds in front of computers (or cell phones or whatever). That is great for developing and maintaining something like Wikipedia, where we need a compilation of the true and tested knowledge of all known phenomena of the world, based on some kind of majority agreement.

But I wonder: Is it also the best approach to solving messy unclear problems, finding amazing innovations and unusual leaps forward? Or: How can you help a group of people not just pile their thoughts on top of each other but actually multiply what one person can come up with by helping them truely think together and (at least for a few hours) tap into their combined group brain?

I have found that a lot of group facilitation techniques are exactly about this, getting groups to the point where their sum is more than just a collection of the individual parts. And if you have ever suffered through a boring meeting of intelligent people, you know that just putting all the experts in a room and hoping they will come up with something amazing, will not lead you far. So what are the things that help you tap into the group brain?

1. Combine structure and freedom. In Net-Map we have a very simple structure of 4 steps (write actors on cards, draw links, write goals next to actors, set up influence towers) that moves the discussion forward and helps participants focus on the issues of interest. But beyond these steps there are very few limitations with regards to what people can discuss and it is this discussion around the map drawing in which the most interesting discoveries are made.

2. Don’t stay on the surface – explore your assumptions. The most frustrating group discussions are those where every participant assumes that the others share their assumptions while that is not the case. Talking about influence for example, let’s say I assume influence comes from being rich and you assume influence comes from having the best ideas. If we try to develop a strategy for becoming more influential together without ever looking at these assumptions, I will find your approaches unbearably naive and you will find me terribly cynical and all we get out of this is increased frustration and disrespect for each other. When we set up influence towers while doing a Net-Map, group members often have the most heated debate around the question of “What makes someone influential”. But these debates are heated in a good way, they are engaged because they point to the heart of the matter. And as participants unearth their assumptions, they show “where they are coming from” and start connecting to each others way of thinking in a more constructive way.

3. The fact that I am right doesn’t mean that you are wrong. Now this is the most difficult and the most rewarding challenge of developing a group brain. It means achieving true inspiration by breaking down the boundaries between my way and your way of thinking. We are trained in the kind of debate where we want to win, where, while I listen to you I make a list of counter arguments in my head to see how I can beat you. Try holding this thought in your brain instead: “We can disagree and both be right.” Feels a bit painful? Especially if this is about an issue you deeply care about… Sure, because what you feel is the crumbling of walls between you and the person you disagree with, and walls give you such a great sense of security.You know who you are and what you stand for. But they are also really in the way if you want to see what the world looks like.

In the groups I work with people tend to have very strong assumptions about what makes someone influential over a certain issue. Alone each of them will focus on one strategy and gather more money, learning, connections, black-mail material or whatever they think makes them influential. And they will tend to form coalitions with people who follow the same strategies, built on the same assumptions because this is just so comfortable (Isn’t it funny how we think a person is so clever when what we actually observe is just that they share our assumptions about the world?). If a group can learn to entertain the thought that I can be right and you can be right even though we disagree, they can start seeing that different people in their system gained their power through different means. And that an influencer coalition that combines these different influence sources can be so much more powerful than one that only includes one and fights with everyone else. Sure, you have to see where your boundaries are and maybe you don’t want to start collecting black-mail material… not because it doesn’t make you influential but because you don’t agree with it on ethical grounds.

4. Don’t force agreement, encourage respectful exploration. In the end, a group of diverse inspired thinkers will not (and should not) agree on everything. If you want to use the group brain to the fullest, don’t restrict it by the pre-condition that afterward everyone has to hold hands around the camp-fire and sing Kumbaja, don’t force people to end up with one common story if that is not where they are. Your goal (as a facilitator or participant) is rather to be connected with respect, trust and insight while staying diverse. You want the individuals to continue doing in their own brains what is best done in solitary thinking while trusting that they can share even their craziest ideas with the group and they will together cook a great meal out of this. Some things sweet, others bitter. Some pure, others mixed and spicy.

O.k., this is it for today. A friend of mine once said that reading my posts is like hearing me think, and this post is truely one of those, my attempt of making sense of what I see by writing it down and sharing it with you. It would be great to hear what you think, does this relate to your experience? Are there other things that are crucial when trying to activate the group brain? What are the things you should by all means avoid?

Sometimes a one-man-show is all you want (copyright by Eu-Motion on flickr) - just don't call it participatory

Sounds counter-intuitive, right? Well, that might be because the word “participants” has been overstretched and overused to mean everyone who sits in a room where something is happening. So if you do a participatory activity (e.g. draw a Net-Map with a group) and there are 30 people in the room, they are all participants, right?

Well, not really. In my experience, if you try to squeeze 30 people around one table you end up with at least two rows of chairs and with a few very active participants in the front row and a large audience of people who just watch and listen to what is happening.

My numbers are based on experience and it can vary according to activity, culture (national and group culture) and facilitator skills, but as a general rule of tumb I would say: If 4-8 people sit around the table, an organic discussion can develop in which people choose their level of involvement according to what they have to say and with just a little guidance of the facilitator to encourage quiet ones and dampen the domineering ones. Let 9-12 people draw a Net-Map together and you will have to facilitate more assertively and be one of these people who can listen to two different things with your two ears, see two different things with your two eyes to make sure that everyone and every view has the chance to be heard. Above that number, you are likely to loose the ability to see and feel the whole group all the time, there will be more and more side conversations or just a quiet group of people who feel disempowered to speak because they don’t feel they have enough status, knowledge or their opinion doesn’t reflect the perceived mainstream of the group.

And the interesting thing is: The bigger the group, the smaller the number of active participants becomes. Not just in relative but in absolute terms. So, in a group of 7 you might have 7 active contributors. In a group of 20, most likely there will be 1-3 really active contributors and then some who say something every once in a while but most will not say a thing (unless they wisper it in their neighbors ear). One of the reasons is that saying something in a small group feels like engaging with your peers. Saying something in a large group feels like being on stage.

So, if you are looking for active participants and not just a quiet audience to a 2-man-Net-Map show, invite less people. And make sure they represent all the different views you want to learn about. Or invite more people but split them up into smaller groups.