What toddler tantrums tell you about work conflicts – Or: The risks and benefits of being a pattern thinker

"I'll teach you how to deal with your colleagues" (copyright by lovelornpoets on flickr)

And what is a pattern thinker anyway? Well I came up with this description when trying to understand why Net-Map is so easy and intuitive for some and difficult to learn for others. I realized that it’s not so much about whether you are more of a left brain or right brain person, whether you think in numbers or stories (quantitative vs. qualitative), but it’s about being able to see patterns.

A friend recently told me about her problems at work. I saw a pattern that my toddler daughter often shows as well (throwing a tantrum because she feels not in control, because I don’t give her a way to contribute) and we developed solutions for the work conflict by thinking about what works with my daughter (e.g. giving people tasks they can handle, allow them to contribute, even if you suspect you could do this faster/better on your own). So, pattern thinkers strip away most of the details (in this case: the age of all involved, their individual personalities, the content of the conflict etc.) to hone in on a structural similarity, asking: Where are these two very different scenarios similar and can I learn from one for the other? I have read research that claims that most of what we call intuition is actually just a way of recording, storing and activating patterns from experience – and the brain does this faster than you can watch, you just know: “This is (not) gonna work!” without quite knowing where this knowledge comes from. That’s why most people get more intuitive as they grow older and store more experience.

I come from a family of pattern thinkers, my father being the mathematical thinker, seeing patterns in numbers, letters… and politics for that matter. My mom is more of the story pattern thinker: Tell her any human interest story and she will predict (with 90% accuracy) how it will end. Annoying and scary for a teenager growing up – impressive now. And remembering how I saw their ways of thinking when I was a teenager made me understand a major risk of being a strong pattern thinker: Once you see that you are right so many times in your prediction, you stop allowing for the 10% of times that things don’t follow the pattern, you stop believing that things and people can change, your view of the world becomes static because you expect the future to follow the same rules that you have seen in the past. Seeing patterns reduces risk (because you know what kind of situations to avoid) but also might keep you from taking those healthy risks that can change the world, change the rules. This might be why a lot of innovation and revolutions are started by rather young people, who have not lived long enough to collect so much evidence that change won’t work anyway…

So, the question is: How can you hone and use your ability to see patterns without discounting for the 10%? Or, to move this from the (made up) quantitative to the more qualitative description of the same question: How can you become a skeptical optimist instead of becoming a cynic?

And: Yes, I do see the irony of describing the risks and benefits of pattern thinking from a pattern thinking perspective…

Don’t Net-Map this!!!

If you know me, you know that I will soon start Net-Mapping what’s for dinner or whom to invite to my daughter’s third birthday (just kidding.. or am I?). So you’ll rarely hear me warn you not to use Net-Map in a certain situation. But recently someone asked me whether I ever had negative experiences or whether there were situations in which I would advise against Net-Mapping and, indeed, there are some:

1. In a hostile or conflict situation where you don’t want your opponents to get better at thinking strategically.

2. In situations with painful power differences if your group is not ready (yet) to talk about them.

3. If you don’t know what you want

4. If decision makers are not truly committed to participation and empowerment.

Let’s have a closer look at these:

1. Not teaching your opponent strategic network thinking

Let’s say you are lobbying for a good cause. At least that’s how you see it. But there are influencers who try to lobby against it (and probably believe that theirs is actually the good cause and yours is the evil one). Obviously it would be tremendously helpful for you to have a complete picture of the advocacy actor landscape and understand how the other side sees it. However, experience shows that you can hardly avoid that your interview partners and focus groups learn a great deal during the mapping session. And their ability to think strategically about their own network development will increase – whether you like it or not.

2. Painful power differences and a group that is not ready to face them

One of the strengths – and dangers – of Net-Map is that it makes differences in power/influence explicit and allows participants to talk about them. The bigger the power difference within your network, the more this will feel like putting a finger in an open wound – and adding some salt to taste. A good example would be a group of well intended people who are looking to create a power-free network of collaboration around a cause but each have a very different ability to influence because of where they are coming from (country, education, organization, position, wealth). I’d say: Eventually they’ll have to deal with it, because you ignore power at your own risk. But if the group is not ready yet, you might make the group explode before they have built a strong enough foundation to face these issues. One option here could be Net-Mapping without influence towers.

3. You don’t know what you want

The initial question we write on top of any Net-Map is something like: “Who influences XY?” If you don’t know what XY is, Net-Map is not going to tell you. If you rush into mapping without spending enough thought on XY you’ll end up like the people in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy“, who found out that the answer “to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything“  is 42 but unfortunately no one knew what the question was (and a lot of my Net-Map clients start out with a question nearly as big as that…). You’ll get a map that somehow tells you something about some people in the general area of your interest – but your interview partners will be about as confused as you are and most of them will pick their specific pet question and answer that – without telling you what the question was. And what are you going to do with “42″?

4. Decision makers not committed to participation

Participation and empowerment are not things that you can switch on (to make your donors, stakeholders, staff members happy) and off (to avoid having to do things differently) as you please. This is not just about Net-Map but any participatory approach: Once you start using empowering and participatory approaches, two things happen: People’s expectations of being heard increase and their ability to make themselves heard does so as well. Imagine you start an organizational change process by involving people from all parts of your organization in participatory Net-Map sessions. And then nothing happens. Or let’s say: And then you don’t follow up. Because, most likely, two things will happen: People will get cynical and frustrated and less willing to contribute than before this session (because they were thinking: “For once they are asking us, the people who really know!”). And they might start initiating some grassroots change just building on their insights and networks developed during the sessions. Whether you like the direction this is going in or not.

Relief: Stop banging your head against that wall…

if you just can't help it: Bang head here (copyright by jcrakow on flickr)

A lot of my Net-Map sessions are about: “How do you achieve your goal (whether that is feeding children in Ghana or reorganizing a company in the US) and who will help / hinder you?” And I can see how mapping out all stakeholders and developing realistic strategies for their involvement can be hugely empowering.

But every once in a while I also see that the biggest impact of mapping out who influences the achievement of a specific goal is the realization: “There is very little I can do. This goal is too tall for me or I am just not in the right position to influence this very much.” In these cases mapping it all out and talking it through with an experienced facilitator gives the person permission to stop banging their head against a wall in an attempt of creating a break-through. Once you realize that your head is so much softer than that wall, you can take a step back, sit down, take a deep breath and have a look at your whole situation: Once you realize something is out of your reach, you can stop feeling like a failure for not achieving it.

Just recently I helped someone map out a long standing family conflict around the one black sheep in the family. She had a very strong desire to integrate her uncle in family festivities again and had put a lot of energy in trying to push for this. Mapping it all out, however, helped her see that as a junior family member who was not involved in the conflict, she had very little power to change deep rooted family dynamics. And that there wasn’t just one side to blame for the whole conflict. So while it was well within her power to continue maintaining a strong and loving connection to the uncle herself, she had to let go of the goal of drastically changing the way the rest of the family connected to him.

Have a look at those things that you fight for most passionately and with most headache involved. Are you banging your poor soft little head against a rough stone wall?

To talk about swimming – or make them jump in?

Any talk about water won't rival the feeling of this swimmer who just jumped in (picture by Horia Varlan on Flickr)

Or: Why talking about an experience is no substitute for the experience.

This week I led students of Latin America Studies at Georgetown University through a Net-Map exercise (Thanks to their teacher Patricia Biermayr-Jenzano for organizing this!). They chose their own questions (a wide range, from personal family disputes to crime reduction in a Latin American small town) and started mapping it after a brief introduction. All of them had read some of my papers and case studies before, so one of the things that struck me in their feedback was how different Net-Map looked to them when they read about it and when they actually did it. Some of their comments:

“I initially was skeptical because I did not understand why a simple activity could be a method for creating social change.  Net-Mapping allowed me to view the world differently.  Granted, stepping back and analyzing the degree of influences in our lives should be a natural process, but it is something that we do not do visually.  By doing this activity and visually seeing our influences, it breaks the ice and fosters dialogue in a non-confrontational way.” 

“The level of sophistication of the tool far exceeded my personal expectations.  I was skeptical not because of the materials involved in the process (paper and pen) but because of the difficulty in determining who influences whom in most of the research in which I have participated.  I think the greatest advantage of the Net-Map system is the ability to look at an activity from a variety of levels.  My group worked on the scale of the individual, but seeing the work of the other groups made it obvious that Net-Map can be transferred to an organizational level or even perhaps to an international level.” 

“I had never done net-mapping or anything alike before. Honestly, when listening to the explanation I thought it was kind of a game. However, after doing the exercise I actually realized the great value it has. Using this hands-on method of visualizing problems or activities I believe is really useful. I believe that great ideas and problem visualization can be seen that may not be realized using other strategic methods.”

Yes, I fully realize the irony of this post, because, as I said in the introduction: talking about an experience is very different from experiencing it. So, get some pens, post-it notes and toys, print out the instructions, come up with a question that bothers you and involves many different actors and see what happens if you try mapping it. You might not start out as an Olympic swimmer but rather splash around in the shallow pool for a while. But even that will be a more interesting experience than reading stories about water, wouldn’t it?

Net-Map – Agile – Organizational Change

This is not the kind of Agile I'm talking about (picture by Double--M on flickr)

Last week I worked with an Agile coach who helps large organizations to move their software development from traditional waterfall programming to adopting agile approaches. What does that mean? Well, waterfall programming means you start out by telling the programmers what you need, then they go and program for a few (or more than a few) months and finally come back with a program for you to use. Now you can see whether you actually knew what you wanted in the beginning and whether the finished product fits. In an agile approach the programming cycles are shortened to weeks and at the end of each iteration stands a good enough product that you can start using and trying out, giving feedback to the programmers so that they can go back to tweak, adjust and make it fit.

One of the great and scary things about becoming agile is that it doesn’t just mean using a different kind of product in the end. But that it means significantly changing processes, power and incentives within the organization. So introducing agile is not just a technical switch but actually an organizational change effort. And this is why my colleague proposed that we Net-Map it.

So at the beginning of a 1 1/2 year project he has just started we met with the three leading managers who oversee the agile implementation for this international corporation. And asked them the simple and difficult question: Who are all the actors who will influence the success of the project (positively or negatively)?

What did we find out? Well, my colleague now has a list of people he wants to invite to the first planning round. And within this list, he knows of a few people who need special attention, e.g.:

• The social integrator, that everyone feels comfortable going to with new ideas or the need for feedback.
• Some actors from neighboring domains who fear that their influence might be diminished by the implementation of agile.
• The strongest driver of the process in the leadership team.

He has more clarity about the drivers that motivate the different people involved and their priorities, especially when it comes to the question: “Is it more important to get stuff done and show results fast or to implement and document processes that others can follow in the future?”

Also, mapping out the whole situation provided a great opportunity to dig deeper into the history of this project, the divisions and people involved and how their past experience with each other might influence their ability and willingness to work together on this project. This specifically is an area where external consultants can easily step on landmines from conflicts they didn’t even know existed…

And finally, working with the project leaders on this and giving them the space to draw a map of their views and experiences, allowing for disagreement and exploration as well as finding a shared core, was a great way of laying the ground work for a longer process of collaboration, getting to know each other better, seeing what their priorities and worries are and reassuring them that we have heard.

From tweet to action: Who moves social movements on twitter?

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.

Discovering hidden influencers that make or break project success

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.

Are we talking about pipes or water?

A few days ago I was on the phone with a colleague who did a series of Net-Maps with groups of African farmers, asking them where they get their information about improving their farming practice. When we talked about the data she collected, we realized that what her farmers had mapped was like the pipe system (hopefully fresh water and not sewage…): What are all the potential connections that these farmers could use?  That’s an interesting questions. And as the mapping was done with groups of farmers, I am sure that a lot of them learned about information sources they were not aware of before and that drawing the maps together might have helped them to access more and more diverse information afterward. What they didn’t map though was where does the information actually flow; and who provides more fresh water (good, correct, new information) as compared to sewage (old, wrong, useless information) – though some of this information was shared in the discussion.

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.

Small town NetMapping: Can informal relationships be captured within institutional analysis? (guest post by Jody Harris)

My PhD research in Zambia is an evaluation of an NGO program that aims in part to align and coordinate certain activities within the Ministries of Agriculture and Health for improved nutrition outcomes (both food and health being essential elements of good nutritional status, of course!). A key piece of information, then, is how are different players in these sectors interacting right now, and how does that interaction change over the course of the project? Enter NetMap.

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…

Do you doodle?

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.