
Just a bowl of spaghetti with toys on top?
So, you have done the mapping, in front of you a messy bowl-of-spaghetti-with-toys-on-top-diagram and your participants or clients ask you:
So what do we do now? What does this mean?
While the content of the answer will be different in every case, here are some guiding principle to direct your eyes and your thought when looking for strategic insights from a Net-Map: In general three issues are considered: Actor Influence, Goals and Connections, with the following lines of thought:
Influence
- Influential actors who can harm / support
- Increasing or decreasing actor influence
- Diverse sources of influence
Goals
- Understanding reasons / motivations / fears / aspirations behind goals
- Working with, connecting, strengthening positive actors
- Dealing with, mitigating risk concerning negative actors
- Changing actor goals toward more positive
Connections
- Network patterns and their effects (e.g. centralization vs. decentralization, boundary spanners, disconnected silos)
- Tension or reinforcement of formal vs. informal links
- Connections which create destructive forces in the system
- Missing links
- Connecting positive actors (coalition), understanding negative coalitions, engaging mixed actors
- Dividing negative actors
Filed under: facilitation, fine-tuning implementation, Social Networks, technical details, theoretical considerations, training material | Tagged: actor goals, actor influence, client, coalition building, connections, data analysis, Net-Map method, Strategic insights, training | 1 Comment »