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The Pattern of Renewal: What to Look for and Help Bring Forth

How Social Networks Network Best

http://hbr.harvardbusiness.org/web/2009/hbr-list/how-social-networks-work-best

The humble bee has much to teach us about the flow of information in our own organizations. Bees, like human beings, are social animals, and evolution has provided them with elegant approaches to group decision making.

One of the most important group decisions made by a bee colony is where to locate the hive. Bees use a kind of “idea market” to guide their discovery: The colony sends out a small number of scouts to survey the environment. Returning scouts that have found promising sites signal their discoveries with a vigorous dance, thus recruiting more scouts to the better sites. The cycle of exploration and signaling continues until so many scouts are signaling in favor of the best site that a tipping point is reached.

The bees’ decision making highlights both information discovery and information integration, two processes that are crucial to every organization but that have different requirements. A centralized structure works well for discovery, because the individual’s role is to find information and report it back. In contrast, a richly connected network works best for integration and decision making, because it allows the individual to hear everyone else’s opinion about the expected return from each of the alternatives. The bees’ process suggests that organizations that alternate as needed between the centralized structure and the richly connected network can shape information fl ow to optimize both discovery and integration.

Recent studies at MIT reveal that this sort of oscillation may be characteristic of creative teams. One intriguing study tracked employees in the marketing division of a German bank by having them wear small sensors called sociometers for one month. Sociometers record data about face-to-face interactions such as participants’ identities and the location and duration of the interaction. Analysis of the data showed that teams charged with creating new marketing campaigns oscillated between the centralized communication associated with discovery and densely interconnected conversations that were mostly with other team members. In contrast, the members of implementation groups showed little oscillation, speaking almost exclusively to other team members.

A second study demonstrated not only that creative teams had especially nimble social-communication networks, but also that the amount of oscillation correlated with how productive the creative group judged itself to be. In this study almost 40% of the variation in creative productivity could be attributed to an oscillating pattern of communication strategies for discovery and integration.

Delving deeper into the communication networks of several organizations illuminated the links between productivity and information fl ow even more. A recent MIT study found that in one organization the employees with the most extensive personal digital networks were 7% more productive than their colleagues – so Wikis and Web 2.0 tools may indeed improve productivity. In the same organization, however, the employees with the most cohesive face-to-face networks were 30% more productive. Electronic tools may well be suited to information discovery, but face-to-face communication, an oft-neglected part of the management process, best supports

Alex Pentland is the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT and director of human dynamics research at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is the author of Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World (MIT, 2008), from which this article is drawn.

Here is an article written about Ed Morrison and his EDPro Weblog.  The writer understands the concept of "Open Source", Economic and Workforce Development and how the 3 are integrated and connected.  Read the article here.

Here's a recent article by Ed Morrison that points to the importance of appreciating different points of view when we work in the Civic Space. Small team work often drives innovation and entrepreneurship, and in close quarters, having a basic familiarity with personality types and traits - is especially helpful. With this understanding we can learn where people's strengths and weakness lie and how best to use available talent and skills.

From Ed onEcon-Dev Google group: (which you can freely join to learn about growing entrepreneurship with principles of Economic Gardening)

As part of the EG tool chest, Chris recommends that we become far more  
versed in the issue of temperament. (For those of you who take the EG  
training, you'll find that Chris is quite agile with Myers-Briggs.)

I confess, at first I did not understand the connection. But after the  
training I saw the light.

The businesses that are most likely to be successful in our economies  
are going to be based on networked business models. They must survive  
in an economy that represents networks embedded in other networks:  
complex adaptive systems.

In this environment, temperament matters. (Understanding these skills  
is a bit like helping a business executive understand accounting: An  
essential tool for growth.)

Here's a good article from this month's Ivey Business Journal:

http://snurl.com/cg33l

(Ivey Business School is based at the University of Western Ontario.  
Their business journal is very good: thoughtful and practical.)

Ed Morrison

Some additional follow ups:

Myers-Briggs Foundation

Economic Gardening

Ed Morrison recently prepared a presentation for the U.S. Department of Labor's, Re-Employment Summit, "Re-Employment Conference: Accelerating Practice Across Networks" in January 2009, Baltimore, MD.

Jasen Jones, Executive Director of the Workforce Investment Board of Southwest Missouri and new colleague at the UEDA provided this testimonial:

I think the approach proposed in your presentation is brilliant.  I think
this provides a way to express what we've wanted to do with integration on
our workforce system in a way that's more responsive and functions more
efficiently with higher quality.  

Read Ed Morrison's presentation, "Re-employment Networks".(1.2 MB)

Contribution and Connection are the New Currency

People are no longer a company's best asset, they are its best technology.

Is it time perhaps to rename human resources something like human resourceful? I was reading the McKinsey Quarterlyarticle about making Web 2.0 tools work (guess they didn't get the memo about the end of the term Web 2.0). In it the authors talk about a wide range of technologies.

I beg to differ on the terminology, I think they mean tools.

Technologies may enable tools and they exist on two sides of them. The application/tool platform side and that of the human using it. A dry system and a wet system (the brain). These new tools are built with the user in mind instead of the task - ERP, CRM anyone?