| CSC World: What can you do about that?
Cross: We go to those people and find out what information they have, or what decisions they’re making, that others go to them for. We try to make information accessible elsewhere and reallocate decision-making rights so the group can operate around them. We do things to take those people out of the bottleneck position. In healthy organizations, as people rise in the hierarchy, they move out to the edge of a network, not the center. Formally or informally, they do things that decrease other people’s reliance on them.
CSC World: What else do you look for?
Cross: I look for brokers and people who aren’t connected enough.
Brokers may not have the most direct connections, but they bridge subgroups. By understanding what two different subgroups in a network know, they can have an impact on an organization’s ability to develop new products or services, or bring new ideas to clients. They can also bridge cultural differences between groups. These are people I’d want to pull into a leadership role if I were forming a community of practice or starting an organizational change program, because they have the ability to pull people together and get information out quickly.
I also look for very peripheral people. People who are stuck on the edge of a network are important because they’re underutilized resources and are three times more likely than better-connected people to leave an organization.
CSC World: Are there patterns to why people are poorly connected?
Cross: Some of them have performance issues and they’re working their way out of the organization anyway. Some are balancing work and quality-of-life issues. These are people you do not want to force back into the thick of things because you’re likely to lose them if you do. If you tried to force a single parent, for instance, or even a scientist or a subject matter expert, back into the fray, you probably wouldn’t get very good results.
Another group is peripheral because of poor staffing or because they weren’t onboarded very well. If they stay poorly connected, the organization will lose them over time. So these people are my high priority points in the network.
CSC World: Many organizations have tried collaboration tools. How well do they work?
Cross: The only effective medium for collaboration across physical distance that I’ve seen — and by this I mean a tool that seems to help networks stay connected across distance — is instant messaging. That’s a generalization, and there are exceptions. But I’ve yet to see any database come close to a human being as a source of the kind of information people need to get work done. Instant messaging recreates the kind of serendipitous conversation that happened around water coolers.
CSC World: How about team-building exercises?
Cross: I think they were useful. Where they fell down was not creating an awareness of who knows what. A lot of times I’ll go into an organization after a merger or a large-scale change effort, where there were plans to have certain groups connect in certain ways. But they don’t connect. It’s not because they don’t want to. It’s usually because people don’t know what to reach out to others for. They don’t know who knows what.
CSC World: So you also look for how people don’t collaborate.
Cross: I always look for disconnects. There are always holes at points where people need to be connecting. That happens in almost every place I’ve been. There are lots of reasons: distance, hierarchy, function. Our tool helps us find opportunity points, where people can get better connected.
CSC World: So you think networks can be managed.
Cross: Yes. There are limits to what you can do, but yes. When you see how work is and isn’t getting done, you can see how to make improvements. I think network analysis will provide crucial insights as we move further into knowledge-intensive work in delayered organizations.
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