When you start a project, you are often the mover and shaker and connector who develops links to all other actors and you move your project forward from this position being the hub, everything happens because you are there, you are in control. We all know projects which only got off the ground because of one tireless visionary who pushed and pushed and pushed for his or her vision. Great.

The only problem is that what is one of the most effective strategies for getting projects off the ground is not always the best for making them sustainable. So while it is only human to think that “more of the same” will make us successful in the future, it is important to understand that hub and spokes networks are
1. highly vulnerable to shocks: This could be a heart attack of the visionary or the hub being overworked or corrupted by power and stopping to be the mover he/she used to be,
2. Don’t harvest the wisdom of the crowd: Because all information is filtered through the hub, people don’t get together independently to think together, inspire each other and come up with new solutions. This is one of the reasons why hub and spokes networks are especially well suited to implement simple repetitive tasks where all answers are known and these networks are especially useless in solving complex messy problems where the answers are not known and might differ between locations or situations.
3. They don’t develop the bottom-up energy to maintain themselves and grow: Because everything is always a reaction to the push from the center, everyone starts to rely on that push and waits for the center to come up with ideas, activities and funding. This can lead to the typical situation in donor funded projects: As the funding expires the activities die down, even if they were extremely useful to the people involved and it would require only little own contribution to maintain them.

What does that mean? If you are really passionate about the change you are aiming for, remember: This is not about you. This is not about your organization’s signboard or your own name attached to the change. Go in, move and shake, develop your hub and spokes network as necessary but AS SOON AS YOU HAVE THAT, start implementing your exit strategy (which might take most of your project) by connecting actors that you work with and making sure that they will eventually be able to do their work without you. Get over the fear of loosing control because loosing it is a pre-requisite for having an impact beyond what you alone / your organization alone can do.

Have a look at the dirty energy money networks. Because if you want to understand how politics work, it helps a lot, to understand the money flow networks between the (oil and coal) industries and decision makers. And, if you are interested in it from a methodological point of view, it is just a pleasure to have such an interactive network analysis surface, where you can click on actors and links and learn a lot more about them. And to explore what happens to a two mode network (with two different kinds of links, companies and politicians in this case) if you look at it from one side (who gives to politicians) or the other (who do specific companies give to). And if you are not satisfied with numbers alone, there are a number of links hidden on some of the pages which will get you to sites that explain more about the causes and effects of the money flow.

So why do I have a feeling that is so quiet in the background that I barely even hear it, a feeling that tells me, this is not enough? Do I need to train more people? And more people?

This morning, squeezed in the crowds of the Metro I realized the problem is a lack of balance. I teach, teach, teach with an urgency, with a mission (as everybody knows who has tried to stop me talking about Net-Map), making the method’s community grow in size. But where do I go, what do I do to learn? How do I grow?

In every project I do I learn something new, about corruption in Ghana or rice par-boiling in northern Nigeria. I work with content matter experts who can explain these parts of the world to the smallest detail. And that truly is exciting. And we stretch the method to fit these different cases and challenges. Which makes me learn more about the method and how to teach it.

But this morning I realized that I long for another kind of learning as well: I want to work in collaboration with masters (in process management, facilitation, people methods, whatever you could call it) and learn from them how they do things, ask a million question, immerse myself in the process and feel as well as intellectually understand what they do. While I add the things that I do. A different kind of growth…

Why do I put this here? Because I know from experience that the most reliable way of making your dreams come true is to send them out there, write it down in your diary, tell all your friends, tell a stranger on the bus and put some energy and sincerity into really wishing for it. Things will start coming your way. And because you know what you are looking for, you will actually recognize them and embrace them.

On quote that I found in the same book this morning:
“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift” Albert Einstein

A higher level, non-involved entity (for example “the” management) looks at problems from a social engineering perspective and comes up with a set of strict and not very useful rules that everyone else has to follow with the goal of standardizing processes – but often with the effect of increasing bureaucracy and decreasing motivation and problem solving capacity.

Net-Map is not a good tool to do this. And even if it was, I’d say: Don’t! Because, why would anyone want to do that???

So how can you use Net-Map as a process tool? What I was thinking of is this: At the beginning of a longer strategic process (maybe a project implementation, a product development or a organizational change process) you invite those involved and impacted to an initial Net-Map session to develop a baseline map and discuss the following questions:

• Where do we want to go from here?
• What do we need to do to get there?

You would discuss both your content goals and what strategic changes in the existing network might help you get there. Are there links that need to be strengthened or abandoned? Do we need to add more partners? What are coalitions, bottlenecks, potential and actual conflicts and what do we do about them? Who can do what to get us to a better future situation?

After that you go back to work and do whatever the purpose of your group or organization is. After some time, you get together again and draw a map of how it looks now: Some of your networking plans of the first round worked out and you see changes just like you predicted. In other areas achievements were more difficult. In the process you might have realized that some of your initial strategies were naive or counter-productive, that you didn’t understand the importance of some actors who became more central to the cause etc. Everyone involved was encouraged to adapt their strategies according to the learning that took place and in can explain in the second round of mapping how we got where we are and what we now need to do to get to the next level. While you compare the network plans with the actual network you have developed, this is not a simple assessment process that would focus on the achievement of pre-defined network goals.

If you start a process like that, you are saying: I trust my partners/employees that they are motivated to do their best and that together we can come up with better solutions than any individual could. But you also say: Let’s check in periodically to see if we are still on track and explore how we can think together and make sure we don’t get lost in networking for the sole purpose of networking.

“Net-Map: Collecting Social Network Data and Facilitating Network Learning through Participatory Influence Network Mapping”, by Eva Schiffer and Jennifer Hauck, Field Methods, August 2010.

As of this month I am a member of the Affinity Lab, a shared workspace, where people like me (and maybe like you) can rent desk space at affordable rates and work in a room full of people like me. Or, even better, unlike me. Because we know from social network analysis 101 that heterogeneous networks are best for innovation. Ok, you need a bit of similarity as well, otherwise it’s difficult to actually develop and maintain connections. So when I first came here and told the manager Phillipe Chetrit, what I do for a living, he was excited. He immediately got why it is interesting, without knowing yet how it works. Next week I will give a brown bag seminar for my co-workers here and see who shares the excitement even after understanding how it works. So, if you work from home and you are ready to strangle your cat, geraniums or husband, I can highly recommend finding a little desk space somewhere away from cats, geraniums and husband.

The initial intuitive approach is to ask those people who are knowledgeable about the issue and the existing networks now and ask them again towards the end of the project. But looking at it more closely I realized: One of the goals of the project is get groups and individuals involved who are not interested in the issue as of now. Sure, if you ask the experts now and in three years, they might say that these marginal actors have become more involved. But you would get a so much brighter picture if you ask the marginal actors now (when they have a rather fuzzy vision of the network and place themselves at the fringes) and after the intervention (when, hopefully, they know much more about how the network works and put themselves in a more defined position). So even though the before interviews with marginal actors will be confusing, not very efficient and lead to little reliable data about how the network works at the moment, you need exactly these unclear pictures from the beginning of the project to be able to show afterward that you did have an impact on their involvement and network knowledge. And if these interviews are additional to the core actor interviews, you will still get a pretty good picture of the before and after network as a whole.

In my typical “learn more about a network in short time” projects I would recommend only interviewing people who are knowledgeable about the network and stop the snowballing when the answers start getting boring (saturation point). But for monitoring and evaluation purposes I might have to re-think this recommendation. So my working recommendation now would be: Interview some overview experts / highly involved actors and interview those whose network position and network perception you want to change. Get a combined network picture for before and after from your highly involved actors. But also compare the individual before and after networks of your target population.

In an ideal scenario you would have some kind of apprenticeship time where the old and new employee work side by side and the new person learns the ropes, get introduced to all the long standing partners, to be able to take forward both the formal and informal relationships, that our old employee has developed. In reality, there will rarely be the time and resources to do that.

What I would propose instead is more of a one day instead of a one year activity: Invite your experienced leaving expert and maybe 3 of the people who will work in the same area in the future (or do so currently) for a facilitated one day institutional knowledge sharing exercise. The core activity of the day is that the old employee draws a Net-Map of all the actors that s/he sees as influential for this cause / organization / position. Make sure that they include individual contact people and the names of movers and shakers where ever possible and take the time to document the details about both formal and informal relationships and specific characteristics of the different actors. Allow a lot of time for questions from the new position holders. Develop some strategic plans together, looking at who the core partners are, what specific untapped opportunities are, what stumbling blocks and old mistakes to avoid and which focused activities could help ease the transition. Maybe there are specific actors that are very crucial or very difficult to access and the old employee would be a perfect door opener.

This activity would not only smooth the transition from one to the next, but is also a great way of showing respect to an “elder statesman” of your organization.

On the other hand, especially in fields where we are not the experts, it is absolutely unrealistic, that we could come up with a pre-defined list of actors, especially if you want to include formal and informal players. And it is one of the big strengths of this method that it allows you to explore actor constellations even in areas where you don’t even really know what questions to ask.

How do we combine the need to explore and be open with the need for consistency in the labeling of data?

In one of our current projects we will try out an approach that is very remotely inspired by the Delphi approach, we will let our experts build on each others’ knowledge: The first interview will start from a blank slate, asking: Who are all the actors involved?

Pythia sitting on the Delphic Tripod Cauldron and a priest

For the second interview we will write all the actors mentioned by interview partner 1 on prepared stickynotes and ask our respondent to choose whichever they want, plus add any that are missing. Interview 3 will have all the actors from 1 and 2 to choose from, plus any that respondent 3 adds.

I’m curious to see how this goes. Will the later Net-Maps have significantly more actors than the earlier ones? Will we find a good balance between openness and consistency? This approach will work better for some questions than for others and it only really makes sense if your final goal is creating a consensus map of a common network. That means it could work for questions such as: “Who is involved in developing this policy?” but not really for questions like  “Who do you personally go to for information about job opportunities?”