BooksCurrent AffairsFamily/CommunicationPeopleAugust 22, 20130How Does Stuff Get Done Around Here?

As many of you know, I wrote a book called Grow­ing Great Employ­ees a few years back.  One chap­ter focus­es on how to get new peo­ple start­ed well in your orga­ni­za­tion. I pro­posed that, in gen­er­al, peo­ple want three ques­tions answered when they start a new job: Who do I need to know?,  How do things get done around here?, and What’s expect­ed of me?

Not long ago a client of mine turned me on to an arti­cle pub­lished a few years ago in Busi­ness Week about the (then) emerg­ing dis­ci­pline of Social Net­work Analy­sis. I got very intrigued, and con­tin­ued to research the subject.

Social Net­work Analy­sis (SNA) is “the map­ping and mea­sur­ing of rela­tion­ships and flows between peo­ple, groups, orga­ni­za­tions, com­put­ers, URLs, and oth­er con­nect­ed information/knowledge enti­ties. The nodes in the net­work are the peo­ple and groups, while the links show rela­tion­ships or flows between the nodes.”  I got that def­i­n­i­tion from the web­site of orgnet.com, a com­pa­ny that’s been doing SNA and pro­vid­ing SNA soft­ware to clients for 15 years.

I find this both fas­ci­nat­ing and use­ful: SNA is a way of mak­ing vis­i­ble the answer to two of those three core ques­tions —   “Who do I need to know?” and “How does stuff get done around here?”

SNA pro­vides crit­i­cal insights into how infor­ma­tion flows (and doesn’t); who is at the core of net­works of peo­ple and who’s at the periph­ery; where there are silos and where inter­ac­tion hap­pens freely. If used well, it can help com­pa­nies take best advan­tage of the employ­ees who are “exam­plars” – those to whom oth­ers turn for advice, knowl­edge, insights.  It can also help orga­ni­za­tions see “block­ages” in work and infor­ma­tion flow, and focus more use­ful­ly on how to get things unstuck.

This isn’t new – many of these con­cepts are at the core of Seth Godin’s lat­est books, for instance, and orgnet.com has a big client list – but I love the idea that this way of visu­al­iz­ing orga­ni­za­tions is becom­ing more wide­spread.  It’s yet anoth­er indi­ca­tion to me that what has his­tor­i­cal­ly been thought of as “the soft stuff” in orga­ni­za­tions is final­ly get­ting rec­og­nized as key to pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and profit.

SNA demon­strates, in a very clear and 21st cen­tu­ry way, that peo­ple real­ly are our most impor­tant resource.