Time for some network thinking in your organization?

Here’s a great piece by Curtis Ogden of the Interaction Institute of Social Change, shared today by Philanthropy for Social Justice and Peace.

Network thinking has been on my mind since attending “Networking Your Institution for the Citizen Age,” hosted last month by Communicopia and Greenpeace’s Mobilisation Lab. (See presentation here.) So thought I would share this for food for thought from Curtis on the differences between networked and more traditional organization-centric ways of getting things done.

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• Adaptability instead of control – Thinking in networks means leading with an interest in adaptability over time.  Given contextual complexity, it is impossible for any actor or “leader” to know exactly what must be done to address a particular issue, much less keep what should be a more decentralized and self-organizing group, moving in lockstep.  Pushing response-ability out to the edges is what helps networks survive and thrive.
• Emergence instead of predictability – As with any complex living system, when a group of people comes together, we cannot always know what it is they will create.  The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.  Vying for the predictable means short-changing ourselves of new possibilities, one of the great promises of networks.
• Resilience and redundancy instead rock stardom – You see it on sports teams all the time.  When the star player goes down, so goes the team.  Resilient networks are built upon redundancy of function and a richness of interconnections, so that if one node goes away, the network can adjust and continue its work.
• Contributions before credentials – You’ve probably heard the story about the janitor who anonymously submitted his idea for a new shoe design during a company-wide contest, and won.  “Expertise” and seniority can serve as a bottle neck and buzz kill in many organizations, where ego gets in the way of excellence.  If we are looking for new and better thinking, it should not matter from whence it comes.  This is part of the value of crowdsourcing.
• Diversity and divergence – New thinking comes from the meeting of different fields, experience, and perspectives.  Preaching to the choir gets us the same old (and tired) hymn.  Furthermore, innovation is not a result of dictating or choosing from what is, but expanding options, moving from convergent (and what often passes for strategic) thinking to design thinking.

Where does your organization fall?