
The value is in the links, not the nodes
The power of social networks.
Had a conversation a few years ago with a global telecoms company that told me a story about its response to the earthquake in Pakistan. It destroyed a communications hub serving not just Pakistan but also the entire region preventing any kind of coordinated relief effort. Apparently, the rapid movement and installation of huge equipment, the mobilisation of people and expertise to the region and the life threatening timescales available to execute meant they had to do two things. First, appoint a super connected leader empower and trust him/her to get the job the done, and secondly, to waive all formal project governance requirements. They say the effort and budget expended was equal to a traditionally governed project that normally takes two years to complete. This project took just three months to complete.
The leader used informal networks and relationships to get things done. This person could not possibly directly know all the people needed to restore communications in the region — from manufacturers and engineers to designers and builders in many countries, but was sufficiently connected to leverage the links in those networks to reach everyone. Did the company take this approach again or change its project delivery model after the crisis? No.
It’s a story that reminds me of Steven Johnson’s snippet from an article he wrote in 2003;
In his classic novel Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut explains how the world is divided into two types of social organizations: the karass and the granfalloon. A karass is a spontaneously forming group, joined by unpredictable links, that actually gets stuff done — as Vonnegut describes it, “a team that do[es] God’s Will without ever discovering what they are doing.” A granfalloon, on the other hand, is a “false karass,” a bureaucratic structure that looks like a team but is “meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done.”
No doubt you’ve experienced these two types of networks in your own life, many times over. The karass is that group of friends from college who have helped one another’s careers in a hundred subtle ways over the years; the granfalloon is the marketing department at your firm, where everyone has a meticulously defined place on the org chart but nothing ever gets done.
When you find yourself in a karass, it’s an intuitive, unplanned experience. Getting into a granfalloon, on the other hand, usually involves showing two forms of ID.
“The real value of Twitter et al is to keep the invisible lines of connection between us alive”. Cory Doctorow
