[image: http://senseable.mit.edu/nyte/]
Network theories have been around for some time. And they have been popularized recently with the rise of the Internet, a game about how movie stars are related, how to fight terrorism and most recently by social networking tools online like twitter and linkedin.
The main take away from these theories is that the number of connections that nodes (think people, computers, cells etc) have is not a bell curve as one might expect but rather a power law curve decreasing exponentially as we reach a high number of interconnections. This hub model has huge implications for everything including project management and organizational theory.
The same thing tends to happen in organizations. People work with the same teams and there is very little dynamic interlinking. This is obviously more the case in the functional organization and in fact the projectized organization is much more able to receive the benefits of the cross pollination by having project members sharing their play books (A play book is a set of strategic ideas to be used in a play in American football. It is a metaphor for the strategies that most of us use repeatedly in our daily based on our experiences of success with them.)
So it seems like a no brainer. The more you share experiences the better. Share between people in different disciplines, different functional organizations, different providers. Move people around and mix it up to create more interlinking.
One criticism is that once people are used to working together the communication is much more fluid. I think this is mainly the case for people that are not used to switching teams. So the more you practice…the better you get at it.
Another criticism is that it is destabilizing. Obviously very interlinked group tends to reduce the power of hierarchies because information does not only flow up and down the chain of command.
And a third is that at some point once people are massively interconnected there tends to be a weighting to a sort of average as pointed out by James Surowiecki. That is to say the same diversity which created increased creativity and productivity by cross pollination is squashed by the feedback of the most successful of these ideas (think memes) feeding back into the nodes so that individual team members are more impressed by others ideas than their own novel ideas.
The main take away from these theories is that the number of connections that nodes (think people, computers, cells etc) have is not a bell curve as one might expect but rather a power law curve decreasing exponentially as we reach a high number of interconnections. This hub model has huge implications for everything including project management and organizational theory.
The same thing tends to happen in organizations. People work with the same teams and there is very little dynamic interlinking. This is obviously more the case in the functional organization and in fact the projectized organization is much more able to receive the benefits of the cross pollination by having project members sharing their play books (A play book is a set of strategic ideas to be used in a play in American football. It is a metaphor for the strategies that most of us use repeatedly in our daily based on our experiences of success with them.)
So it seems like a no brainer. The more you share experiences the better. Share between people in different disciplines, different functional organizations, different providers. Move people around and mix it up to create more interlinking.
One criticism is that once people are used to working together the communication is much more fluid. I think this is mainly the case for people that are not used to switching teams. So the more you practice…the better you get at it.
Another criticism is that it is destabilizing. Obviously very interlinked group tends to reduce the power of hierarchies because information does not only flow up and down the chain of command.
And a third is that at some point once people are massively interconnected there tends to be a weighting to a sort of average as pointed out by James Surowiecki. That is to say the same diversity which created increased creativity and productivity by cross pollination is squashed by the feedback of the most successful of these ideas (think memes) feeding back into the nodes so that individual team members are more impressed by others ideas than their own novel ideas.
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