Knowledge Matters™

At the moment I am working on a very large business network analysis™ project, which began in late September 2007 and doesn’t finish until March 2008. (It is also the primary reason why my blogging activity has slowed up of late.) On Monday I delivered the second interim report which is largely a visual diagnosis. When using network analysis techniques it is too easy to become enamoured with the pictures at the expense of other forms of analysis. I call the pictures SOILs – senior officer interest lights – because they are very powerful in grabbing the attention of senior managers. The diagram below was a SOILs, attracting management attention for all the wrong reasons.

The diagram as drawn is accurate, however I have removed all the labels, arrowheads and link attributes to protect the innocent and preserve organisational anonymity. The nodes are coloured by business units, and at first blush suggest the organisation is highly dysfunctional with no cross-unit collaboration! This is how some managers initially interpreted the diagram, however the interpretation is wrong. The question asked was “Which internal to business unit positions does your position interact with the most for work purposes, and what is the frequency of the interaction?” Of course there are no cross-business unit links – the question precludes them! Other questions in the structured one-on-one interviews collected these links.

So what are the lessons? The big one for me is I should have presented this diagram as four separate slides to eliminate any possible misinterpretation or misuse, not that any misuse occurred. I probably also should have included the question on the slide, to remove completely any ambiguity. These type of network diagrams work – management attention was gained and interest lights went on – but these diagrams are also dangerous and easy to misinterpret. The biggest lesson of all the need to understand the sort of data a question might elicit. The questions matter!

Regards, Graham