Social network analysis gives me a language to talk about and think about things I see people do. I rarely use the network measures quantitatively (does it help to know that actor A has a betweenness centrality of 0.2?) but more as structural descriptions of what I see and to explain what might happen. Centralization for example has come up a lot in my recent work with various development projects. Centralization describes the structure of the network as a whole, a highly centralized network is a hub and spokes network, one actor in the middle with a star shaped network linking him to others who are not linked to each other. In a network with low centralization on the other hand, everyone is linked to everyone.

When you start a project, you are often the mover and shaker and connector who develops links to all other actors and you move your project forward from this position being the hub, everything happens because you are there, you are in control. We all know projects which only got off the ground because of one tireless visionary who pushed and pushed and pushed for his or her vision. Great.

The only problem is that what is one of the most effective strategies for getting projects off the ground is not always the best for making them sustainable. So while it is only human to think that “more of the same” will make us successful in the future, it is important to understand that hub and spokes networks are
1. highly vulnerable to shocks: This could be a heart attack of the visionary or the hub being overworked or corrupted by power and stopping to be the mover he/she used to be,
2. Don’t harvest the wisdom of the crowd: Because all information is filtered through the hub, people don’t get together independently to think together, inspire each other and come up with new solutions. This is one of the reasons why hub and spokes networks are especially well suited to implement simple repetitive tasks where all answers are known and these networks are especially useless in solving complex messy problems where the answers are not known and might differ between locations or situations.
3. They don’t develop the bottom-up energy to maintain themselves and grow: Because everything is always a reaction to the push from the center, everyone starts to rely on that push and waits for the center to come up with ideas, activities and funding. This can lead to the typical situation in donor funded projects: As the funding expires the activities die down, even if they were extremely useful to the people involved and it would require only little own contribution to maintain them.

What does that mean? If you are really passionate about the change you are aiming for, remember: This is not about you. This is not about your organization’s signboard or your own name attached to the change. Go in, move and shake, develop your hub and spokes network as necessary but AS SOON AS YOU HAVE THAT, start implementing your exit strategy (which might take most of your project) by connecting actors that you work with and making sure that they will eventually be able to do their work without you. Get over the fear of loosing control because loosing it is a pre-requisite for having an impact beyond what you alone / your organization alone can do.

“One useful rule of thumb is to use network maps more for raising questions than for answering them” (Hoppe and Reinelt 2009)

No sitting around tables and playing with toys (as in Net-Map) but another cool application of social network analysis in which participation plays a very important role as well. This is not participatory data collection (the data collection is mainly automatic) but the results speak to the politically aware mind and might motivate and feed (with data and with anger…) participation in political processes.

Have a look at the dirty energy money networks. Because if you want to understand how politics work, it helps a lot, to understand the money flow networks between the (oil and coal) industries and decision makers. And, if you are interested in it from a methodological point of view, it is just a pleasure to have such an interactive network analysis surface, where you can click on actors and links and learn a lot more about them. And to explore what happens to a two mode network (with two different kinds of links, companies and politicians in this case) if you look at it from one side (who gives to politicians) or the other (who do specific companies give to). And if you are not satisfied with numbers alone, there are a number of links hidden on some of the pages which will get you to sites that explain more about the causes and effects of the money flow.

Profound moments happen at the unlikeliest times and places. This morning on the metro I was reading The Change Handbook (Holman, Devane and Cady) when all of a sudden I had a new insight about growth. I think it was spurred by their ideas about mastery. In the past months I have put much thought and activity into growing Net-Map bigger than what one person can do: Whenever I engage with a project, I make sure that someone from the project is trained as far as possible to take over the activities; I tell clients: “I want you to hire me for as few days as possible.” because I want just enough time to infect them with Net-Map, I want it to go viral. I’m training colleagues how to use it, so that we can work together, form a community of practice and take it to the next level…

So why do I have a feeling that is so quiet in the background that I barely even hear it, a feeling that tells me, this is not enough? Do I need to train more people? And more people?

This morning, squeezed in the crowds of the Metro I realized the problem is a lack of balance. I teach, teach, teach with an urgency, with a mission (as everybody knows who has tried to stop me talking about Net-Map), making the method’s community grow in size. But where do I go, what do I do to learn? How do I grow?

In every project I do I learn something new, about corruption in Ghana or rice par-boiling in northern Nigeria. I work with content matter experts who can explain these parts of the world to the smallest detail. And that truly is exciting. And we stretch the method to fit these different cases and challenges. Which makes me learn more about the method and how to teach it.

But this morning I realized that I long for another kind of learning as well: I want to work in collaboration with masters (in process management, facilitation, people methods, whatever you could call it) and learn from them how they do things, ask a million question, immerse myself in the process and feel as well as intellectually understand what they do. While I add the things that I do. A different kind of growth…

Why do I put this here? Because I know from experience that the most reliable way of making your dreams come true is to send them out there, write it down in your diary, tell all your friends, tell a stranger on the bus and put some energy and sincerity into really wishing for it. Things will start coming your way. And because you know what you are looking for, you will actually recognize them and embrace them.

On quote that I found in the same book this morning:
“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift” Albert Einstein

Sometimes misunderstandings in conversations seem to be my main learning opportunity. Maybe that’s one benefit of working in a context where I am not a native speaker…  Today I presented Net-Map to my colleagues at AffinityLab and in the discussion afterward I said something about how great this tool would work for managing processes. What I didn’t realize was that a lot of people think of the following, when they hear process management:

A higher level, non-involved entity (for example “the” management) looks at problems from a social engineering perspective and comes up with a set of strict and not very useful rules that everyone else has to follow with the goal of standardizing processes – but often with the effect of increasing bureaucracy and decreasing motivation and problem solving capacity.

Net-Map is not a good tool to do this. And even if it was, I’d say: Don’t! Because, why would anyone want to do that???

So how can you use Net-Map as a process tool? What I was thinking of is this: At the beginning of a longer strategic process (maybe a project implementation, a product development or a organizational change process) you invite those involved and impacted to an initial Net-Map session to develop a baseline map and discuss the following questions:

• Where do we want to go from here?
• What do we need to do to get there?

You would discuss both your content goals and what strategic changes in the existing network might help you get there. Are there links that need to be strengthened or abandoned? Do we need to add more partners? What are coalitions, bottlenecks, potential and actual conflicts and what do we do about them? Who can do what to get us to a better future situation?

After that you go back to work and do whatever the purpose of your group or organization is. After some time, you get together again and draw a map of how it looks now: Some of your networking plans of the first round worked out and you see changes just like you predicted. In other areas achievements were more difficult. In the process you might have realized that some of your initial strategies were naive or counter-productive, that you didn’t understand the importance of some actors who became more central to the cause etc. Everyone involved was encouraged to adapt their strategies according to the learning that took place and in can explain in the second round of mapping how we got where we are and what we now need to do to get to the next level. While you compare the network plans with the actual network you have developed, this is not a simple assessment process that would focus on the achievement of pre-defined network goals.

If you start a process like that, you are saying: I trust my partners/employees that they are motivated to do their best and that together we can come up with better solutions than any individual could. But you also say: Let’s check in periodically to see if we are still on track and explore how we can think together and make sure we don’t get lost in networking for the sole purpose of networking.

This paper focuses on how the method works, both for data collection and for facilitation of processes. If you are a regular at this blog, you know it all, but you’ll be glad to have it all in a condensed, quotable fashion.

“Net-Map: Collecting Social Network Data and Facilitating Network Learning through Participatory Influence Network Mapping”, by Eva Schiffer and Jennifer Hauck, Field Methods, August 2010.

I know, for many of you that’s nothing to write home (or a blog post) about and for some it might be just the daily drag… But after two years of working from the sofa-bed-kitchen-table-home-office, let me tell you, having to get properly dressed to go to work feels great. And having colleagues. But no boss. What better workplace could there be?

As of this month I am a member of the Affinity Lab, a shared workspace, where people like me (and maybe like you) can rent desk space at affordable rates and work in a room full of people like me. Or, even better, unlike me. Because we know from social network analysis 101 that heterogeneous networks are best for innovation. Ok, you need a bit of similarity as well, otherwise it’s difficult to actually develop and maintain connections. So when I first came here and told the manager Phillipe Chetrit, what I do for a living, he was excited. He immediately got why it is interesting, without knowing yet how it works. Next week I will give a brown bag seminar for my co-workers here and see who shares the excitement even after understanding how it works. So, if you work from home and you are ready to strangle your cat, geraniums or husband, I can highly recommend finding a little desk space somewhere away from cats, geraniums and husband.

I’m working with Alive & Thrive, a Gates Foundation funded project to improve young infant and child nutrition in a number of third world countries. Net-Map is part of the monitoring and evaluation component that is led by IFPRI. The question we are looking at at the moment is: If the project aims at changing the networks related to infant nutrition, how can we monitor if it actually does. And who do we need to ask to figure this out.

The initial intuitive approach is to ask those people who are knowledgeable about the issue and the existing networks now and ask them again towards the end of the project. But looking at it more closely I realized: One of the goals of the project is get groups and individuals involved who are not interested in the issue as of now. Sure, if you ask the experts now and in three years, they might say that these marginal actors have become more involved. But you would get a so much brighter picture if you ask the marginal actors now (when they have a rather fuzzy vision of the network and place themselves at the fringes) and after the intervention (when, hopefully, they know much more about how the network works and put themselves in a more defined position). So even though the before interviews with marginal actors will be confusing, not very efficient and lead to little reliable data about how the network works at the moment, you need exactly these unclear pictures from the beginning of the project to be able to show afterward that you did have an impact on their involvement and network knowledge. And if these interviews are additional to the core actor interviews, you will still get a pretty good picture of the before and after network as a whole.

In my typical “learn more about a network in short time” projects I would recommend only interviewing people who are knowledgeable about the network and stop the snowballing when the answers start getting boring (saturation point). But for monitoring and evaluation purposes I might have to re-think this recommendation. So my working recommendation now would be: Interview some overview experts / highly involved actors and interview those whose network position and network perception you want to change. Get a combined network picture for before and after from your highly involved actors. But also compare the individual before and after networks of your target population.

Imagine someone has worked for your organization and your cause for 25 years. Or maybe for the same cause in different organizations. Or for the same organization but different causes or regions. As he or she approaches retirement the organization will not only loose the workforce that will leave when the person leaves, the 8 or so hours a day that s/he puts in. But also the 25 years and all the network knowledge gathered over this period of time. You can easily find someone for the 8 hours, but they won’t have the 25 years.

In an ideal scenario you would have some kind of apprenticeship time where the old and new employee work side by side and the new person learns the ropes, get introduced to all the long standing partners, to be able to take forward both the formal and informal relationships, that our old employee has developed. In reality, there will rarely be the time and resources to do that.

What I would propose instead is more of a one day instead of a one year activity: Invite your experienced leaving expert and maybe 3 of the people who will work in the same area in the future (or do so currently) for a facilitated one day institutional knowledge sharing exercise. The core activity of the day is that the old employee draws a Net-Map of all the actors that s/he sees as influential for this cause / organization / position. Make sure that they include individual contact people and the names of movers and shakers where ever possible and take the time to document the details about both formal and informal relationships and specific characteristics of the different actors. Allow a lot of time for questions from the new position holders. Develop some strategic plans together, looking at who the core partners are, what specific untapped opportunities are, what stumbling blocks and old mistakes to avoid and which focused activities could help ease the transition. Maybe there are specific actors that are very crucial or very difficult to access and the old employee would be a perfect door opener.

This activity would not only smooth the transition from one to the next, but is also a great way of showing respect to an “elder statesman” of your organization.

When doing Net-Maps with different people about the same question, we face the following dilemma: We want them to be free to mention any actor who comes to mind, whoever is involved in, let’s say innovation in the poultry sector in Ethiopia or managing small reservoirs in Ghana. But then we might want to combine these maps to get a master view of the problem. And what seemed like a minor oddity, the fact that people give the same actor different names, or use more or less condensed actor labels (do they just say NGOs or give us the specific names of the NGOs involved, do they name individuals by their name or position?) can become a major problem when trying to combine the maps. Even just minor spelling differences means that we have to fiddle around with the data manually where a click or two should be able to do the job for us.

On the other hand, especially in fields where we are not the experts, it is absolutely unrealistic, that we could come up with a pre-defined list of actors, especially if you want to include formal and informal players. And it is one of the big strengths of this method that it allows you to explore actor constellations even in areas where you don’t even really know what questions to ask.

How do we combine the need to explore and be open with the need for consistency in the labeling of data?

In one of our current projects we will try out an approach that is very remotely inspired by the Delphi approach, we will let our experts build on each others’ knowledge: The first interview will start from a blank slate, asking: Who are all the actors involved?

Pythia sitting on the Delphic Tripod Cauldron and a priest

For the second interview we will write all the actors mentioned by interview partner 1 on prepared stickynotes and ask our respondent to choose whichever they want, plus add any that are missing. Interview 3 will have all the actors from 1 and 2 to choose from, plus any that respondent 3 adds.

I’m curious to see how this goes. Will the later Net-Maps have significantly more actors than the earlier ones? Will we find a good balance between openness and consistency? This approach will work better for some questions than for others and it only really makes sense if your final goal is creating a consensus map of a common network. That means it could work for questions such as: “Who is involved in developing this policy?” but not really for questions like  “Who do you personally go to for information about job opportunities?”

Or the other way round.

picture by psp

There might be people out there, who find all the change they need within themselves. But when I look at how Net-Map moved from toys in a cookie tin to what it is now, I know that I met a significant guide at most of the important cross-roads. Someone who says: “This might be the best idea you’ll have in your life, stick with it for a while, don’t run away because you’re bored, don’t assume you’ll invent something more interesting tomorrow” (John Mason of NCRC, Ghana), “Give it a name, turn it into a toolbox, make it a recognizable product – and we’ll help you do it.” (Klaus von Grebmer and his communications team at IFPRI), “WRITE THESE RESEARCH PAPERS! This is how people learn about Net-Map and start taking it seriously.” (Regina Birner at IFPRI), “We’re all doing it and you can also be independent and thrive!” (Mark Steinlin, Nancy White and so many other colleagues at KM4Dev)

Today is my personal international “Thank the change agents day”. It’s amazing how that works, because change has to be outside and within at the same time, this brief moment that is like an opened door. Because we all know how often people encourage us to change this or that and we just feel like: “Leave me alone and mind your own business.” But every once in a while you meet people who hear the change that is brewing in you already and give you the one question, advice, criticism that you need to jump. It does make you wonder: Who or what opens this door?

Ok, in the end you have to do all the hard work to make it happen, and, let me tell you, change never comes for free… But, would you even have tried without this random or pointed remark?

My last change agent encounter was actually with more than one… more than one customer asking me for the same time slot, wanting me to be in different corners of the world at the same time. And then I sat down with my partner in crime Noora Aberman (IFPRI) and we asked ourselves: How can Net-Map grow beyond our own limited capacity? How much sharing and how much control is needed so that it can spread wide and still not be diluted too much? Can I let go? Of what? How does collaboration work if I don’t want to employ?

I don’t know. Yet. But I will find out. And I’m asking all my friends to tell me what they think… So if you have made an idea grow beyond your own limited size – or if you failed to do so and learned a lot along the way – tell me what you have learned and you might be on the golden list on my next “thank the change agents day”…

I just finished an online Net-Map training with a group of people in the UK who focus on improving the accessibility of psychological services to ethnic minority groups. They look at how to improve the interactions between government and third sector (NGOs) in this respect. As part of the training I asked them to draw a Net-Map, because you can’t learn to swim by talking about water.

When we were done, some of the participants gave rather strong feedback, saying that they felt stressed and perturbed by the whole exercise. As one lady put it: “It nearly felt like therapy when you go too deep too soon and don’t know what to do with it afterward.”

Now we have to see how we can tone the question down so that it isn’t too scary for the bigger meeting that this group is preparing to facilitate.

For me this is a great reminder that even if you are a researcher (and not a facilitator as in this case) your responsibility goes beyond finding out whatever you can. Tools like Net-Map are like a spade, which looks harmless enough but depending on where you dig, you can find all kinds of buried stuff. Which doesn’t mean you have to stop digging… Just be aware that any Net-Map is also an intervention (not just information gathering) and you might have more than your intended impact. From my experience I would say this is especially true in any situation where there are great power differences between the different actors involved.

picture by Rachel Ray

Roberta Amaral de Andrade from Brazil used Net-Map to get a better understanding of ” conflicts and opportunities for developing Jequitiba’s Forest Settlement Project”. She took the time to write a reflection  (323 KB) of her experience and allowed me to share it. Two of the struggles she describes are actually rather typical, they are things that often happen to us in our pre-tests so I’ve developed some ideas of how to deal with them so that they aren’t carried over into the actual research.

Let’s call the problem:

BORING SPAGHETTI

Your interviews are poring (for your interview partner and after the first three or so also for you) because the maps are all more or less the same. And they look like a bowl of spaghetti, because there are so many links between the actors. Drawing the links takes up a lot of time but doesn’t generate much new insight. So your data doesn’t tell you much beyond, well, everyone somehow interacts with everyone, but it is also a pain to collect, because it takes hours to draw and even more hours to enter the data.

What happened? I would guess you asked commonly known and agreed upon networks and / or low effort links. Low effort links are for example “exchange information” while a high effort link might be “gives money to” or “fights with”. Commonly agreed upon links are often those that are formal (such as “reports to”).

So why, if I know this can happen and I claim to have a remedy for it, do we commonly run into it in our pre-tests? That’s because you have to know the specific situation, to actually know which links are boring or common and how far you have to up the stakes to get to something more interesting. And to get a first overview over the situation, it makes a lot of sense to look at the formal hierarchy system, general information exchange and similar links that are boring and / or cumbersome if done too often. But if you see that it’s just boring spaghetti all over again, see how you can make it more difficult for your respondent do connect actors with links:

• ask for more specific links: instead of “information flow” this could be “research findings”,  “information about farmer’s performance” or “information about corruption”.
• ask for less formalized links: that’s why you do interviews instead of reading a document, because the different interview partners can tell you about the kinds of friendships, family relations, work coalitions, enemies and information shortcuts that an outsider can’t see.
• ask for links that take more effort: we can greet a lot of people each day but won’t be close friends with all of them, we can give presentations (share information) to a big group of people but will only work closely with few… If the links you ask for require more effort, you will be less likely to link everyone to everyone.
• ask for very different links: I have spent a lot of time drawing funding links in one direction and reporting links between the same actors in the opposite direction… if you realize that two links appear together most of the time, just ask for one of them and substitute the second one for something completely different.
• ask for hot links: When pre-testing, observe which issues (links or aspects of the discussion) heat up the discussion and add some spice to the interview. Follow your intuition and look for things that stir up the interview, that confuse you or make you curious.
• ask for riskier links: this is a recommendation that you have to follow only very carefully, depending on the trust you can develop and the openness with which your interview partners can talk, but sometimes it has proven very interesting to ask for “who annoys whom” or “where are informal money flows”

One final recommendation: Pre-test and take your pre-test seriously. Be aware that you might not know which questions to ask before you actually asked them. It’s so much better to change your questions after a pre-test than to collect a set of boring spaghetti data.

Some weeks back I had a great discussion (or two…) with Siraj Sirajudin of Influence and he was excited about Net-Map. We drew a map about a change process that he facilitates at the moment and came up with a little powerful innovation in the corner of the map. The major driver or draw-back of change processes is the buy-in of those involved. So after adding actors and links to the map the obvious goals to add to the actors were whether their attitude towards change was supportive, neutral or negative. So far, so standard Net-Map. But then we wondered: “So how many people are for or against us, and how powerful are they?” And added a little calculation to the corner, adding up the numbers of individuals in each camp – and adding up their influence towers. So if you stacked all influence towers of the nay-sayers on top  of each other, how high would the resulting super tower be? A little calculation that you can do right there at the table with your participants, and that can have an extremely eye-opening effect. And, as Siraj rightly remarked, sometimes the neutral ones can be a bigger problem than the outspoken opposition.

I know there is even a name for it (but have forgotten what it is called): Sometimes research findings make so much sense, that everyone afterward says: “Well, that’s no surprise, I could have told you that… why did you have to waste so much time and money to find out something that is just common sense?” Well, maybe not everyone says it but you can see it on the faces of even your more polite listeners. And maybe they are right and you have come up with a finding of the innovative power of “Water is wet.” Or: “Wheels are round.”

But it might also be that you just found out something that makes so much sense that it feels to your audience like they should have known it before… even though they didn’t. There is one very easy way of finding out whether you learned something new or something old when drawing Net-Maps: Do a test run before going to the field. Draw a map of how you guess it would be. Sit down with the whole research team to draw a map. Or do it with your client, if you do this research for someone else. Maybe you can even convince the guy who always says “Well, we knew that before…” to sit with you and draw a map of what he actually does know before.

In most cases you will find out (and your audience will as well) that you/your client/your audience didn’t know beforehand what afterward they thought they did. And while it is great and lends a lot of TATAAA to your research, if you can come up with the unexpected, most of the things you will find out (in any field) are things that make sense and thus, somehow, feel familiar. And, honestly, isn’t it a good thing, if your findings make sense?

On a quiet Saturday morning, my baby sleeps longer than I could hope for so I have a few minutes in which I could either finish a proposal, do the dishes or float around in the web, looking for one or two inspiring thoughts. By the fact that I am writing this post, you can guess, that the dishes are still dirty…

Viv McWaters is always a good person to turn to for something to think about. Today I stumbled over the following:

“We act our way into a new way of thinking rather than think our way into a new way of acting.” Which Viv got from the Melbourne Playback Theatre Company

Then she refers to the Cynefin framework, stating that
“in complex environments, what’s needed are ‘multiple small and diverse interventions to create options.’ Probe – Sense – Respond.”

And as the third thought in this series of posts that caught my eye was her pledge to “stop interpreting for others”, that’s what I will do, and not go into lengthy explanation of what I think these things mean or should mean to you.