The Invisible Organization – How Informal Networks can Lead Organizational Change by Neil Famer has been on my book shelf for about 12 months, and I’ve read it three or four times. My heavy pencil annotations in the margins are testament to the usefulness of the book. The book is about applied social and organisational network analysis in a business context – it is not a text book or a book for serious academic application. The central thesis is that organisations have invisible and public structures, both of which can be accommodated and weaved. Farmer argues that weaving both networks will result in improved business communication and a more harmonious workplace.

Farmer says that most of the real leaders are in the invisible organisation and are part of lower echelon small groups. These people are the organisational influencers and they should be cultivated. He claims that all of the formal management hierarchy combined can probably identify less than a third of the local leaders, and that management’s power to influence represents less than 20% of the potential influencing capability across all employees. These are bold claims, but they resonate with me. The problem is if influencers are in the invisible organisation, then how can they be identified and their talents harnessed? This is where social and organisational network analysis comes into play, with a particular emphasis on influence networks.

The method espoused in the book suggests that rather than using a complete data collection methodology an iterative interview approach should be used. This process begins by interviewing known change champions. They are asked who the change positive and open-minded influencers in the organisation are. These individuals are then interviewed, with the process being repeated until no new names emerge. The idea is to quickly and accurately identify change-positive, as opposed to change-negative, influencers with extensive local personal networks. The resultant networks are then mapped and key players identified. These people are then used to weave the network and create a high-performance workplace with deep leadership.

I’ve not explicitly tried this approach, but have plans to do so in the first quarter of 2010 – I’ll blog about it then. I do think there is a huge sample bias, but after all this is the intent! I also think making the tacit explicit has some challenges, and certainly has some ethical issues. A management contract as espoused by Borgatti may overcome this issue. I think some discussion on various network analysis measures is lacking. For example once an influencer network is mapped what would be really interesting is betweenness centrality. Betweenness centrality would reveal who in the influencers keeps that network connected.

All in all I would rate give this book four stars. It has a nice practical and applied approach about it, and should be on the shelf of knowledge managers, human resource specialists, and senior managers looking for effective evidence based methods for organisational reforms that involve a restructure.

Regards Graham