In the coming weeks I am presenting to diverse groups on topics ranging from Business Network Analysis™, to ethics and leadership, and the RAAAKERS™ framework. In keeping with my open sharing practice I will post all papers and presentations to this website, if I haven't already done so.

This week I am presenting to the Australian Medical Students Association (AMSA) on leadership and ethics. AMSA is the peak representative body for medical students in Australia. I expect them to be a challenging group, but in turn I intend to challenge them by using the 1994 Rwandan genocide as my case study. My presentation will build on the theme that ethical dilemmas create leadership challenges and poor decisions create ethical dilemmas.

The following week I will be giving two presentations to the Defence Operations Research Symposium, which will be attended by Defence scientists from ...

read more ...

Rwanda: A Case Study in Ethical and Leadership Dilemmas . A presentation on operational ethics periodically given to the Australian Defence College , and occasionally to other organisations. Warning: Some photographs are gruesome .

I’m annoyed today because twice in less than a week I have been asked by a client to brief consultants masquerading as academics on how I did a business network analysis. To make matters worse a scientist internal to the organisation asked me by e-mail today to:

“Please provide me a copy of your presentation and all your data so that I can brief my boss.”

I have a couple of irritations here. The first is a lack of transparency, dare I say honesty, on behalf of the academics. In both cases it did not emerge until the end of the brief that they were not working for the internal scientific organisation (something my client did not know), and that they were in fact working as independently contracted consultants. I might add their hourly rates are more than twice mine! Yes they are loosely affiliated with my client’s scientific organisation, but they do not work for it and are not reporting to it. I wouldn’t mind so much if they were validating my work but they aren’t. Why do I feel like they are stealing my ideas? Probably because their non-disclosure was unethical! ..,

read more ...

It’s been a very interesting, challenging, and exhausting week. I had planned to do a couple of blog posts but instead got myself into a controversy on the actKM list . The controversy began with a post by Doctor Leoni Warne, on behalf of Doctor Elayne Coakes , with the simple request to “Please consider responding to the appended KM Survey”. A harmless enough and reasonable request you think, but how wrong you are! The controversy began in earnest with the sixth post, when David Snowden , the Alpha on the list, posted the following:

“Come on guys - we all know that these surveys are a game to get people degrees or for established academics to meet the performance criterial for publication in their Universities. In the main they have no value and arise from a perverted self-referential concept of research which is endemic in management and social science. However people's degrees and jobs are on line if they can't get them complete. Help them, fill it in (and random if necessary) but don't take it seriously”.

Now David has posted similar things in the past including comments along the lines of – “I tend to feel sorry for them and fill them in at random, or get my children to do the same. Given the lack of context on the questions random answers have the same validity as considered ones”. Knowing this I posted the following comment: ...

read more ...

I’ve been engaged in a blog-post discussion with Euan Semple on “The map is not the territory ”. I won’t bore you with all the details as you can read it for yourself, but I will take the opportunity to address two of his and his readers’ points in a bit more detail. The first is to do with network analysis focusing myopically on one group – this will be the subject of a later blog-post. The second, and to my mind the most important, is network analysis ethics. This is a subject that was hinted at on Euan’s blog-post, but not directly discussed. At this point it is necessary to snip from Euan’s blog-post, and some of the comments, to give some context.

Euan said – “If I felt that someone else was mapping my conversions and the relationships they represented - and wasn't prepared to have the same done to them, I would soon stop talking”.

Jon Husband commented on the quote by saying - “... or were not completely transparent about the purpose of the mapping (including attempts to enhance productivity and top-down control). People will, I think, automatically assume these are key purposes, why wouldn't they ?”

Steve Dale said – “Euan, absolutely agree with your sentiments. I detect a form of management paranoia; they don't really understand what social networking is all about, they don't want to dip their toes into what they consider to be muddy water, yet at the same they want to understand it in the only way that makes sense to them - numbers and statistics. What worries me are the conclusions they may draw from this imprecise and flawed method of evaluation!”

Now all three quotes have some legitimacy, and can be boiled down to a question of ethics, and perhaps this is where all three gentlemen have had a bad experience?! Ethics in network analysis is a vexed question for a few reasons. First, in a social network analysis even if someone declines to participate it is likely that others will use their name and say they have a relationship. This means that non-response does not immediately guarantee omission from the study. Second it is possible for data, and the report, to be used in unintended ways or to be misinterpreted – see my Senior Officer Interest Lights (SOILs) blog-post for an example of misinterpretation.

Professor Steve Borgatti , the inventor of UCINET , has addressed these issues in detail in his paper “Toward ethical guidelines for network research in organizations ”. As far as I am concerned this is a seminal and must-read paper for anyone practicing, or intending to practice network analysis! ...

read more ...

One of my interests is philosophy, and in particular epistemology and ethics . I provide an invited presentation to the Australian Defence College twice a year titled – “Rwanda: A Case Study in Ethical and Leadership Dilemmas ” . The key points of the presentation are:

• Ethics are reflective of societal norms and vary within society and groups.
• Ethics are as much an attitude as they are a set of values, skills and knowledge.
• Ethics are not constant – they will vary from society to society, and group to group.
• Decisions are developed within an attitudinal framework.
• Do not expect your colleagues to apply your own ethics to their decisions.
• The focus should be on decision making, not on issues of ethics in isolation.

But I digress. Pat Byrne sent me this link to the Carnegie Council website , which is a great resource for anyone interested in ethics. (A good Australian resource is the St James Ethics Centre ). What caught my attention was the Ethical Blog Project , which naturally has its own blog called “The Ethical Blogger ”. Apparently this blog attracts thousands of visitors a day, and has been nominated by Google as a blog of note. I’ve added it to my bookmarks.

read more ...