Every month Network Weaver has a virtual Consultants Gathering. In August's gathering, the consultants were asked to share stories about their own successful and fulfilling network experiences.
Below are three stories from Network Weaver consultants in response to this question:
“What is a story of a time that a network offered you value and you were excited enough to prioritize engagement with that network? What were the conditions that enabled this?
A few years ago I was a member of a national network of people working for spiritual and social transformation. Prior to joining I had become aware of the network and felt greatly impressed and inspired by the way the members of the network embodied practices that reflected the values and principles of the network. I deeply desired to join so I could be part of this community that was walking the talk and making a positive impact in the lives of others. I remained part of the network for over ten years.
Reflecting on the conditions that enabled my sustained involvement I thought of the following:
- a clear network structure that allowed people to be involved in the network at different levels of engagement and responsibility.
- a community of support and accountability
- a joyful and meaningful connection to members of the network, true friendships
- a clearly and oft articulated purpose and vision
- opportunities for learning and for contributing to the growth of others
- personal and social development. Self development as well as projects for improving the broader community
- a strong sense of ‘we’, a shared identity
- clear mechanisms of appreciation and votes of trust. These were shown through increased responsibility and participation in decision making etc.
The network that immediately comes to mind is the network I’ve been supporting for almost 7 years now, Food Solutions New England. Though I am technically a consultant, at this point I am very much a member of the family. It was, in some sense, exactly what I was looking for – a “project” to really sink my teeth into and a community where I could find a deeper sense of belonging.
I would say that from the get-go there was something about the quality of the people, the sense of welcome, and of being more authentic and whole with one another that was a draw. People were willing to not just be in their heads, but in their hearts and souls. We shared meals and informal conversation with one another. We shared art and poetry. And there was a sense of truly being in something bigger, a movement, that was larger than any of our individual work. So, trust, authenticity, openness, and compelling purpose all helped.
We have also been committed to diversity, inclusion and equity in a number of different ways, so that there is a commitment to ongoing learning and action, which results in being in rooms with people of a variety of different backgrounds and identities, which is stimulating. Over the seven years of work, there have been threats of plateauing and then we come on another challenge: from building a base of trust, to aligning around a vision, to committing to racial equity, to mapping our system to working on complex solutions, to addressing white privilege and white supremacy culture. Never a dull moment? And we have consistently evolved the structure to meet the needs of where we were moving and growing towards.
I consider the people in this network to be friends, many of whom would really have my back. In this day and age, that feels like an incredible gift.
The network that comes to mind is an international youth network I have been connected to for 10 years now. Focused on internal development and external social initiatives, the network has spun off several different initiatives led mostly by 18-28 year olds.
I think what makes people excited to be involved are:
deep friendships and many different relationships
many opportunities for different experiences to collaborate creatively with one another to develop our practices
collective work that benefits, connects to, and serve others.
There is also an evolving core that brings people back together from time-to-time and shared attention is given to how the economy is developed and the values are practiced
Every month Network Weaver has a virtual Consultants Gathering. In August's gathering, the consultants were asked to share stories about their own successful and fulfilling network experiences.
Below are three stories from Network Weaver consultants in response to this question:
“What is a story of a time that a network offered you value and you were excited enough to prioritize engagement with that network? What were the conditions that enabled this?
At one point some years ago, I was actively engaged with my Truman Scholars Network — listserv posts, meet ups, attending conferences. I was engaged because it was a network of people who shared the same values and same goals as I did—a career in public service—and were passionate about helping each other reach those goals. There was a sense of community and solidarity. We had all survived the infamous Truman selection process and we were in this together. Trumans were in every career field, many of them higher up, and could help you secure connections with others, internships, jobs, and provide help during the graduate admission process. I found some of my best friends in this network.
In November 2017, a network of women who had been victims of gender bias or sexual harassment in the workplace, specifically in Jewish communal settings (synagogues, Jewish schools, and Jewish organizations) began to coalesce. Some of us met in a large group in late November and began to self-organize in small groups around particular areas of urgency or interest. For some of us, current events were enough to motivate us to gather, to talk together, and to learn to listen and respond to each other differently. For others, having been victims or caring for victims propelled us to engage with the network and connect with others. Current events swirling around us were no doubt also a motivating factor that we all used to catalyze our engagement with this developing network and our desire to weave the network into something tighter.
We also knew that without the power that lived within this network--predominantly female and with some men who were allies--we would continue to see a culture of complaint without action emerge, and this would be ultimately unsatisfying. Small spots of action began to emerge within the network, through the relationships that came about inside the network amongst trusted network members. Those outside the network were not deemed as trustworthy as those inside--not trustworthy enough to take part in various actions or to hold the stories of those inside the network.
Half a year has passed and real action has emerged from the group. Ideas which were born inside the network have become professional training for people in organizations on the periphery as the changes the network is seeking are becoming diffused. Those trainings are using network models to make sure that they do not stay as trainings alone but create a strong community of partners who can get the work done after they are trained to make change. Advocates from inside the network are moving from the core to the periphery to carry the messages of this work and the value and need for change out into the world and acting as powerful bridges.
Certainly, this is based on current events. When the world can see women as equal and workplaces as equitable, maybe these networks that are being born and coalescing will disappear. But women are taking the reins here and giving birth to these networks, shaping them and making sure that they are strong, using network principles even where they do not know them, and evolving them into something truly captivating.
I myself found two friends inside this network who wanted to work on a project with me, and we have woven our own network as a part of the larger one around hiring as a specific focus, gathering professionals who have been impacted specifically by issues connected to hiring processes. The energy that has been generated inside this has surprised me--it has not been anger alone but has been directed toward change. Where it could have been anger, the network managed to, as a living and breathing entity, steer toward growth and positivity and appreciation, and we are all energized toward a future that can be about connection and equity over disconnect and imbalance.
I was fortunate enough during my undergraduate work to be matched with a network weaver extraordinaire as a mentor, Dr. Froswa’ Booker-Drew. Although my networking had been effective previously, it was almost entirely intuitive, and she added science and strategy to it. She also trusted me enough to introduce me to those in her network who could help, or who I could help, and modeled network weaving for me. She introduced me to the idea of social capital and leveraging relationships to make change. Years later, she is still a mentor and a friend to me, and has taught me that every relationship has value and how to strategically align my community to make change. I started a nonprofit community after that, Amplify, and today it is 5 years old and 5000+ members strong - we all rely on each other for the collective knowledge and skills we could never have alone!
More stories to come in Wednesday's blog post.
If you have a story you'd like to share, please do so in the comments below, or email info@dev.networkweaver.com
In early September I started collecting #MeToo tweets and stumbled into a big-data look at #MeToo and the Kavanaugh confirmation. As I posted previously, the Twitter network is radically split into red and blue factions. (FiveThirtyEight subsequently wrote about this divide, based not on Twitter but on polls, and arrived at the same conclusion.) Now I want to post an update on this project, which is more than ever a work in progress. I’m especially wanting input from #MeToo movement organizers, who hopefully have real questions that can guide where this research goes next.
I am still collecting tweets. Here is an updated map, showing the same left-right split. The network appears to have a couple significant bridges and a “super-left” tail:
#MeToo twitter network of Sept 25-27
We know it’s been a momentous few weeks for #MeToo. Let’s look at the data. See how #MeToo tweeting spiked over 100,000 per hour on Sept 27, the day of Ford’s testimony.
Five million #MeToo tweets in one week. There was a huge spike of #MeToo tweets Sept 27. The grey bar indicates missing data from Sept 28.
What tweets exactly are being counted? Over Sept 15-27 I curated a list of hashtags to track, aiming to capture #MeToo spirit without taking unnecessary Kavanaugh crossfire. During that time, #BelieveSurvivors grew from zero to the number one trending hashtag on Twitter of Sept 24. My final list of 20 “#MeToo hashtags” also includes #WhyIDidntReport, #BelieveWomen, #MenToo, #MeTooMvmt, #SurvivorCulture, and #HimToo. Below is a word cloud showing all the top hashtags from the 5 million tweets charted above.
Word cloud for all #MeToo tweets Sept 25 – Oct 2
All these maps and charts are a nice start, but how can we better understand what’s happening on the two sides of this “conversation”? One way is to make separate word clouds, one for each side:
Separate word clouds for left and right network clusters
We can see some important differences based on these word clouds, like #HimToo on the right and #WhyIDidntReport on the left. But the differences are obscured by the overwhelming similarities. For example, barely a day after #BelieveSurvivors exploded on the left, it became just as huge on the right, and so both word clouds feature this hashtag prominently, which does not help us understand the differences between left and right.
Let’s look at this problem another way. We’ve got 5 million Tweets from 1.5 million users. Based on network clusters, we can categorize many (maybe most) of those users as “left” or “right.” What happens if we make one bucket of tweets from known “left” users, another bucket of tweets from known “right” users, and then teach a computer program to recognize the difference between a “left” tweet and a “right” tweet? If we succeed, then we can use that computer program to score any #MeToo tweet on left-vs-right partisanship, including tweets from unknown users and without even drawing a network map.
We have formulated a classic problem of machine learning. Skipping some technical detail, we train a classifier to recognize our two categories of #MeToo tweets with roughly 87% accuracy. Not bad. If we crack open the resulting classifier, we find model coefficients that tell us exactly which words are most strongly associated with each side of the #MeToo divide. The bigger the bar, the more influence it has on our “prediction”:
The words listed above do not have any extraneous hashtags that are popular on both sides. We are looking at the most significant single-word indicators that a tweet is either “left” or “right.” The top two and bottom two make perfect sense. The left champions #SurvivorCulture and #StopKavanaugh. The right champions #HimToo (a cry to protect men from false accusations) and #ConfirmKavanaughNow. Some words included in the list are not obviously partisan (#world) and we’d want to do more model-training if we were really serious about classifying lots of future tweets very accurately.
Let’s run with our first-draft model for now. With it, we can actually compute, for any #MeToo tweet, the probability that it’s left or right. If a tweet scores 0.0001, then it’s almost certainly left, and it it scores 0.9999 then it’s almost certainly right. If we can score tweets this way, then we can aggregate tweet scores user by user and estimate how far each individual leans left or right (on a zero-to-one scale), based on what they’re literally saying and without having to bother with a map. Below we see a curve of tweet scores based on Sept 25-27.
The rainbow in the chart above shows how we assign a color to each score value from zero to one. This will be handy when we start assigning scores to nodes and edges in network maps.
Based on the distribution above, let’s consider a more nuanced classification than the binary “left” vs “right.” I’ve proposed four categories, and selected 2-3 of the most-retweeted examples within each category. It looks good at the far ends, with a miss or two in the mid-left and mid-right.
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Far Left: ~500K tweets scoring 0.0-0.15:
"i was raped at Yale. i was groped at parties in dke’s house—#kavanaugh’s fraternity at yale—and was told as a freshman to avoid their “rape basement.” multiple dear friends were raped by yale dke brothers & by boys from elite prep schools. i believe ramirez. #believesurvivors"
"by scheduling a vote on judge kavanaugh before dr. ford has even testified, senate republican leaders are saying loud and clear: they don’t care what she says. #believesurvivors"
"mr. president, enough. a supreme court nomination is not worth more than the lives of survivors. there must be a full investigation of these allegations of criminal behavior, and judge kavanaugh’s nomination must be withdrawn."
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Mid Left: ~300K tweets scoring 0.15-0.35
"ladies, a question for you: “what would you do if all men had a 9pm curfew?” dudes: read the replies and pay attention. #metoo #kavanaugh #cosby #feminism #maleprivilege #privilege"
"tune in as democrats show our support for dr. christine blasey ford. #believesurvivors"
"so, the same party that wants to force teenage boys and girls to shower together in the name of transgender rights is also leading #metoo against sexual predators?"
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Mid-Right: ~200K tweets scoring 0.35-0.75
"modern feminism has never been about equality with men. it has always been about special treatment and exemption from all responsibility. many condemned me for being one of the first to speaking out against #metoo. now it’s toxicity is on full display. #defendourboys"
"you can like or not like @michaelavenatti but what he just put out is a sworn affidavit alleging that kavanaugh and mark judge regularly gang raped women including once his client julie swetnick. i believe survivors."
"it’s all about #metoo & #webelievesurvivors unless the survivors support @realdonaldtrump or the sexual predator is a democrat. ain’t that right @keithellison @maziehirono @senfeinstein & @billclinton @dnc the party of hypocrisy
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Far Right: 100K tweets scoring 0.75-1.0
"i’m loving the hashtag #himtoo. it appears to be a movement built of men who have had their lives and families destroyed by false allegations and a lack of due process. radical feminism has become problematic and needs to be addressed. dr. luke, brett kavanaugh… #himtoo"
"serious question. are keith ellison, sen. sherrod brown, sen. booker and sen. tom carper signing on? i know they’re democrats but thought it’s only fair to ask given their history’s on this subject."
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COMING SOON…
With a good scoring and coloring system, along the lines described above, we can apply those colors to every node and edge of a twitter map, and see “exactly” where left- and right-leaning discussions are happening, along with some shades in between the extremes. Something like this:
Prototype #MeToo Twitter network map, With color spectrum to indicate extent of left vs right expression.
Let me know what you think. I am especially interested in movement organizer folks who have suggestions for improving the relevance and usefulness of this method to provide them with actionable information.
The following video is about 20 minutes long and provides a short overview of network strategies. It was done for the Food Policy Network State Networks, who graciously agreed to let me share it.
The video emphasizes the importance of being part of networks of networks and of catalyzing self-organizing to move us to a more experimental, learning and viral space. Increasingly I’m seeing networks of networks and self-organizing as the key factors needed to shift systems.
Imagine leaving a meeting feeling naturally inspired, energized by new ideas, with enhanced goodwill toward your colleagues, and a shared sense of alignment and clarity for where to go next. In a highly-functioning group, ideas and experiences cross-pollinate, perspectives broaden, assumptions shift, and something new emerges that no one could have discovered alone. Sadly, many people spend a lot of time in meetings, which are boring, routine, frustrating, and do not access the ideas and perspectives of every one in the room.
Here are some of the needs I often hear expressed by people in organizations and those working on positive social change:
Our work is to ‘siloed’ – people are not aware of what others are doing.
Insights or lessons learned are not well communicated so others make the same mistakes or reinvent the wheel
We spent all this time to come up with a plan and now that we are rolling it out, people are resisting and objecting to it – we need better messaging.
How do we convince people to act? To change? To adopt our goals?
In a world of pressing demands and complex challenges, where people want to have impact, take action, and get outcomes, what gets overlooked is the process of how we get there. The how is all about how people are engaged, brought together in meetings, and how they participate, learn, and think and work together. As Atul Guwande, a surgeon and writer says, “Human interaction is the key force in overcoming resistance and speeding change.”
In over 25 years of work in organizations and collaborative initiatives focused on environmental and social change, I have come to realize that meetings hold more potential than we typically access. I have been blessed to discover some great teachers and had the opportunity to learn, experience and practice new ways of working and organizing meetings to achieve multiple benefits (see end of this blog for credits.) We can design meetings to do more.
Design starts with intent, which means becoming aware of the world view and assumptions that inform our choices. I’ve always been inspired by how one quote or question can shed light on and shift my assumptions and intentions. Here I’d like to share the quotes that inspire how I design meetings:
“Are you lighting a candle or filling a bucket?”
There is a tendency to highly script every minute and fill a meeting or workshop with speakers and presentations, squeezing in a bit of Q&A with the participants. If our aim is to spark people’s motivation, willingness to engage and take action, getting the balance right of presentations with conversation is key.
“It’s a far superior strategy to get all the minds working on what needs to change, rather than to convince each person to do what we think is best.” -Fran Peavey
Inviting a group to consider well-framed strategic questions is a great the way to get all minds working on what needs to change. This engagement, when well designed, is what leads to better thinking overall and an experience of participation and contribution. When people help shape a strategy or plan, there is less need for “messaging” and convincing.
“Nothing about us without us.”
This slogan from South African disability activists is a good reminder to have people in the conversation who are closest to the situations being discussed. Aryanna Pressley, who is the running for Congress from Massachusetts, said it well: “The people closest to the pain should be closest to the power.”
“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.” - Albert Einstein
An effective practice for meeting design is to have a design team work ahead of time to consider and distill the most important relevant questions to be considered by the group. As this blog shares, this strategic clarity and investment before the meeting “sets the table” for productive conversations.
“Social learning networks enable better and faster knowledge feedback loops, essential for innovation and creativity…social learning is how we share implicit knowledge and get work done.” – Harold Jarche
Combining a good question with meeting methods that get people talking in small groups and then mixing and cross-pollinating those conversations enables us to access the ‘collective intelligence’ of a group. Methods such as World Café, 1-2-4-All, and Open Space allow many voices to be heard and inform the group’s understanding and development of consensus, as I have written about in other blogs.
On October 11th, I will be hosting a workshop called Designing Meetings that Do More, which will explore more of these ideas. Hope you will join us!
Credits go to (among others):
Art of Hosting, Liberating Structures, World Café, Fran Peavey and strategic questions, Tom Atlee and the Co-Intelligence Institute, Harold Jarche, Time to Think, National Council on Dialogue and Deliberation.
Do you suspect your network has trust problems ? This simple survey, when taken by participants in your network, can pinpoint the nature of your trust challenges. It might be that people are not sharing transparently about what they are doing or it may be that they are not coming through on what they said they would do. Once you can pinpoint major areas of mistrust, your network can talk about those areas and develop strategies to increase trust. [ap_spacing spacing_height="15px"]
Just hand out the survey, or move it to a web platform such as google forms or survey monkey, then aggregate the results, present them to the network and discuss the results.
Trust is a core principle – in Chaos Theory, we’d call trust within human systems a powerful ‘Strange Attractor.’ [ap_spacing spacing_height="15px"]
The purpose of a Change Network is to amplify the flow of knowledge, information, resources, skills, and assets throughout all parts of the network – especially to where they can do the most good. To put everything we can contribute, collectively, into the shifts we’re trying to make – so that change is faster, more meaningful & relevant, and spreads further.
And as one who struggles greatly with trust – it’s glaringly obvious – without trust, nothing significant moves. It’s that simple, and abundantly clear.
But whenever the word comes up in community-work, I cringe a little. Especially in groups with different cultures and privilege gaps. Because what, really, are people espousing?
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What do we mean when we say ‘trust’?
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What IS it we’re trying to create together? And who gets to decide?
"'We must trust each other for this to work' is a dangerous statement. Dangerous because it too often implies that trust is easily or instantly developed. Actually, we have little awareness of how authentic trust is built."
In fact, I’m a little afraid of saying what comes next – so this constitutes a small act of trust that I’ll be forgiven for writing what can’t help but come across as snarky, judgmental, condescending – tho it’s meant more as a contribution – some clues about where to start when things aren’t moving along as hoped-for.
But in my mostly-white, well-educated, middle-class, do-gooder, some-brand-of-spiritual, conflict-averse, organizational-consultant-filled ‘Minnesota nice’ universe, I often feel like the operating definition of trust is stiflingly narrow, superficial, insensitive and – ultimately dominating and destructive. I trust that’s no-one’s intention, but intentions are rarely enough.
I’ve often felt like I’m being told or seen others being told: ‘never challenge me’, ‘never create a conflict I have to sit in the middle of’ and ‘never do anything I wouldn’t do, because that frightens me.’
In other words – Trust as ‘no overt challenge to anyone’s (especially the speaker’s) cherished beliefs & behaviors.’ (or even, ‘trust’ as the tool for shutting out what anyone who is different is trying to contribute, ‘trust’ as the reframing of ‘intended contribution’ to ‘attack’). The rare exceptions make the norm more glaring.
I’m exaggerating (just a little ) and maybe it’s just my own trust issues filter, but what I often hear when the topic of trust comes up – is ‘YOU need to trust ME (precisely as I am behaving in this moment, even if it’s not what you find trust-worthy, and without discussion of said behavior). Or else it’s ‘I CANNOT trust YOU unless YOU be different than you are (and don’t bother explaining or clarifying yourself, because my mild manner proves my rightness & you are broken, crazy, mean, not spiritual enough’).
I almost never hear ‘How can I earn YOUR trust?’ or ‘How are MY social norms excluding, devaluing, controlling YOU?’ I never hear ‘I DON’T KNOW HOW to trust what’s going on, but I don’t want to shut it down – I want help understanding it so I can learn to react to this sort of situation differently.” (all of these, I notice, require real vulnerability. . . )
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Presuming upon trust is hazardous
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My own (admittedly still sometimes hyper-vigilant) gut often says ‘in this context Trust means ‘don’t push members of the dominant culture out of their comfort zones’.
The dominants are usually the only ones who feel safe enough to express when & what they don’t trust. For everyone else, just showing up as ‘different’ is uncomfortable enough. Expressing mistrust of dominant norms – I can attest – is hazardous – and that perceived call to safeguard privileged comfort zones just pushes the mistrust further below the surface – making it that much harder to correlate with more mundane problems and that much harder to heal.
As a person who grew up in poverty & chaos – expecting to trust, deep down, still feels like a privilege & a luxury to me. I envy (and occasionally resent) people with stable lives, trustworthy families & trustworthy friends – people who feel safe in community & actually believe others will support them when needed. They have a beautiful Ease the rest of us lack. My years of working on my own trust-worthiness and trust issues has taught me to recognize both the presence and the absence of that Ease in others. And to mourn the amount of time I’ve engaged in the world without it.
To me, trust is rare, super-hard-won and precious, whether I’m earning it or bestowing it. A most fragile gift we are lucky to share (though luck has nothing to do with it).
Trust is not something we can demand from one another. It’s not something we can decide to feel because it’s expected of us. We can TRY to feel it, we can PRETEND that we feel it – and what a mess THAT creates!!
Trust is also absolutely NOT an effective tool for controlling others, or for keeping ourselves safe. But, too often, that seems either it’s unconscious purpose or it’s unintended consequence.
Because of the rarity of trust in my own life (in both directions, I freely admit), I may know some things about trust that those who take it for granted can’t know. It’s a reality I’ve had to study, struggle with, learn to apprehend & to value. Which is why I can say, with conviction – that beautiful Ease people have when they trust, not only is it palpable & lovely – it makes all sorts of magic possible.
I’ve lived in enough of both trust & not-trust to know this – trust is what makes transformation possible. It helps things fall into place. It creates a flow of value and met-needs so much greater than anything we can create without it.
But within a broader culture of separation & domination & exploitation – trust is hard to muster, it takes work.
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Approaching trust with humility
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So when we’re aiming to build change networks, I think we’d all benefit from a far more patient & nuanced understanding of Trust. As something emergent, not manufactured. And understanding that especially, especially, especially when we belong to the dominant culture of any given context, or wherever we have rank or privilege, there are more layers to it than we can perceive on our own.
Let’s learn – from scratch and not from what we were raised with – how to earn it from one another and/or how to give it to one another- knowing there is no direct path or single route, that for every small group and ‘two-sie’ it’s different, and that, especially for those who have historically been excluded, it’s asking a lot).
Let’s learn to recognize its presence, and not accidentally spoil the trust we’ve been given.
Let’s also learn to recognize the lack of trust and to honor its absence – because that lack comes from real stuff. We can’t pooh-poo away mistrust with platitudes & empty promises, and until we can see where Trust isn’t, we can’t begin to revive it.
Of course, there are more elements to network weaving and more elements to social change. But when we lose track of or trivialize this foundation, all those other elements are going to be less effective.
[ap_spacing spacing_height="25px"]Trust makes it’s own, often uncomfortable, demands
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This post was meant to be a single brief paragraph introducing some thoughts on kinds of trust that we can learn to work on. I guess my own trust issues needed to be heard from before they were ready to let me be more pragmatic.
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Originally Published by Christine Capra on October 12, 2015 at GreaterthantheSum.com
Trust in networks is different than trust in organizations or coalitions where it is essential to spend time building trust among everyone because the relationships are likely to be long-term.
However, networks often have hundreds or even thousands of participants and it is not possible for everyone to know everyone else in the network, let alone have the time to build deep relationships. People in self-organizing networks are often involved in a number of collaborative projects at any one time, but these projects are often of short duration with little time to build deep trust, and after the end of the project they may not work with those individuals again.
For this reason, people in networks need to learn how to build swift trust. Swift trust, explored by Debra Meyerson and colleagues, means that the participants of a collaborative project interact as if trust were present.
Several things make establishing swift trust easier. First, when a few of the collaborators have had previous experience working together, they can set the tone or standard of trustworthiness that others buy into. For example, they can model openness, appreciation and other qualities that help everyone be more trustworthy.
Another key to swift trust is the communications ecosystem and values. By agreeing to be transparent and make all their work easy to observe and be accessed by others, it’s easy for all participants to see that others are doing the work they said they would do. That’s why it’s so important to use tools like google docs and set up task and timeline spreadsheets, a place for meeting notes and a budget and expense spreadsheet. Slack is another tool that helps people see what others are doing.
Another essential ingredient of swift trust is taking time to clarify roles in the project based on specific expertise. For example, I am in a collaborative project where one person is responsible for developing content, another for the tech aspects of the virtual sessions, and other for the communications. This doesn’t mean that each person does all the work in their area - in fact, we often work together on content - but one person is responsible for moving that part forward. The clearer the roles are to everyone, the less conflict is likely to occur.
As in any situation, it’s always important to take time to help people know each other: even if the group is working virtually, it’s easy to set up breakout rooms in zoom.us where smaller groups or dyads can share about themselves. If the project has a convener, it’s helpful for them to state values such as “We are all unique, and each of us has quirks or things about ourselves that can affect our work. For example, one person has a child with a chronic illness; another person may be very introverted. We need to get to know people so that we know about these things and realize the parent may be called away from work to care for the child and we need to make sure the introverted person has space to talk.”
Having skills in dealing with a person when they do not do what they have agreed to do is essential. People quickly become more reliable if small infractions are dealt with immediately and directly (often through a one on one conversation).
If someone proves to be difficult to work with or untrustworthy, they will find that they are not included in future network collaborations. This is a powerful incentive for most people to contribute as positively as they can. Word of mouth that occurs in the network means that effective contributors will find they are frequently sought after for projects.
Undergirding swift trust is a set of network values and understandings - things such as openness, transparency, acceptance of difference.Network weavers can help ensure that most network participants are aware of these values.
On Friday we will offer a free Trust Assessment that network weavers can use to increase network participants awareness of these critical elements of trust. [ap_spacing spacing_height="30px"]
“Relationship is the fundamental truth of this world of appearance,”
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Over the past several years of supporting networks for social change, we at IISC have been constantly evolving our understanding of what is new and different when we call something a network, as opposed to a coalition, collaborative or alliance. On the surface, much can look the same, and one might also say that coalitions, collaboratives and alliances are simply different forms of networks. While this is true, it is also the case that not every collaborative form maximizes network effects, including small world reach, rapid dissemination, adaptability, resilience and system change. In this regard, experience shows that a big difference maker is when participants in a network (or an organization, for that matter) embrace new ways of seeing, thinking, and doing. The following revised list continues to evolve as our own practice and understanding does, and it speaks to a number of network principles to guide thinking and action: [ap_spacing spacing_height="20px"]
1. Adaptability instead of control
Thinking in terms of networks means leading with an interest in adaptation over time. Given the complexity of the situations we are often called to help address, it is difficult for any actor or “leader” to know exactly what must be done, much less keep a diverse and decentralized social structure moving in lockstep. Iterative design and adaptive strategy serve us better. [ap_spacing spacing_height="20px"]
2. Contribution before credentials
You may have heard the story about the custodial staff person in a shoe company who anonymously submitted his idea for a new shoe design during a company-wide contest, and won. Or the homeschooled teenager who contributed tremendously helpful information on nitrogen pollution to an open and crowdsourced call for research. “Expertise” and seniority can serve as a bottle neck and buzz kill in many organizations, where ego gets in the way of excellence and vital experience. If we are looking for new and better thinking, it should not matter from whence it comes. [ap_spacing spacing_height="20px"]
“Your generosity is more important than your perfection.”
-Seth Godin
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[ap_spacing spacing_height="20px"]3. Giving first, not taking
You’ll see it when you create it. Often people are drawn to networks by the promise of abundance, but stand back and wait for something to happen. The key to generativity is generosity, to being first to make a humble offering – of ideas, truth, courage, attention and other resources. The fear of having an already scarce pie became further divided is fulfilled by the failure to give, to give freely and fully of our experience, gifts and excess capacities. For more on the importance of giving, see Adam Grant’s work.[ap_spacing spacing_height="20px"]
4. Resilience and redundancy instead of rock stardom
You see it on sports teams all the time. When the star player goes down, if the team is built around said star, so goes the team. Resilient networks are built upon redundancy of function and a richness of interconnections, so that if one node goes away, the network can adjust and continue its work[ap_spacing spacing_height="20px"]
5. Diversity and divergence rather than the usual suspects and forced agreement
New thinking comes from the meeting of different fields, experience, and perspectives. Preaching to the choir gets us the same old (and tired) hymn. Furthermore, innovation is not a result of dictating or choosing from what is, but expanding options, moving from convergent (and what often passes for strategic) thinking to “design thinking.” And network action is not simply about everyone having to engage in one big effort, but cooperation and parallel play[ap_spacing spacing_height="20px"]
6. Intricacy and flow not bottlenecks and hoarding
Networks are key to supporting life and liveliness – life is after all a network. A constant threat to aliveness is rigidity, hoarding and exclusion. Economically we are seeing plenty of evidence of this, pushing us towards what Jane Jacobs once called socio-economic “necrosis.” With hyper-concentration of resources, patterns of exclusion and growing inequality, we see the entire system put at risk. The antidote is robust, diversified local networks that are connected to other such networks, which are collectively able to move resources of many kinds fluidly from and to all parts of the social body.[ap_spacing spacing_height="20px"]
Keep reaching out, keep interconnecting, keep things flowing.
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[ap_spacing spacing_height="30px"]7. Self-organization and emergence rather than permission and the pursuit of perfection
As with any complex living system, when a group of people comes together, we cannot always know what it is that they will create. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Vying for the predictable means short-changing ourselves of new possibilities, one of the great promises of networks. Furthermore, network effects and change stem from many different experiments rather than looking for the single best answer. [ap_spacing spacing_height="20px"]
8. Shift focus from core to the periphery
As living entities, networks are defined by the nature and quality of their edges. The core of the network tends to be made up of those who are most connected to others in the network, as well as interested in and engaged in the work (albeit in some cases through exclusionary dynamics of power and privilege). Those on the edge, or periphery, may be less connected and engaged, and also bring considerable strength, to the extent that they provide lessons about adaptation, a willingness and ability to play in different spaces, and have connections to other important domains. In many cases, there is strength in following the lead of the margins. As Ceasar McDowell says:[ap_spacing spacing_height="20px"]
“If you take a tent and you stake it far out at the margins … the middle is always covered. And the further out you stake it the stronger the structure you get. And why is that? Because in our systems and our social systems the people at the margins are actually living with the failures of the systems. And they are creating adaptive solutions to them. So when we design to take care of them we build stronger systems for everyone.” [ap_spacing spacing_height="20px"]
[ap_spacing spacing_height="30px"]9. From working in isolation to working with others and/or out loud
I recently spoke to a leader of an amazing organization in Pennsylvania who was bemoaning the situation where a number of his newer staff thought that “getting the job done” meant paying attention to the tasks on their list and working on them in an independent and efficient way. What they were not doing was involving others, communicating about what they were working on, where they were in their process and what they were learning as a result. One network mantra I have heard is “Never work alone.”Or to put a more positive spin on it, “Work in good company.”Why? Because our thinking and ideas are made better by others. Furthermore, sharing our work is crucial since communication is the lifeblood of networks (and networked organizations) if they are to be intelligently adaptive and resilient to changing and challenging times. Even it we are physically alone, we can show and share our work in helpful ways, to ourselves and others, using virtual tools. [ap_spacing spacing_height="20px"]
10. From “Who’s the Leader?” to “We’re the Leaders!”
Leadership can be a confusing and fraught concept. In certain quarters there is still glorification of and deference given to heroic individuals, with little recognition of the interdependent nature of, well, everything! The late Mila N. Baker made the case that the individualized and command-and-control leadership lexicon is grossly insufficient for our changing, complex, and interconnected world. She promoted the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) IT architectures as models for thinking about leadership and how people organize themselves. In P2P arrangements, everyone becomes a generative and recipient node in a network, and has easy access to other nodes. This embodiment of leadership is stymied by rigid hierarchies, fixed positional authority and purely transactional mindsets (without regard to underlying and authentic relationships). Flipping this script means seeking arrangements where everyone leads and follows, trust and reciprocity are fundamental values and thriving is linked to connection. [ap_spacing spacing_height="20px"]
What might the integration of these principles do to the way you lead and do your work? What opportunities and outcomes might be created? [ap_spacing spacing_height="20px"]
