Are you familiar with this word?  Let’s see what a quick Internet search reveals:

Some Meanings

According to our friends at Wikipedia, ”Hetaerarchy can be defined as an organizational form somewhere between hierarchy and network that provides horizontal links that permit different elements of an organization to cooperate whilst individually optimizing different success criteria.”  Huh? 

Maybe the folks at dictionary.com can help:  ”The government of an alien.”.  Ok…

The site yourdictionary.com says, “Originally, today’s word meant “rule by aliens or foreigners” but it is gaining currency today in reference to a form of institutional organization based on distributed intelligence and collaborative decisions rather than hierarchical structures. A heterarchy is an organizational structure resembling a network rather than the top-down tree of a hierarchy.” Now we’re getting somewhere!

Say “Hello!” To Social Networks 

Time to pull in the experts.  I had the incredible opportunity this past May to experience a keynote presentation with Dr. Karen Stephenson.   A Harvard-trained anthropologist, she now works as a “corporate anthropologist.”  Her consulting firm is Netform. More here on her background, work, and accolades.

KS

Subject To The Laws of Mathematics

Social Networks are not about people meeting in ‘industry vertical’ groups or marketing cohorts.  The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics has a study by Lada A. Adamic here that summarizes an example of a social network.  Social network theory comes from graphs theory in math.  The concepts are not new - just a lot more prevalent and applicable with the ability to mine data within organizations. 

(If you really want to get into the science of social networks, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America has a detailed study titled, “Random Graph Models of Social Networks” by M. E. J. Newman, D. J. Watts, and S. H. Strogatz here.)

Hub v. Gatekeeper v. Pulse Taker

Dr. Stephenson uses these three key network nodes to assist in analyses. Hub is where traditionally the power/information/center of the network lies.  Gatekeeper controls the flow of information from the networks to/from the Hub.  Pulse Taker is the position(s) in an organization that really know what is going on with any given situation.

Relationships Drive Sustainable Results

Social networks, heterarchy, is ”decoding culture.” It is not about mapping networks - it is about intelligent meshing of hierarchy and network.  In an article written for http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/, ”Connecting the Corporate Dots: Social Networks Reveal How Employees and Companies Operate” (free membership required), we get a better sense of what is meant by, “it is who you know, not what you know.”

Could social networks be the next frontier for continuous improvement and organizational structure work? How do you decode culture in your organization?

Joe Raasch :: Aug.24.2007 :: Change Management, Innovation, Organizational Development :: No Comments »