In his classic novel Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut explains how the world is divided into two types of social organizations: the karass and the granfalloon. A karass is a spontaneously forming group, joined by unpredictable links, that actually gets stuff done. A granfalloon, on the other hand, is a “false karass,” a bureaucratic structure that looks like a team but is “meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done.”
For most of the past 50 years, computers have been on the side of the granfalloons, good at maintaining bureaucratic structures and blind to more nuanced social interactions. But a new kind of software called social-network mapping promises to change all that. Instead of polishing up the org chart, the new social maps are designed to locate karasses wherever they emerge. Mapping social networks turns out to be one of those computational problems- like factoring pi out to a hundred decimal points or rendering complex light patterns on a 3-D shape- that computers can do effortlessly if you give them the right data.
- Building Better Organizational Networks
- Computer Programs for Social Network Analysis
- Greg Satell
- How Org Charts Lie
- Is This Any Way to Make a Decision?
- Knowledge Networks: Mapping and Measuring Knowledge Creation, Re-use and Flow
- Lessons from the Ant Farm
- Managing Corporate Social Networks
- Managing the Connected Organization
- Mapping Employee Chitchat Can Reveal Information Blockages
- Model Behavior
- On Trust and Culture
- orgnet.com
- Relationship Science: Harnessing Big Data for Power Networking
- Tapping the Power of Hidden Influencers
- The Craft of Connection
- The Hidden Power of Social Networks
- The Quantum Theory of Trust
- The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
- To Understand Whether Your Company Is Inclusive, Map How Your Employees Interact
- Understanding Your Social Network and How to Use It
- What You Can Learn from Your Employee Networks
- Who Knows Whom, And Who Knows What?
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