Pitfalls of networks: a cage went in search of a bird

A solitary tree on a hill in a field near Buonconvento, Tuscany that we encountered on a trek in May. Is this a network?

Over the past few months I have had several conversations with clients and colleagues about networks.  The common theme seems to be “how can we start a network or how can we get a network to do something we need it to do…?” In all of these conversations I have noticed that the common theme seems to be starting with the ideal structure and imagining there is a straightforward way to create and then maintain it.

My favourite Franz Kafka quote is “A cage went in search of a bird.”  It’s from his collection of aphorisms written in Zaurau (No. 16, to be specific). I remember reading it as a young man of fifteen when a friend gave me a book of Kafka’s writings.  I felt smart tucking into the book, but so many of his observations and aphorisms went over my head.  Especially this one, which is the shortest and therefore the one I committed to memory. 

It took me something like 30 years to fully understand it and as I developed my practice in working with facilitation and organizational development, this aphorism kept coming back at me. In project after project, I saw people craving just the right structure.  “If we just organized ourselves in the right way,” the thinking went, “we’d be able to get everything done.”

I have seen this mindset lead to some truly tragic consequences. Beyond the kind of “analysis paralysis” that groups get into I have watched groups scrap over structures for managing program money that have taken years to decide, while the money for the work slowly leaked away. I have witnessed groups locked in ideological battles over leadership and hierarchy that became unresolved. I have seen people fall in love with a single facilitation tool and use it everywhere with no regard context. There always seemed to be the idea that somehow there was an ideal structure out there that, once designed and implemented, would remain stable and anchored. This is rarely the case for any organizational structure, let alone networks. And working in deep complexity takes this to a whole other level.

In their seminal 2006 publication Using Emergence to Take Social Innovation to Scale, Meg Wheatley and Deborah Frieze discussed the idea that networks are merely the first stage in the emergence of systems of influence. New ways of doing things start from the connections that for between folks who are acting on individual interest. In the life cycle of emergence, Wheatley and Frieze observed that networks can create the conditions for the emergence of a shared purpose. That transforms a network to a community of practice and introduces the important tension between care for individual interest and care for collective interest.

Wheatley and Frieze were writing in a time before social media became the dominant form of how people experience the World Wide Web. At that time, people were discovering each other through the communities that arose across the internet, as they had since the early 1990s when connectivity made this phenomenon possible. Jon Husband called this shift “from hierarchy to wirearchy” and it marked a time of excitement as people began to see how self-interested connectivity on a global scale could undermine the control and power of dominator hierarchies. It was a brief moment of optimism about networks, before the network was captured by big tech and venture capital who managed to wall the gardens, contain and monetize connection, and then subvert the power of people to find one another by introducing and algorithm that drove people apart. In future centuries this shift may be considered a crime against humanity.

Wheatley and Frieze were prescient in their observations that networks are only the beginning of social change, not the end. What was implied was that the full journey of emergence needs to be supported if we are to find new ways of being together.

So my first response to folks who are desperate to create networks is “what do you think comes next?” This question is best answered by focusing on the necessity and purpose of the work at hand, becasue in a complex system, that can become the powerful attractor that catalyses new structures and ways of working together that sustain and stabilize intention. This trajectory is why the Chaordic Stepping Stones is so critical to our work with complex challenges: it takes the emphasis off of structure and places it on the generative core of the work. My theory of change is complexity, but my theory of stability hinges on returning to the core of the work to discern whether the way we are doing things is connected to the urgent necessity of the context.

Networks are not the answer; they are an option. They are useful if the need is for people to pursue loose connections rooted in self-interest. But anything more permanent or more powerful than that requires a concentration of effort on a shared purpose.

Furthermore, I don’t think a network, the way most people think about them, is something that you can design and predict and then implement and manage. A network is just the connections you notice between people, places, things and ideas. You can map these connections, but for the purposes of working with emergence, you have to be humble enough to realize that the map is only what you can see, that the connections and white spaces on your map are all very different, and that the moment you have mapped something as adaptive as a network, it changes shape. For rapidly changing contexts in which people are working together in highly emergent situations, network mapping might even be a waste of time.

If you want people in a network to engage in common cause you need to catalyze attractors that get them there. And you need affordances for action. Catalyzing attractors is not a guaranteed effort. Some folks are so comfortable in a networked environment that they will eschew any effort to develop a higher level of structure with accountabilities, principles, roles and shared purposes. If you are trying to get a network to do something that has a higher level purpose than any one person’s desire to participate, you are no longer in a network but you are beginning to create a community of practice or an organization. In Wheatley and Frieze’s model, which became the Two Loops model as we explored it over many years within the Berkana network, communities of practice are nascent structures in the development of organizations from emergent connections. This can be a vulnerable time for an effort. I recently worked with a few different nascent organizations who had managed to secure resources to hire a full or a part-time coordinator. The problem these quasi-staff people faced was that the work at the core of their structure was held mostly by them, and only partially by others. A powerful idea or even a shared urgent necessity is not always enough of an attractor to precipitate an organization. This is what makes collaborative work so hard. Either a strong a committed individual arises to steward the new structure into being, or a slower process takes place where shared power and responsibility emerge, usually defying any one person’s ability to control it.

In this particular day and age, there are very few examples I have encountered where a small group of people working in a network have been able to focus a relatively equal amount of commitment to turning their network into a stable community or organization. It requires that folks find an attractor around which they gather to the exclusion of many of the other important things they are doing in their lives. When people say they “don’t have time” many of these efforts simply wither away. You can’t “strengthen a network” without doing things that will induce people to devote more of their precise resources of time and attention to the effort. There is no “more with less” here. And a staff person doesn’t always help.

So what to do? Here are a few pieces of hard won advice that shape my own practice and exploratory conversations with clients.

Defer the conversation on structure. When you feel like you need to find the ideal structure or the conversations starts with the “how” questions, back up a few steps and be sure you understand the “why?” The Chaordic Stepping Stones help me to do this, and it’s a useful way to have a conversation with a client or a team. Once you start to see the “why,” the “how” becomes clearer.

Don’t map the network first. Map the territory. This is a key move when working with complexity. A network might not be right structure. Even when you do sit down to map out a network, pay very close attention to the context in which all of these relationships are embedded. That context will enable structures to develop in certain ways and not others. If you find yourself struggling to launch a network or any kind of structure it’s because you are discovering blockages within the context and/or parts of the network you can’t see. Every human system has layers in which it is embedded. Sometimes we call this culture, but whatever you call it, don’t believe that your network diagram alone is the be all and end all of your strategic decision making.

You never see the whole picture in complexity. So start close in, with what you know, with what seems obvious, with connections that are stable and resilient. If they have survived through different changing environments they may represent the seed of the stability and shared purpose you are looking for. But beware, sometimes solid and stable connections can get in the way of new structures emerging.