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The Network How Your Business Really Works Reprinted with Permission offficeinsight - a news weekly for office professionals (*).
I can't imaging doing an adjacency study without taking into account Karen Stephenson's work,- said Neil Frankel, president of the IIDA, principal of Frankel + Coleman, and former director of design for SOM Chicago. The occasion was the 2nd annual IIDA International Design Congress last November. Ms Stephenson was a featured speaker at the event, the focus of which was "the future of interior design." Her specialty is networks, the webs made of the invisible threads through which much of an organization's communications and knowledge are actually transmitted. We are defined by our relationships. Identifying those relationships and how they really work is Ms Stephenson's business and profession. Networks are based on personal trust, says Ms Stephenson, and are achieved largely through face-to-face encounters. One of Ms Stephenson's many insights is that these "warm and fuzzy" relationships are, in fact, the repository of much of an organization's proprietary "how-to" knowledge and, often, function as highly coercive structures used to monopolize organizational resources. (The "old boys" had it right all along.) Ms Stephenson, trained as a cultural/corporate anthropologist, spent the last 10 years at UCLA's Anderson School of Business gathering -the worlds largest database of corporate networks." Her findings have been published widely in Forbes, The Economist, CIO Magazine, Fast Company, The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, as well as many academic and professional journals. Networks have their origin in tribal societies and have always been part of the fabric of our personal and professional lives. But now, after 20 years of research, experts have determined that networks have predictable patterns which can be accurately identified and diagnosed. A culture can be X-rayed for its networks. Once identified, networks can be efficiently managed to affect the rate and substance of any change and utilized to accomplish tasks efficiently and effectively. A network analysis will identify the Hubs, Gatekeepers and Pulse-takers, a network's focal points or DNA. Want to put out a message- Talk to the Hubs. Did your message get out? Ask the Pulse-takers what they have heard. If it didn't, ask the Gatekeepers why. Studies of networks have considerable implications for office design. Alternative office concepts advance the idea that work environments should be designed to reflect how knowledge workers really work. The theory is that this will facilitate flexibility, innovation and productivity. Proof of benefits, however, is difficult to obtain. One reason may be that our ideas of how people actually work is incorrect, being derived from common sense and first generation information gathering methods such as questionnaires, focus groups and other 2 dimensional polling tools. Errors at this level make accurate measurements impossible. With the results of Ms Stephenson's work becoming generally available some of these difficulties may be overcome. And, every facility manager and interior designer can now look forward to that long-sought-after, first meeting with a client's senior executives, where the first question asked about the new office plan will be: " How will this plan affect our networks?" Among the subsidiary questions which immediately come to mind are: How is network formation affected when employees
telecommute or work in hotelling environments' Does traditional office design senior management in formal offices and more junior employees in open systems represent an appropriate, well balanced hierarchical/ networking arrangement for many businesses? What are the net efficiencies when facilities managers/interior designers save real estate costs by moving employees to new locations or different types of offices if, as a result, needed networks are destroyed or prevented from forming? What message is being sent when a CEO: (a) moves his or her office to an open-floor design? (b) maintains his/her office on the executive floor or retains the 4-walled, corner office?
The implications and applications of the network study conducted by Ms Stephenson and others is vast and go far beyond usual concerns of office design. Here are a view samples from her writings that indicate the range and importance of the areas touched by her work: Knowledge Capital: An organization?s intellectual
capital its collective knowl-edge and experience is its most valuable
asset. Knowledge capital is often untapped, however, because it
resides entirely within employees connected in invisible, "informal"
networks. NetForm [Ms Stephenson's business] enables an organization
to visualize and diagnose the informal networks and thereby leverage
the embedded knowledge capital for a variety of strategic initiatives.
Hierarchies: The organizational chart, so meticulously planned and prominently displayed, often should be ignored. Hierarchies form as rules and procedures harden and begin to define, rather than guide, behavior. This facilitates the dissemination and use of accumulated knowledge but, by its very nature, retards or stops innovation, which is counter-cultural, unruly and dependent upon nonlinear thinking.
According to Ms Stephenson, NetForm is a diagnostic tool which will provide a bird's-eye view of an organization's knowledge capital and enable facilities managers, and interior designers and others to analyze network structures along various dimensions: local and global issues, across division boundaries, up and down hierarchical levels. It is quite possible that Ms Stephenson will be one of the Pied Pipers leading the evolution of the interior design profession into a multi-disciplinary practice in the 21st century. Her data, organization and systematic analysis of networks will be of particular interest to those interior designers, facilities managers, corporate consultants, human resource executives who provide strategic, planning or programming advice to the most senior executives of corporations and other organizations. Karen Stephenson received her Ph.D. in
Anthropology from Harvard University, an M.A. in Anthropology from
the University of Utah, and a B.A. in Art and Chemistry from Austin
College. She is the President and Co-founder of NetForm, Inc. She
can be reached at e-mail karen.stephenson@netform-int.com
(*)© 1999 KPL Communications,
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