SOCIAL LATTICES AND COLLABORATION
(Posted 2006-07-11 21:51:58 by Ray Lopez)
Right now I am attending the Collaboration Best Practices conference at IBM
Somers. One of the key messages arising from the presentations I've heard
thus far has to do with the central importance of collaboration with regard
to successful teams, projects, etc. Slowly but surely, it is becoming
apparent that collaboration matters, a lot.
Underlying the notion of collaboration, of course, is the notion of
relationships between people. You can't have effective collaboration
without having positive relationships with the folks you're collaborating
with. This idea of positive relationships has been written about from a
variety of perspectives. From the social networking perspective, I've done
social network analyses that reveal not only what types of work
relationships people have with each other, but also what types of
non-work-related social relationships they have with each other as well.
In my experience, groups that have extensive extra-work relationships with
each other tend to be higher performing in terms of collaborative efforts.
This is not earth-shattering news, of course. People who genuinely like
each other and consider each other friends will want to spend more time
together, and will generally work together more effectively. In my
observations, I have noted that there is an extremely strong correlation
between inter-group friendships and the collaborative output of the group.
Supporting this observation, a couple of speakers at this years CBP
conference have shown that groups of people who have been together for a
long time are generally better at collaboration.
Given this, it may be important to try and define the quality of
intra-group friendships. Most social network analysis tools do just this.
However, most real-world interpretations of social network analyses do not
allow for a full discussion of friendships and relationships, because it is
not deemed to be directly related to particular business goals. Nothing
could be further from the truth. The data presented at this years CBP are
just the beginning of what is sure to be more and more data showing how
important it is to take advantages of our natural propensity to form
friendships and other strong social bonds.
My own experience with social network analysis has demosntrated that this
is true, and I've coined a phrase to desribe the nature of intra-group
friendships: a social lattice.
A social lattice is a group of individuals who share mutual trust and
empathy among themselves. Trust is manifested as greater self-disclosure
among individuals, and social psychologists have shown that self-disclosure
is the key to the formation of trusting relationships. Similarly, empathy
for other members of a particular group also defines a social lattice.
Empathy manifests itself as concern for the other, most importantly as the
exchange of information related to health and well-being. The experience of
most individuals tends to support the idea that working in a mutually
trusting and empathetic environment is preferable to working in an
environment of distrust and apathy.
A social lattice is at once a physical thing (the collection of persons in
the lattice) and a psychological construct (the degrees to which
individuals trust and empathize with others). I use the term "lattice" to
not only define this physical/psychological construct, but also to denote
the resiliency of the relationships and of the lattice itself.
Social lattices can and often do cut across time and space. The
relationships one develops in a social lattice can persist even after an
individual has physically moved to another location, and can also persist
for a lifetime. I think this is the key notion about social lattices. They
are entities that can exist independently of organizational structures. As
a result, social lattices may form an important entry point for social
networking interventions intended to foster collaboration and innovation.
As we get more and more data relating to the importance of collaboration, I
think it would be beneficial to develop tools and methods to better define
social lattices in addition to work-related social networks. Social
lattices may allow us to better quantify and understand the currently
intangible effects of trusting friendships in the workplace.
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