I liked what flashed on the front page a week or so ago, about encouraging people to rant. With Slack specifically, it basically amounted to having a "<username-rants>" channel for every user.
Now that I read the current post, maybe that should be a Slack feature out of the box!
> The challenge is that these communication networks are informal, fluid, and nearly impossible to map.
I bet most large tech companies could have a fairly accurate map of the network in less than a week if they really wanted it. Simply look at every email and chat reply between two people and build a graph whose nodes are people and with edges whose strength is the number of those interactions. Done.
Of course, there are a lot of scary privacy implications and I'm sure there are a few execs who wouldn't want anyone to discover that, wow dude_in_power_x sure does sent a lot of chats to cute_indirect_subordinate_they_have_no_reason_to_interact_with.
But if and organization really did want a better sociological understanding of their workforce, they could build it.
The office advocacy seems out of place. Extroverts work this weak network methodology well with face time. Introverts are more likely to get similar results from sharing planning and status documents and lists highlighting relevant problem reports. While it may be easier to do this kind of thing by putting extroverts in an office it might be more valuable to let introverts focus on shared documents and reports because of the records that get generated along the way.
I grew several grassroots software projects in a 5-digit size company. The last had least 10-15 direct contributors and tens of others involved. It grew so large the CTO organized a summit to get the main IT organization along with everyone else involved on the same page and it came out as the "winner".
I did all this as an individual contributor. We called them "internal open development" and had developed an entire model around it. You can basically create "parallel" hierarchies within organizations. It's not that different from the "build something people want" idea, but it actually makes those people part of it.
Anyone who has worked in disaster recover and business continuity planning knows how to map an organizations processes and people.
There is always 2 different orgs: the organization that is formally stated for legal/insurance reasons, and the REAL organization that is messy and ad-hoq.
Isn't this effectively a core operating principle of DAOs? Members self-organize and declare their roles and accountabilities. Tooling has been built specifically around structuring, visualizing, governing, and incentivizing this emergent organic structure. Traditional orgs could learn a lot from what's been happening there.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 36.6 ms ] threadNow that I read the current post, maybe that should be a Slack feature out of the box!
You can’t just find some idea and do things. There are road maps and promises made to manager and product.
What incentivises your manager to just agree to let you work on your own projects?
I bet most large tech companies could have a fairly accurate map of the network in less than a week if they really wanted it. Simply look at every email and chat reply between two people and build a graph whose nodes are people and with edges whose strength is the number of those interactions. Done.
Of course, there are a lot of scary privacy implications and I'm sure there are a few execs who wouldn't want anyone to discover that, wow dude_in_power_x sure does sent a lot of chats to cute_indirect_subordinate_they_have_no_reason_to_interact_with.
But if and organization really did want a better sociological understanding of their workforce, they could build it.
I did all this as an individual contributor. We called them "internal open development" and had developed an entire model around it. You can basically create "parallel" hierarchies within organizations. It's not that different from the "build something people want" idea, but it actually makes those people part of it.
There were several other projects like this.
There is always 2 different orgs: the organization that is formally stated for legal/insurance reasons, and the REAL organization that is messy and ad-hoq.
You have to account for both.