Telephone +1 617-388-7658 www.networkingaction.net Boston, USA (GMT -4/-5)
Seeing Complexity Clearly through Mapping
for More Effective Strategies
By:
Steve Waddell, Principal – NetworkingAction
Verna Allee, President – ValueNetworks.com
James Ritchie-Dunham – President, Institute for Strategic Clarity
NetworkingAction Working Paper #1
www.networkingaction.net
Oct 20, 2009
From time-to-time NetworkingAction produces working papers. These are papers that are neither final reports nor published articles, but which draw from NetworkingAction associated activities.
For more information contact:
Steve Waddell – PhD, MBA
Boston, MA, USA
+1 (617) 388-7658
Telephone +1 617-388-7658 www.networkingaction.net Boston, USA (GMT -4/-5)
NetworkingAction Working Paper #1
Seeing Complexity Clearly…for more effective strategies
· When CARE pondered the increasing poverty in Guatemala despite its best efforts for many years, it turned to an approach called Strategic Clarity mapping to build an innovative strategy.
· When the Global Finance Initiative wanted to understand how to define the “global finance system” and its stakeholders to develop a strategy to integrate social and environmental concerns into the system, it began with web crawls.
· When the European Commission wanted to understand how to enhance the process of innovation, it used an approach called Value Network Analysis.
· And when the Global Reporting Initiative considered its strategy for developing a South African network to advance GRI’s triple-bottom line accountability agenda, social network analysis was used.
All these organizations turned to tools that can be broadly called “visual diagnostics mapping.” They are tremendously useful when complexity is a big issue, when formal structures are obscuring what is actually happening, and when different ways of thinking about the world are creating conflict.
These visual diagnostics are network diagrams of arrows and nodes that communicate tremendous amounts of information visually, much more easily than volumes of text. They are a product of the vastly enhanced computing power and software developed over the past decade. These tools are an important new resource that has been moving out of academia over the past half dozen years. However, like any innovation at an early stage, they can be very confusing. The language describing them is still evolving, and the limitations and benefits of the various approaches are just becoming clear.
The mapping tools require openness to learning new ways of approaching challenges and looking at opportunities. One necessary shift is to think in terms of “systems,” a concept perhaps most powerfully popularized by Peter Senge. Everyone works with “systems” – internal systems relating to how work gets done, issue systems relating to the topic that an NGO is working to address, and mental model systems about how people understand a strategy. Clearly “seeing” those systems is important for success.
Another necessary shift is building participants’ identity with the issue system. Stakeholders may or may not identify themselves as participants in the system. Building this participant identity is critical to creating effective action to realize opportunities, address needs and respond to challenges. In visual diagnostics mapping, individuals, organizations, or core concepts are depicted as nodes in networks. These diagrams graphically highlight the range of their actions, their ways of thinking vis-à-vis the issue, and the natural and man-created environmental factors that influence the issue system.
These maps can include literally hundreds of nodes and arrows, or very few. Experience working with people around the world proves that even relatively complex systems with a couple of hundred nodes can be understood by people with very limited education. Key is a participatory development process. Diagram 1 is a map developed by a couple of dozen people in Guatemala from their mental models, to support CARE to vastly enhance
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its impact. An evaluation a year later showed that the process was transformational from two perspectives: people had significantly changed their relationships (who they were working with), and they had significantly changed how they understood their work vis-à-vis others.
Typology of Visual Diagnostics Mapping
To bring clarity to complexity, visual diagnostics support one’s understanding of who is the system, how participants or ideas relate, how work actually gets done, where there are key leverage points, and what is the source of conflict in the issue system. Four visual diagnostics mapping approaches have been applied in the past decade to bring clarity to deep social complexity. Table 1 shows how these four approaches clarify different kinds of complexity, require different levels of knowledge of the system, and provide different levels of clarity about the complexity in the issue system.
Each visual diagnostics technology is presented in Table 1, with a description of what it is, an example of its recent application in an issue system, its benefits, and its limitations.
Table 1:Characteristics of Four Visual Diagnostics Mapping Approaches
Mapping Approach / Complexity it clarifies / Required knowledge of who is in system (stakeholders) / Required knowledge of how stakeholders relate
(relationships) / Increase in knowledge of value created
(value exchange) / Increase in knowledge of sustainable value-creation processes (dynamics)
Web crawl / Stakeholders and relationships in a system / Low / Low / Low / Low
Social network / Structure of relationships / Medium / Low / Low / Low
Value network / Value creation among relationships / Medium / Medium / High / High
Strategic clarity / Leverage points for dynamic, collective value creation / High / Medium / High / High
Web Crawl Mapping
Perhaps the easiest form of mapping in terms of effort is web crawls. The Internet has an increasing role in communications and daily life. People have personal as well as organizational websites. Sites bringing people together around shared interests and concerns are numerous. The importance of the internet in political and other campaigns is unquestioned. Although web presence is not uniform around the world, certainly for global issues and increasingly for local ones the internet presents an incredible information resource for mapping.
The internet is structured around sites that have unique URL addresses. And most sites have (hyper) links to other sites that you click on to take you to other sites or pages. These are inserted because they have more detailed information with regards to a topic (including, of course, ads), because the host wants to connect people to allies or colleagues, or because they may be foes on an issue.
These connections between unique URLs provide the basis for mapping relationships by doing a web crawl. A software program can draw the relationships between organizations’ web links, to give a description of the virtual network of the organization
Diagram 2 is such a map of an issue system.[1] It shows links between URLs that can collectively be called the global commercial finance public issue arena. These are the organizations to which global commercial finance institutions link.
The crawl identified 282 URLs; only the top 100 are shown in the map. Key public policy institutions like the World Bank are shown as stars, the UN as a square. Separate data lists the number of links to each URL and the direction – whether they go to a URL or come from it – which is important to understand who thinks who is worth attention. Another list summarizes the number of links. In this case URLs with 20+ links are:
1 - worldbank.org - 36
2 - sec.gov - 26
3 - imf.org - 26
4 - oecd.org - 22
5 - unpri.org - 22
6 - whitehouse.gov - 21
7 - calpers.ca.gov - 21
Together with this map, the data illustrate the following:
1) There is quite a division in the map with the U.S. Federal Reserve playing a key link between the global and U.S.-based organizations.
2) The World Bank, IMF, Bank for International Settlements and OECD (the stars) are key global public finance institutions for commercial finance.
3) There also is a group of “shadow” public institutions working in the responsible investment arena in the top-middle-left with the Global Reporting Initiative having an important linking role.
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Of course as with any methodology, this presents only a limited picture. However, the crawl suggests that for anyone looking to reform the global finance system, there might be an important role for the responsible investment organizations. The UN Global Compact and Global Reporting Initiative should be investigated for potential in playing a role in bridging between non-traditional industry players and others. In this case, one of the most important uses of the data is the other crawls that could be undertaken – depending upon the questions driving the inquiry. The remaining URLs generated give you a large data base for further investigation. You can identify the top NGOs and commercial firms in the arena easily, and run different crawls with each of them separately in order to find top organizations in each sector. You can suppress the World Bank (so its site is ignored) or other highly ranked organizations to see if other responsible investment bridges emerge.
Web crawls are particularly useful when used with other network analysis methodologies, because they help identify organizations in a field to begin investigating.
Social Network Mapping
To support GRI development in South Africa, they used perhaps the most common type of visual diagnostic mapping approach: social network analysis (SNA), that describes relationships with a single line or arrow between nodes, where nodes are individuals, parts of organizations or organizations. There are several softwares that can be used for SNA; the best known being Ucinet.
Diagram 3[2] is a very simple example of an inter-organizational network (ION) that was developed with the Global Reporting Initiative when it was thinking about establishing a South African GRI network. Surveys conducted identified organizations and their relationships with two particular characteristics that drew from GRI’s core strategy: organizations that were involved with triple-bottom-line analysis and development (social-economic-environmental impact), and organizations that engaged in multi- stakeholder processes. (This type of “boundary setting” is a critical part of mapping.)
This resulting issue system map illustrates the following:
1) There are six different stakeholder groups with these characteristics: labor, business, academic, new South African leaders, associates of an organization for Directors, and environmental organizations.
2) Environmental organizations – the ones in the top center – do not have any powerful linkages to the other organizations.
3) There are some key bridging organizations that connect groups: Business SA, Stellenbosch, Transparency International and the King Commission.
4) Each stakeholder group except new South African leaders has important hubs: NEDLAC (labor), Business Council Sustainability (business), Ethics South Africa (academics), Institute of Directors (Directors), and IA Impact Assessment (environment).
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This descriptive analysis suggests the following strategy:
1) Put the environment on the back burner for the moment, since economic-social issues are more dominant;
2) Consult with the bridging organizations as key informants and perhaps engage them in initial convening to form a GRI South Africa network; and
3) When creating a leadership group or board, make sure you engage the nodes of each group.
The descriptive analysis therefore supports a strategy of firmly building on the current, local orientation, social structure and capacity to develop a GRI approach. Rather than GRI being a foreign entity coming in through a particular stakeholder group as is often the way an organization enters a new region – raising great suspicions among other groups – GRI can begin with a much more comprehensive strategy that weaves together current social relationships in a new way.
The analysis also supports developing an impact measurement assessment. GRI could imagine what a map of relationships would look like to realize its goals, and repeat the analysis at a later date to see if the relationships have changed.
This is a very simple example of social network mapping. A more comprehensive analysis could describe the types of contacts/relationships (what is being exchanged, how frequently, etc.) and sub-networks in more detail.
Social network mapping can describe inter-personal networks, key thought leaders and gate keepers (those who can inhibit or facilitate entry to a network). This type of analysis can help identify and describe political difficulties that an organizing strategy should be aware of.
Organizational analysis could describe the influence of GRI within an organization. For example, a specific person in a company is usually charged with representing a company to GRI. That person and GRI might want to develop a strategy for promoting GRI and building internal corporate capacity to apply the GRI framework; in a large corporation. This can be a huge challenge. Formal reporting structures ignore how most work actually gets done, but internal organizational analysis can help develop a strategy that is built upon the way people actually interact.
Value Network Mapping
ValueNet Works™ is a mapping methodology developed by Verna Allee. The methodology maps issue systems in terms of roles and exchanges between roles. This is very useful when you want to understand what roles are necessary for a healthy issue system, what roles need more attention and which might be so well resourced that competition is creating problems.
In Diagram 4 of the innovation production system, there are seven roles represented by the nodes; the exchanges between them are represented by the arrows where broken lines represent intangible exchanges and solid lines represent tangibles. Most organizations play more than one role – there are actually more than thirty organizations behind the map and many of these would play at least one role and sometimes two or three.
This particular map was done with a government agency in New Zealand that commercializes scientific discoveries. In other work with the European Union a similar analysis identified four stages or “phase changes” with different value network models for each. The effort resulted in numerous policy recommendations.