When people collaborate, they create tacit communities of practice. Finding and understanding these communities is key to an organization’s innovation health. Understanding Communities is based on the co-authorship and commenting connections that people make in an event. All connected participants are shown around a ring graph and are put into mathematically best-fit communities.
The ring graph shows two important things: the tacit communities in this social network and the people who hold it together. Both are illustrated by applying the same analysis to the screenplay of The Wizard of Oz.
The colored arcs are communities: groups of people who converse more among themselves than they do with others. In the Oz data we see a pink community which we recognize as the humans in Kansas at the beginning and end of the film: Aunt Em, Hunk, Hickory, Uncle Henry, Zeke, Miss Gulch. By following the thin gray lines that show each connection, we see that this community is connected to the inhabitants of Oz only through Dorothy and the Professor — exactly what we know from the story.
The large size and dense mesh of lines to Dorothy’s dot show that she is a key connector; in fact in some cases she is the only connection between communities (a community with no outside connections is called a clique in network theory). Clicking on Dorothy brings up a list of all her connections and readily shows the connections between the four travelers that dominate the film.
In exactly the same way, Understanding Communities shows the tacit communities and key connectors in a business challenge. In addition it shows each person’s collaboration style, from those who mostly enter ideas to those who mostly enter comments. We use Malcolm Gladwell’s terms Maven and Connector for these styles: in chapter two of The Tipping Point he points out that both behaviors are important in different ways and situations.
Below we see that Vera Melton is a Maven: she’s authored ideas that many people find interesting enough to comment upon. She is probably a “know how” person: perhaps not the most socially outgoing but a good bet for expertise. In contrast, Alvin Wolfe is a Connector, having written no ideas but instead many comments on others’ ideas. He’s a “know who”, a person who may not know the answer to your question but probably knows who will. Call on Vera to develop ideas further, and call on Alvin to help communicate the final decisions.
The key connector people are further characterized by text analysis. Those whose ideas and comments have the same keywords as the overall challenge are keeping to the mainstream of thought, while those with very different keywords are “fringe thinkers”, at least in this context. In the example below, Harry Edwards is a socially-connected “know who” person interested in chemical engineering topics — and he might be exactly right for your next team.
Diversity can be gauged by mapping the tacit communities based on the data against the formal organization. This new graphic shows if departments are cliquey (conversing mostly among themselves, like Technical Services in this example) or are engaging colleagues across the company (like Preclinical Formulation, whose “rainbow” of connections closely matches the tacit communities at the left, i.e. is not biased by local affiliations).
