A new era of organisational efficiency powered by network science

If you’re not already aware of ONA and you’re in the world of organisational development it’s something you might want to take a look at. It’s a technique used to measure and understand and visualise relationships and communication flows within an organisation. It shows how people and teams interact, share information, and collaborate. It also is used to identify critical individuals, and is valuable for developing collaboration at both a team and individual level.

ONA is becoming increasingly relevant as teams across almost all organisations become dispersed and disconnected. Relationships are becoming more and more formal and functional. Informal networks are being eroded and measuring and developing the quality of interaction between people in an organisational system is becoming essential if you want to protect and develop world class teams. Rob Cross, a leading academic in organisational networks, has shown that “Informal networks provide the glue that holds together cross-functional initiatives, alliances and are essential for innovation and long term success”.

Cophi (2023): This shows the development of personal social networks from 2 time points having run the Cophi solution for one year.

A study by PWC showed that over 55% of organisations are working in silos and 61% of people in those organisations believe that breaking down the silos and improving cross-team collaboration is critical to delivering on long term strategy.

The current solution to the problem of silos is, all too often, invasive and large scale transformation projects that are reactive to challenges rather than proactive.

Progressive businesses are beginning to develop ongoing systems of continuous development and transformation. This requires highly effective employee listening tools that allow for on-going awareness of organisational  efficiencies.

Traditional engagement surveys only go so far to address these issues and in many cases do not meet modern day standards for complex systems. 82% of people believe that their employee engagement survey drives no noticeable value.

Measuring collaboration in the organisational system brings in a new dimension to the traditional engagement survey allowing advanced HR and organisational transformation (OT) teams to triangulate around another critical  data point and work with individuals directly on specific systemic challenges as they arise.

Organisational transformation consultancies and boutique leadership development firms are using network analysis to driving rapid performance improvements in particular with:

Accelerating time to value

Rapid network diagnostic quickly surfaces the way an organisation really operates and what can be done to make it work better. This is far more budget and time efficient.

Objectively find the opportunities

Objectively find the opportunities by removing bias and assumptions - a network analysis generates 1,000’s of data points on system quality and this provides statistically significant results on where to focus and what to do giving laser targeted interventions for bigger impact.

Identifying the catalysts

to drive transformation, it's easy to use network data to objectively surface the critical connectors or change catalysts in your organisation. This can be very powerful for building Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) for example.

Increasing the impact

Increasing the impact of work with the same budget by uncovering more opportunities for change and providing a scalable delivery model to take on more complex projects predictably.