Commodities of Power in a Collaborative Network

In my last post, I invited readers to take a survey about their experiences with collaboration in their networks. The survey is still open and I encourage you to take it if you haven't yet! In this post, I discuss what I am learning about "commodities of power" in collaborative networks. A commodity of power is something that demonstrates prestige and standing.

In his book Learning for Action, Peter Checkland gives an example of an organization where people were divided into "KT" and "NKT." The "KT" people "Knew Tom," who was the founder. The "NKT" people "Never Knew Tom" and were relegated to a lesser role. Having known Tom was a commodity of power.

I asked a group of network practitioners the following question: If I were an alien from outer space who didn't know anything about humans, what is the decoder ring you could give me so that I know who has power?

If I were an alien, how could I know who has power and who doesn't?

  

Right away, everyone listed formal roles. Someone on the steering committee has more power than a member not on the steering committee, for example. As the conversation progressed, people were able to give my imaginary alien the keys to decoding much more subtle ways that power is understood in their networks. Examples of commodities of power included:

• Convening a conversation or meeting
• Other members do the work of your vision
• Having exposure, such as by speaking or presenting
• Control over the budget
• Access to decision-makers
• Being eloquent
• Having a firm commitment to one's values
• Conversely, being in a position to accuse someone of not living up to shared values
• Being tattled to (in other words, the person that someone complains to in order to correct someone else's behavior)

The point of learning about commodities of power is that it helps one frame interventions. If recommendations are going to run counter to prevailing forces, it's best to understand that up front. 

What do you think? Leave a comment sharing some of commodities of power at work in your network, or take the research survey that will ask you about this and other factors relevant to collaboration. 

Early Exploration into Network Culture

Are you someone with a perspective on a particular social-impact network? Please take my survey regarding collaboration. In previous posts I gave brief overviews of my research methodology and topic. In this post, I invite you to contribute to the research. I also explain a bit more about what I am doing in this phase of the research and share what I've been learning so far.

A Survey to Find out about Networks

I am conducting a survey in order to find out more about how those involved with networks experience collaboration. The heart of the survey is the Process Quality Scale, which I was introduced to when Darrin Hicks, a Communications professor from Denver University, presented it at the Network Leadership Training Academy. This scale is used to measure whether participants in collaboration feel the process is fair and authentic. I am using it in this survey to help those of us in social-impact networks develop a rough baseline for ourselves in this regard, so that we can recognize our challenges, and take actions to improve. 

The survey also draws on suggestions from Pete Plastrik, Madeleine Taylor, and John Cleveland's Connecting to Change the World in ways that will tie results from the PQS more closely to a network-specific form of collaboration. Additionally, a simplified version of Werner Ulrich's Critical System Heuristics is employed in order to help identify power and impact within networks (perhaps this warrants a blog post of its own down the pike).

But don't worry! You don't need to know anything about PQS or heuristics or any other jargon to take the survey!  All the questions are in plain English, and it will take about 15-20 minutes to share your thoughts. Please also share the link widely with other network practitioners, particularly those who are network members. Here's the link for easy cut-and-paste: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/FG783WS

What I Am Finding Already

Prior to setting up this survey, I spent a good bit of time interviewing various network practitioners (a task that will be ongoing throughout my research), as well as acknowledging my own perspective. 

In Soft Systems Methodology, the first step is to find out about a problematic situation. This typically involves drawing rich pictures, and analyzing the roles, values, norms, and commodities of power in a situation. 

A rich picture is one that is hand drawn by someone concerned with the situation. It expresses the people, relationships, structures, and processes graphically, usually metaphorically. 

For example, when I drew a rich picture (below) to describe collaboration in social-impact networks, I imagined 3 people, each with expertise in one of the following: mountaineering, sailing, and desert travel. They stood together at a fork in the road. Should they each individually pursue the fairly straightforward path to simple fixes that only address a symptom of the root problem? Or should they combine forces and go on a long and confusing trip, in the belief that they could ultimately unlock systems change? Up front, they know that the journey involves deserts, oceans, and mountains, so by working together they should be able to get there. (If I were to redraw this picture, I would show that one typically doesn't need to make quite so stark a choice, as most in a network work at both the immediate and long-term scale.)

My rich picture of collaboration in networks

As they travel, their collaboration creates new emergent properties (indicated by a poorly-drawn mushroom, which is the emergent property of mycorrhizae and the environment). For example, meals and music are emergent properties of their collaboration, since they cook together and sing while walking. Also patience is an emergent property, when one member falls ill and they must wait and care for him. As they continue, new and unforeseen terrain arrives: a forest, which none of them have experience navigating. Now all the practice they got by collaborating to make meals and music gives them confidence that they can collaborate to create emergent strategies that will get them through the woods and that much closer to systems change. 

As you can see, rich pictures need not be beautiful, nor even understandable without detailed explanation. Their main utility arises from accessing a different part of your brain than the one that tries to describe things using words. This enables all those involved in the inquiry to find out what they themselves think (and feel) about a situation, and to then share with others. 

Recently, I asked a group of network practitioners to draw and share rich pictures about collaboration in their networks. Due to my limited instruction, most simply drew diagrams of how one component of their network related to others (which was still quite informative!), but a few metaphors emerged: a prickly box full of uncooperative legislators, and a big house full of all kinds of people, for example.

The conversation with these practitioners grew much more interesting when I began to ask about roles in driving collaboration. Most practitioners felt that staff act as "curators" of collaboration, by keeping track of member needs and requests, and responding to what seems most beneficial. Members with more capacity and expertise also tend to drive the shape of the collaboration, in these practitioners' experience, making me wonder if there might be a "success to the successful" archetypal pattern at work (again, something for another blog post down the road!). 

To find out about values in the networks, I asked practitioners to share gossip. I asked what members say about each other if they want to praise someone or criticize someone. I promise, we didn't use any names! Some interesting themes emerged. Lots of praise or criticism stemmed from ideas about what's strategic. In many networks, someone might criticize an organization working at a different scale than themselves by saying that scale of work isn't strategic. Other times, someone might say that the organization's purpose isn't strategic and they shouldn't even exist. 

On the other hand, sometimes those that seemed to have a good clear strategy are seen as not being very good collaborators. When members of these networks wanted to praise one another, they often talked about how an organization really "shows up." Whereas someone might be criticized as "in it for themselves."

Popularity itself was not seen as necessarily that valuable. More than one practitioner said they often see examples of members who are genuinely liked by everyone, but not really respected or seen as valuable in the network because they simply don't get things done. Accountability, then, was another key to being valued. However, it was useful to note that being disliked by the "right" people could be valuable. For example, if someone working at one scale was actively disliked by people working a scale seen by peers as "nonstrategic," then that dislike might lead that person to be valued.

Although it's too early to draw conclusions, at this stage it looks like any recommendations for improving collaboration in networks should be seen as something that helps members see themselves and each other being strategically placed, productive, and able to get things done. 

I will continue finding out about networks through observation, interview, workshops, and of course, the survey, which I hope you will take and share with others. All of this will allow us to recognize our starting point for improvement, so that any recommendations for improvement can be grounded in members' lived experience. 

Commodities of Power

In my next post, I will share what I've been learning about commodities of power in a network. These are status symbols, or ways of demonstrating who has influence. You can sign up for updates in the upper right corner of this post (note, this feature wasn't working properly before, so if you signed up earlier, please try again.)