What shape is your network? You’re wrong

What shape is your network? Do networks have shapes? People seem to think so. They’re referred to as “topologies” and you see the same sort of mentality in organisational charts. Similarly, your organisation’s org chart is lying to you. A blatant lie. It draws a picture — a graph of arrows and nodes, or vertices and edges — people believe it, yet it’s wrong. The topology of most organisations is a top-down hierarchy, in which the power is centred at the top and commands are passed down through levels of control and authority lower and lower reaching the workers at the bottom. On the “factory floor” or the “sales force” or “front line”. Whichever analogy describes best the people who spend all their time doing the applied work and none of their time commanding (or “managing”) subordinates. This is still a dominant topology for many organisations other than the very young startups, which pretend to be flat and equal, and the very trendy, which pretend to be informally mixed up and organically interconnected and equal, man. However, if you draw out the org chart of any organisation, it is a deceptive lie. Your org chart is lying to you.

Who is connected to who? The traditional and expected way of viewing this is by authority. Who can issue commands to who, who can sack or promote who, who pays who. Another way of viewing the situation is by who influences who, and viewed this way the connection graph looks totally different. Some people in an organisation are not influential at all. Even at the top. There are people at the top of an organisation that few even recognise as working there, most people don’t attach their name to their face, and what function they perform is a mystery. If they have any influence at all, it’s a generally vague ‘fear’ experienced from a distance instilled by association with certain offices that most people don’t go near. Apart from that quiet background-level impression, they have no specific influence at all. You can almost ignore those people. Without them, life would not be detectably different. However, your organisation’s traditional-style org chart is simply a map of fear — that’s all it is.

Then you have people at the top who everybody knows — their name, their aim, their personality — and although any interaction with them is definitely one-sided (they own the company, or can sack you, or promote you) it is at least reassuringly predictable and not such a mystery. You kind of know where you stand with those people, you know enough about them to transact usefully. They’ve publicised or made known all of the necessary information about themselves over the course of time as a social investment. However, it may often prove to be that the most influential people in an organisation, and therefore, where the most dynamic transactional value activity in the network takes place, is not at the top. It’s elsewhere, and could be anywhere — it doesn’t relate to your accepted org chart at all. We’re beginning to glimpse a different network graph altogether.

There are popular nodes in a network, and these become even more popular because they offer the richest connections to the most other nodes in one easy action. The people that everyone knows, the gossips through who all traffic travels. The people who act as interfaces between all the departmental networks in the organisational environment. Not just the hubs within the departments, but the circuses that connect the different departments and even the outside world.

Who sees everybody in the organisation? Who interacts with everybody? Not just a casual “hello” and “goodbye” but a useful transaction offering value, that bridges domains. Who are the circuses? These are often also the influencers. If they get a new type of phone, or wear a new fashion item, or use a new app, ride a new type of bike, or read a new book, or shop online through a certain site, or have their hair in a certain way, soon a few more people align themselves with these choices. Many people within and connected to the organisation gain value from these people who influence, and they afford credibility and reputation to these influential highly connected circuses. However, you won’t see any of that on an org chart. Essentially, if you’re an owner or founder or some other chief of an organisation and you think you’re the boss because you’re in the top area of your org chart, there’s a fair chance you’re wrong. Your  org chart is actually a map of fear, and it’s been lying to you all along.

Is feedback useful in business and real life?

We need feedback, they say. Not when you’re on the radio, of course, the delay through the transmission process will cause your own voice to return later and echo through the same process. Not when you’re singing on stage, either, as you’ll get a high pitched tone as the mic and amplifier picks up its own signal from the speakers, causing a positive feedback loop. That’s no good. But all other times, feedback is what we want. Is that right? We want feedback?

If the bad kind, on stage, in broadcasting, is bad because it is positive feedback, then what is negative feedback? That’s all over the place too — technology is full of negative feedback systems, for correcting deviations, etc. Aircraft navigation and flight controls use negative feedback to ascertain how far off course we are, how far out of the desired steering the plane is, etc. At home, the central heating has a thermostat which uses negative feedback — is it at the correct temp yet? No, then keep heating. Is it at the correct temp yet? No, then keep heating. Is it at the correct temp yet? Yes, then stop doing what it’s doing — stop heating. Most systems we use all day use negative feedback for correction and control, it’s an essential part of modern system design, from cybernetics to signal theory (see Claude Shannon’s work, if you’re interested in that sort of thing).

What about us? In business, in real life? Do we need feedback? Which sort? Are we cybernetic systems, designed to operate through error correction via a negative feedback loop? I would suggest it’s not that simple. Yes, we operate mechanistically in many ways, but not totally. We are subject to the mass reinforcements of feedback that amplify, exaggerate and ramp up the input to increase the output that are all typical of an out-of-control positive feedback loop. When we’re told of news of a bank that’s perhaps on shaky ground and there’s a slight risk that in the distant future it may fail, we all queue up at the doors to get our money out, and guess what, the bank fails. It’s that horrid positive feedback again, isn’t it.

What about negative feedback. Our lives are full of that. You need not look any further than our partners or spouses to find a constant and reliable source of negative feedback. Corrective criticism designed to adjust what we’re doing can obviously improve the outcome. Anyone involved in quality control in mass production knows this — if there’s an issue or fault, detecting it, measuring it, and bringing this evidence to the source of the error as negative feedback will hopefully adjust and correct the error, so that subsequent production is within tolerance. That’s pretty normal for modern production in most industries.

However, although the negative feedback loop indubitably works so well for keeping systems under tight control, is it the way humans work? To a certain level, yes of course. If you’re learning something, or training someone, highlighting errors or incorrect actions will hopefully cause subsequent attempts to occur within acceptable boundaries. Learning a musical instrument, a language, a sport, etc. You want to know what you’re doing wrong, and in quite significant detail, otherwise you’ll continue doing it, perhaps never knowing why things aren’t turning out quite right.

However, as hinted at in reference to partners, there’s a tendency to think that if negative feedback achieves so much good, then just keep doing it, and doing it more! Not just partners, but work colleagues, everyone we are in contact with in fact. Of course, that falls into the category of positive feedback and escalates to a level of saturation representing the most that we can put up with. Occasionally, though, that top level is reached and broken, so people split up, people walk out of jobs, people shout at customer service workers, people even go out on strike and have marches.

What about positive feedback as the antidote? If used carefully, it can be a good thing, it can be a reinforcement, an encouragement, and an ingredient for growth. As referred to earlier, 100% positive feedback is no use. Telling someone they’re fantastic all the time when they’re not is really unproductive and can be damaging, but never telling people they’re doing okay when they’re doing okay is also unhealthy. You can achieve a lot with negative feedback but you can’t go all the way with just nothing but criticism, and similarly you can have quite damaged outcomes with nothing but positive feedback but used now and then it’s quite a good ingredient.

What about no feedback at all? Well, there I think is the biggest problem. People working alone or at home or teleworking or setting up new businesses on their own, are at risk of having absolutely no feedback at all. Most feedback you’ll get from the Internet is simply non-existent — no feedback at all — you’ll be totally ignored. You don’t exist. Your efforts add up to nothing.

The next level of feedback is simply a simple “+” or a “like”, which might well only indicate that the person reading it didn’t disagree with it and wants some way of remembering it later, on that fictitious day that they’ll come back to everything they’ve ever bookmarked and read some of it again (I don’t know, maybe the Internet firehose dried up that day, nobody posted new stuff, so we all have to read some old stuff). The Internet is a strange and unintuitive system when it comes to feedback design principles. There’s a lot of positive feedback tendencies about it — things can ramp up out of control very quickly, “going viral” as they say (in reality it’s more like a stampede than a virulent outbreak) and then it’s old news, buried forever like Crazy Frog or All Your Base Are Belong To Us. There’s no shortage of negative feedback on the Internet either — you don’t have to look far to find maximum criticism occurring any day of the week.

But the risk of working on your own is that there’s absolutely no feedback at all — your efforts might be good, or might need adjustment, but the particular response curves of the system are simply not linear (technically, there’s hysteresis, which is partly the reason things can go viral) and this lag or disconnection can be disconcerting, depressing and give the impression that you’re being completely ignored.

We need feedback — to tell if we’re on the correct path or not. Without feedback we might think we’re doing okay but we’re really heading off in an incorrect direction. Or worse, without feedback we don’t get any validation that what we’re doing amounts to anything worthwhile at all, so we stop wasting our time on it and do something else instead, or at least, slow down, in case it turns out to be a waste of time.

If you’re doing your own thing, if you’re working alone, if you’re not part of a group, then there’s an additional resource drain of having to have faith that what you’re doing might one day add up to something. Even when in the face of things, there’s nothing complete right here and right now, and the whole world is ignoring you, giving no feedback at all — neither positive nor negative — just nothing. It’s under those circumstances that we must remember what we’re doing and fix our sights on the eventual outcome — the goal, the destination, the thing we’re doing it all for. We have to be our own feedback loop.

How old are you? No, not you, but you. Everything you know is wrong pt 1

How old are you? Since the clock was punched the moment you popped out, that age clock has been ticking away. Seasons, years, winters, summers, holidays in the sun, holidays in the rain, christmases in the grey, school days all fabricated and fictitious, work days one after the other we’d rather forget. How old are you, then?

Well, you yourself might be that certain age on the tip of your tongue (or if you get to a certain point, you have to think to yourself whether that was actually plus or minus a decade, I forget). But many of us have encountered that urban legend floating around our infosphere that states that as our cells are under a process of constant renewal, our bodies are no more than about seven years old.

This is a nice thought. Wrong, but nice. Like most things you thought you knew, this is of course nothing more than consumer-grade bullshit. Nobody questions it, because nobody wants to. It’s a nice cosy thought to think that we’re fresh and young and anything wrong will repair itself in a few years, hence, the myth is kept alive because we want it. Well, there’s nothing wrong with a little utilitarian bullshit applied here and there — there’s obvious value in it, in this instance. It makes you feel better — warm, cosy, radiant, healthier, and to continue the stream of denial, makes you able to face situations you might not otherwise feel up to. After all, you’re almost brand new. That’s valuable — a delusion that’s of value — nothing wrong with that. Except that it’s wrong, of course, but a lot of things are wrong. So what, it feels good.

Scientifically, we do age, cells do get replaced, but to say that we’re a whole new person every seven years or so is false. Some cells are replaced entirely, within weeks. In the stomach, for example. Other cells are replaced almost not at all, in the eye, for example. Our brain is a network of cells forming neurons, most of those once dead are not going to make a return. We are born with more brain cells than we will have for the rest of our lives. On average, yes you might be able to say, ‘a mean of something like every seven years’, but it’s a fairly useless average, if the range is so wide.

It is more useful to think that the brain itself, although constantly dying, is forming new information connections out of what remains. It is forming new levels of information from the incoming information, in the form of understanding. However, sometimes those things we thought we understand turn out to be not the case, and we have to change our mind about some things. This is kind of like what we thought was appealing about the body renewing itself ever few years or so. Except this time it’s true. If you accept the stance that everything you know is probably wrong (and we’ve all been there) then it’s a nice notion that what we knew that turns out to be wrong is, if we wait a short while, going to be replaced by a new idea that’s closer to being correct.

What about our attitudes and responses? The same thing applies. You might have had a response that has been reiterated over the years, for example, the way you respond to your partner in an argument. Who knows, it might turn out that the way you were responding was actually wrong all along. That can be replaced with another new fresh response, probably a bit better and more recent, new and advanced than the old one, which, as we realise, was wrong.

Success In Seven Parts — the blog

This is the launch post of the “Success In Seven Parts” blog. It accompanies my “Success In Seven Parts” series of motivational speaking talks. Are you interested in the process of achievement? The “Success In Seven Parts” pilot is up on youtube now: