February CLT Monthly Meeting Summary - “Organizational Network Analysis with Michael Arena”

At this meeting we explored organizational network analysis with Michael Arena. We recorded Michael’s presentation, including our brief context setting with the Catalyst Wisdom Exchange. You can find the video recording here. In addition to the video, you can find summary notes from the breakout rooms and chat below.

Michael’s presentation was full of examples of how different and distinct adaptive spaces are needed for the discovery, development, and diffusion stages of innovation. He emphasized the need for bridging mechanisms to integrate new ideas into established systems. Our conversation also touched on the role of generative AI in accelerating innovation and the challenges of scaling ideas within large organizations. Participants shared their experiences and learnings in breakout rooms.

Breakout Room #1 Amy summarized:

Gary asked a great question - we should always ask ourselves, "What excuse do you want to use to not do something?" Is it that the regulators won't let us, the culture, we don't have the budget, or whatever? Really be aware of what excuse you or your organization are using. He used a great strategy in his most recent role, going around the organization and getting people to talk about their pain points - what they don't like. Pushing that conversation by asking more and more constructive questions is actually a way to get people to share pain points and almost treat it like a flywheel. You get action going on innovation just by talking to people about what they don't like. And thinking about that, people love to complain, so that's great.

We also talked about how important it is to pick your target opportunities and push experimentation around them.

Amy also shared the concept of a pre-mortem analysis. We were talking about providing guardrails for failure in a heavily regulated industry. Relevant article from HBR

Room #2 Melanie summarized:

1. Innovation's ability to influence from within - change the model from time to time; centralized vs. diffused/embedded.

2. Need to be able to transition from heads down innovation and heads up building relationships.

3. One sure path to failure is inventor's pride. Inventors need to care more about the idea and its ability to emerge; have a degree of humility.

Room #3 Jayshree summarized:
I think one of the reasons people look at nodes and not connectivity is that nodes are easy to spot, monitor, measure, and control. One of the things Michael said at the end, which was about leadership, again emphasizes leadership's ability to realize and recognize that despite the fact that I can measure these things, what makes the organization tick is connectivity.

CHAT RESOURCES & RECOMMENDATIONS

Tyrome shared that the book "Emergence" by Steve Johnson was a seminal text for him in understanding how these networks function, and mentioned that Valdis Krebs has done extensive work in this area. 

Ryan McCreedy from Slalom mentioned Turo and stated that outcome-focused thinking is superior to output-focused thinking. He suggested pushing boundaries by achieving outcomes through differentiated outputs.

Sandeep Mehta recommended "Empires of Light" by Jill Jonnes

Ryan recommended following Michael's work with Worklytics, praising its applicability to adaptive teams..

Tyrome referenced Clay Christensen's "Job To Be Done" concept. Shannon asked how to find effective leaders, to which George and Sandeep both suggested mapping, with Sandeep specifically mentioning Simon Wardley's mapping approach.

Amy Radin noted Pre-Mortem article from HBR