My professional friend Rob Cross is a professor of management at the University of Virginia and, I think it's safe to say, the leader in applying "social network analysis" (SNA) to business and professional organizations.   SNA is nothing mysterious; in fact it reflects one of the bedrock truisms of human nature, that people who trust one another work better together and share more information, resources, and contacts.

Rob is now director of The Network Roundtable at U.Va., a consortium of firms dedicated to teaching managers how to conduct and apply SNA to their own organizations and how to use it to promote, among other things:

• innovation
• large scale change
• post-merger integration
• closer connectivity with clients
• alignment of execution with strategy, and
• leadership development.

The membership ranks are blue-chip, including:  Accenture, Bain, BCG, British Petroleum, Ernst & Young, Goldman Sachs, Hewlett Packard, Hill & Knowlton, IBM, Intel, Lehman, Mercer, McKinsey, Merck, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, PWC, and the World Bank. 

At the moment, no law firms belong—but Rob assures me he would be most interested in being able to include a few who would be interested in exploring the benefits of applying SNA internally.   Legal Week just issued a piece on the uses of SNA within law firms, so it's rising above the radar horizon.  That piece focuses on how SNA can contribute to and undergird efforts at Knowledge Management, primarily through the inter-related mechanisms of trust and reciprocity:

"People know who the knowledge sources in their organisation are and will gravitate towards them, not based on the sources’ formal organisational role but on the power and effectiveness of their knowledge.

"Sometimes people will provide information out of a sense of altruism, but there is a sophisticated market of barter for providing information within organisations which has the benefit of providing not only the theoretical but contextual tacit knowledge. There is an unwritten rule that the party receiving information will at some stage reciprocate."

Any readers who might want to learn more about what SNA might be able to do for their firm should start with this primer on what SNA can achieve within organizations, and if you and your firm would like to pursue it, please let me know and we can explore further from there. 

But just to whet your interest, here are two SNA maps of the same firm.   The context of this analysis was that, 18 months before these maps were drawn, the firm had inaugurated a sustained effort to get people to collaborate across practice areas and hierarchical levels on client projects.   Looking at the left map, you'd say they'd succeeded; but looking at the right, you'd say they failed.

In other words, if your reaction is "separated at birth," you're not far off; how could this possibly be the same firm? 

The answer:  The left map includes the top nine executives; the right map omits them.  In other words, the leaders had "gotten their own memo;" the troops had not.  Something worth knowing?  I'd say so.