🌿🧭🌳 OD20: New insights about communities of practice ∙ 5 types of informal networks at work ∙ OD goodies
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1. New insights about communities of practice
Communities of practice have the outstanding feature that they connect people across hierarchies around a specific topic of interest. Inside organizations, we’ve seen such communities meaningfully connecting people from all walks of work life around topics such as “business models”, “parenting”, “innovation” or “working remote”.
If you are part of such communities and want to explore this topic further, there’s new research from Emily Webber and Robin Dunbar (the anthropologist that coined the Dunbar number).
5 main takeaways, outlined by Emily:
Business communities of practice mimic natural social communities
Communities of less than ~40 tend to have a greater sense of camaraderie
Communities of more than ~40 people need formally recognized leadership
The larger the community the less often it is likely to meet
Smaller communities or subsets in larger communities can carry out more focused activities and tasks
See the whole overview, based on the research paper:
5 types of informal networks at work
Another insightful piece of research we recently came across is about the informal networks that help people perform, especially in new work contexts (new job, new role, new team, new project, new department, new organization, new industry etc.)
Åsa Jonsson shares findings on the Corporate Rebels blog about 5 types of social networks:
Advice networks: “provide advice for problem-solving related to work tasks.”
Developmental networks: “promote (…) career development or function as role models.”
Social support networks: “comfortable discussing sensitive matters with.”
Friendship networks: “people they could relate to beyond work.”
Organizational information networks: help build “an understanding of how to navigate the organizational reality.”
If you’re leading an organization, a question for reflection:
How does your organization help people build or connect to these networks?
Explore the whole article:
OD Goodies
Curious about more resources on leading organizations?
Here’s a section with very short descriptions and links.
From the growing field of ONA (Organizational Network Analysis), we’ve learned that the “fewest number of employees who can reach the largest possible share of the organization” is 3%. This is dubbed “the three percent rule”.
Long read about how slack can help a system continuously adapt to its environment. If everybody’s busy all the time (no slack), the organization will have a hard time succeeding in the future. Similar to the idea of prioritizing working on the business, not only in the business.
Wiley is offering a curated list of free access research articles on “virtual working”. There are a couple on revisiting psychological contracts that we found particularly interesting.
EODF has launched an org design book club. First gathering will be on June 2nd, discussing The Fractal Organization with the author. See you there.
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The OrgDev newsletter is curated by Raluca and Bülent Duagi, the team behind Sense & Change. We work as OD Advisers to high performing cross-functional teams, guiding strategy execution and increasing team effectiveness in complex and uncertain contexts.