January/February 2008 · Volume 90 · Number 1

Leading a Net

by Camille Cates Barnett

“How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.”
—Niels Henrik David Bohr, Danish physicist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, 1922

Austin, 1975: Austin abutted 10 cities and 3 municipal utility districts.

The leader is the person at the top of an organization—right?

Think of the mental model this question assumes. It assumes an organizational structure that has a specific top and a hierarchy with a chain of command from top to bottom. Our mental model of governance is often one of hierarchy and central control.

Author Kevin Kelly describes this mental model as the icon of the past century:

The popular symbol of the atom is stark; a black dot encircled by the hairline orbits of several other dots. The atom whirls alone, the epitome of singleness. It is the metaphor for individuality; . . . the atom stands for power and knowledge and certainty.¹

We have even developed local governments that fit this mental model. Years ago, I presented the Austin, Texas, city council with two maps that shook our understanding of what we were leading. We were leading a city that no longer existed. We considered Austin the central city dominating the surrounding suburbs. It was an Austin that looked like an atom.

Our city was actually part of a network of jurisdictions that made up a metropolitan region.

Think about our cities and counties—as you see them when you fly over them. A city or county today is actually a complex system of overlapping, interrelating jurisdictions—a net.

Austin Environs, 1993: Austin abuts 22 cities and some 40 municipal utility districts.

The things we really care about in cities cannot be resolved without looking beyond the arbitrary political jurisdictions we call cities, counties, school districts, special districts—or state or federal government. We cannot be successful focusing only on the public sector, the private sector, or the nonprofit sector. We work with organizational models that are outdated.

In an information society, we are trying to make bureaucracies work that were designed for an industrial society. We work in a governmental system that is changing. We still talk about our system as federal, state, and local—when the emerging governance systems are global, regional, and by neighborhood.

What has become clear is that we are leading organizations and communities that are networks. In fact, the icon for the 21st century is the Net:

The Net icon has no center—it is a bunch of dots connected to other dots, . . . the restless image fading at indeterminate edges. The Net is . . . all intelligence, all interdependence, all things economic and social and ecological, all communications, all democracy, all groups, all large systems.²

We need to change the way we think so we can change the way we govern. We need a governance system for a networked society.

Most of what leaders today are asked to influence are networks. So here is the paradox—how do you lead a net? Here is how:

1. Model behavior.
2. Design structures.
3. Facilitate flows.

Model Behavior

I got into public service because I wanted to change the world. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the world would also change me. You cannot change an organization without changing yourself. That is both the risk and the reward of public management.

I remember when I first realized this. I was deputy city manager of Dallas, Texas, and was encouraging department directors to be more participative. My instructions to them were something like: “Talk with your staff, develop a new communication strategy, and report back to me on what you’ve done.”

As I read their memos, dutifully submitted on time, I got angrier and angrier. All I was getting was the same old stuff. Then it hit me. They were doing exactly what I had said—and what I had been doing. I had been using a command and control style to get them to be more participative! My actions spoke louder than my words. So, I changed my actions. I took a risk and started meeting with middle managers. I began to conduct creativity workshops in the organization. I learned a lot—about the organization and about myself. You have to model the behavior you want in others. As the saying goes: Walk your talk.

Leaders also know how to listen and learn. They have the vision to see connections and networks, to cross boundaries to find new players and ideas. These leaders do not control others as much as they engage others.

C. Clinton Sidle and Chester C. Warzynski of Cornell University say “. . .network leaders have learned to see connections and develop a level of personal influence that helps them serve as attractor—important nodes or connectors. . . .”³ They liken leaders to the role of “strange attractors” in physics. They identify the skills needed for this type of leadership as:

• “Knowledge for understanding the business and a grasp of the cross-functional issues for seeing the possible connections.
• Relationship skills for building trust, interpersonal influence, and social capital for collaborative efforts.
• Vision for seeing the possibilities, what is most important, and communicating direction and strategy.
• Action orientation for leading by example, and embodying and modeling the way for others.
• Personal mastery and self-knowledge for understanding personal motivations and values that drive personal development and the ability to learn from experience.”⁴

You lead a net first by modeling network behavior. The best leader is the best learner.

Design Structures

Can you design an invisible organization?

Dee Hock, Visa’s creator and first CEO, said: “The better an organization is, the less obvious it is. In Visa, we tried to create an invisible organization and keep it that way. It’s the results, not the structure or management that should be apparent.”⁵

The story of how Visa was created as a network organization is a fascinating tale, told in Hock’s book, Birth of the Chaordic Age.⁶ (“Chaordic” is the blending of chaos and order.) Hock describes the representatives of competitive banks meeting over many sessions to determine how to design Visa. They focused on:

Purpose—the mission of the organization.
Principles—the core values.
People—the roles of people and the membership in the organization.
Structure—the rules of engagement and governance (the relationships).

The organizing principles, which could also be transforming as principles for metropolitan regions or management teams, are:

• “It must be equitably owned by all the participants.
• Power and function must be distributive to the maximum degree.
• Governance must be distributive.
• It must be infinitely malleable yet extremely durable.
• It must embrace diversity and change.”⁷

Every time you use a credit card or log on to the Internet, you are a member of a networked organization. These new organizations are highly decentralized and highly collaborative. They are largely invisible to us. Network organizations are not defined by a new organization chart or headquarters building. They are defined by the results they enable.

Designing networks to enable results is a principal leadership task. Think how you would design your organization to move from one set of design characteristics to another.

Leaders have ideas. Leaders can conceptualize and operationalize new organizational designs, new networks. They know that complex organizations are not led by systems of control but by systems of values.

Designing networks is easier when you know several models of networks that could be adapted to the needs of the situation. In his ground-breaking book published in 2006, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, Chris Anderson showed that beneath social power curves, especially in consumer markets and popular culture, lies a reality that has been greatly amplified by modern telecommunications and information processing technologies.⁸ Figure 1 shows that, although the demand curve tends downward, it is for all practical purposes asymptotic, that is, it never reaches zero. Whether it is an unpopular song or movie, there is always somebody out there who will assign value to it.

Figure 1. The Long Tail.
This graph demonstrates author Chris Anderson’s explanation of long tail or high demand for a few items, tapering to low demand, but never zero, for many items.

Because there are many more non-hits than hits and blockbusters for consumer items, selling more of less-popular items is a viable business model. Anderson insightfully explains that, unlike in the past, when the economics of our technological limitations made available only the hits and blockbusters, modern technologies such as those that make eBay or Netflix possible now let us get more choices from more people. The implications of this for leaders in public networks are intriguing.

Among other things, it means that we can ensure nothing gets by our network without at least some degree of engagement. A network with a large, diverse membership will have a lot of eyes trained in a lot of directions. It will be able to catch and assimilate more information and, therefore, bring to bear more capacity to anticipate and solve problems, take advantage of opportunities, and, in general, out-compete its less robust rivals.

It also means that you can connect the public more effectively into your network.

Washington, D.C., used this long-tail network model to change the way its public service agencies did business.⁹ After discovering that the majority of citizen requests for such services as pothole repair, bulky-trash pickup, and snow removal were either reported but unclosed or altogether unrecorded despite an elaborate automated system for tracking them, the District decided to stream each request to the Internet immediately after it came in (http://data.octo.dc.gov/Main_DataCatalog_Go.aspx?category=0&view=RSS ).

This meant that program managers would get each report at the same time as the public and would be accountable directly to the public for slow responses and inaccurate report closeouts. To ensure the public found them meaningful, each report went out with exact street address and geo-positioning information.

Staff was given one month to update their existing reports and prepare for the new order of business. When it was time to broadcast the reports, the agencies had attained a near-perfect accuracy rate, and the game had now changed to making sure every citizen request was recorded no matter whether it came directly from residents, or indirectly from the mayor’s office or through an offhand remark by a well-intentioned employee. Today, the information generated by the District’s customer service request system is highly reliable, and the response times are shorter than they’ve ever been. For more information, contact Marina Havan at 202/478-9209; e-mail, marina.havan@dc.gov.

We have more options if we think of our problems as challenges that we can meet, not by ourselves or through the government alone, but by an entire network. Managers can solve their problems by facilitating the participation of an increasingly technologically savvy public, an unmistakably vital member of an effective city network. In this hypothetical thought experiment, the city went so far as to inform the would-be criminals of the change in their environment, in this way channeling their participation in the network.

Facilitate Flows

The third leadership task is to facilitate flows of information, feedback, ideas, resources, and power. Facilitate flows by developing new connections and repairing broken connections:

“We have many organizational models that demonstrate how open access to information contributes to self- organized effectiveness. The literature on organizational innovation, creativity and knowledge management is rich in lessons that apply here; not surprisingly, they describe processes that also characterize the natural universe. Innovation is fostered by information gathered from new connections; from insights gained by journeys into other disciplines or places; from active, collegial networks and fluid, open boundaries. Knowledge grows inside relationships, from ongoing circles of exchange where information is not just accumulated by individuals, but is willingly shared. Information-rich, ambiguous environments are the source of surprising new births.”¹⁰

We grow networks by making and repairing connections. Part of what public managers do is spend time in the organization and in the community. One of the functions of this activity is to make new relationships and nourish existing relationships. It is facilitating networks, connections, and relationships.

Leaders of today’s governments know the real organization is made up of networks of relationships people have within and outside the formal organization. You lead a net by developing and maintaining webs of informal connections.

Another lesson from today’s science is that the act of observing changes what is observed. In this context, no measurement is neutral. What we chose to measure is what we focus on, what we declare as meaningful and important. That is why outcome measures are more helpful in describing process than activity measures. That is also why having citizens and other stakeholders involved in developing and tracking the measures has great impact on the organization.

Many governments today are vulnerable to surprises or adversity in the environment. Bureaucracies are slow to respond to unplanned events. Resiliency depends on frequently getting insights about changes in the environment and distributing this information broadly so that many are involved in determining its meaning and the best responses. Net leaders build agility to ensure engagement.

Net governance would build on all these efforts. We would create new ways to govern these new kinds of cities.

A Leadership Challenge for Us All

Suppose we took these ideas about leading a net and applied them to our jobs now. What would that look like?

• We would focus on results by using citizen-driven indicators.
• We would post in real-time on the Internet the data and transactions that drive those indicators so members of the public can see and analyze them on their own.
• We would design our service delivery systems to maximize the public’s interaction on a self-initiated basis.
• We would use virtual reality technology to model land use and transportation decisions of our region, and citizens of our region could see—and change—these models on their computer or television screens.
• We would consistently highlight the relationships, the consequences, and the unintended consequences of various public policies in land use, transportation, economic development, environment, education, health, housing, social services, and public safety.
• We would focus more on facilitation and less on control.
• We would cross boundaries and include diversity.
• We would focus on repairing broken connections among cities, suburbs, and rural areas.
• We would strengthen our interdependencies through revenue sharing and joint projects.
• We would be able to see our collective self-interest in economic development and environmental protection strategies.
• We would be able to cooperate without a central authority requiring it.
• We would encourage sharing of ideas among diverse cultures, professions, places.
• We would be open to experimentation and a search for better outcomes.

The beginnings of net leadership are already emerging. We can take a piece of advice from hockey player Wayne Gretzky. When asked what made him so good at hockey, he said, “I don’t skate to where the puck is; I skate to where the puck will be.”

Mastery of the game is more than skill. It is more than knowing the rules. Mastery of the game is seeing where it is going.

It is already a new game. It is a new world. We need a new kind of leader.

¹Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1994).
²Ibid., 25.
³C. Clinton Sidle and Chester C. Warzynski, “A New Mission for Business Schools: The Development of Actor-Network Leaders,” working paper, Cornell University, Johnson Graduate School of Management, n.d., www.clintsidle.org/uploads/JEBParkLeadershipModel.doc.
⁴Ibid., p. 9.
⁵M. Mitchell Waldrop, “The Trillion-Dollar Vision of Dee Hock,” Fast Company, October 1996, 75, www.fastcompany.com/magazine/05/deehock.html.
⁶Dee Hock, Birth of the Chaordic Age (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1999).
⁷“The Chaordic Organization: Out of Control and into Order,” World Business Academy Perspectives 9, no. 1 (1995).
⁸Chris Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (New York: Hyperion, 2006).
⁹Oscar Rodriguez, executive director, Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission (M-NCPPC), contributed to this article by helping explain the long tail concept and how it applies to public administration today. M-NCPPC is a state-created agency that serves the cities and unincorporated communities of Montgomery County and Prince George’s County, Maryland. He also coauthored the previous two articles in PM’s three-part series on networks.
¹⁰Margaret J. Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World, 3rd ed. (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2006), 104.

Camille Cates Barnett is managing director, city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Editor’s Note: This is the third article in the PM series on networks. The first article, “Connections Matter: Using Networks for Economic Development,” was published in March 2006. The second, “Connections Matter: Using Networks for Improved Performance,” was published in June 2006.

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