It is of course now abundantly clear that networks are the underlying structure of business and society.

Seminal social networks (in their pre-digital sense) pioneer Ron Burt proposed the term ‘structural holes’ to refer to the connections between people that did not exist but could create value.

You probably know some people (or you may be one yourself) who in conversations will frequently ask, ‘do you know so-and-so?,’ because they recognize that there would be mutual value in you knowing each other, and actively want to connect you.

In Malcolm Gladwell’s parlance, these are ‘Connectors’. The power of connectors is not in the strength of their connections, but the diversity of the many weak ties that they have across many communities.

However what really makes the difference is that they proactively connect, they don’t need to be asked. If they think two people should be connected then they are compelled to make the connection.

In Living Networks I used the example of Napier Collyns, a co-founder of the highly influential scenario planning firm Global Business Network. It was sometimes jokingly referred to as “Global Buddies of Napier,” not just for Napier’s extraordinary network, but his deep desire to connect.

In every one of my many conversations with Napier he constantly told me about people I should connect with if I wasn’t already, and he made sure he brought us together. His deep desire to connect created immense value for everyone he touched.

Many people strive to be good at ‘networking’, and a host of speakers and writers specialize in advising people how to build their personal networks, by going to events, reaching out on social networks, and a variety of other tactics.

In my keynotes over the years I would often urge people to have the primary intention of connecting not themselves, but others. Whenever you meet someone, think first of the connections between them and others that will create value, and take action to connect them. A slide in many of my keynotes read:

If you help bring the networks to life… you will create success for yourself

Your focus should be not on yourself, but in bringing the networks to life around you, enabling the immensely valuable connections that otherwise would be gaps, lost opportunities for human connection and value creation.

By thinking primarily about connecting others, as a side product you will create immense value for yourself, by living and working in a richer, more connected network of people, ideas, and value creation, incidentally making yourself more central to the incredible opportunities that you are helping to catalyze around you, at the heart of value as the networks we live in awaken and flourish.

I was recently going to quote this phase in an article I was writing, but when I searched for it, it wasn’t on Google. So I thought it was worth writing this post to re-share the idea. 😃

If you are bringing the networks to life, I love you!

Image: Nastya Dulhiier

Having been involved in the events, thought leadership initiatives and awards of a wide variety of associations over the years, I have long thought that there is massive untapped potential value in many associations’ member networks.

The disruption of associations

Over the last 5-10 years many associations have been challenged by a confluence of powerful forces undermining their established positions.

Most notably, in a connected world relevant content is far more accessible, individuals and organizations can readily build their own networks, and special interest groups can self-organize.

However in an increasingly networked world many associations have continued to maintain a hub and spoke mentality, gradually eroding the value of their established model.

The role of serendipity

The greatest potential of a group with aligned interests is very often in enabling valuable connections.

In a world driven by innovation the most value is often created by bringing together two or more people, ideas, organizations, or association members that have not previously been connected.

Serendipity has long been a key theme of my work. In 2006 on this blog I described how to create enhanced serendipity and told the delightful origin of the word.

I have always preferred the term ‘enhanced serendipity’, however I have also dug into the role of social networks and engineering serendipity in the workplace, which has drawn increasing attention recently.

Communities and beyond

As the value of proprietary content and resources is eroded, many people and organizations are remaining members of associations for the potential of high-value connections between peers.

The role of government and community representation for industry sectors is important and will remain, but this has lower value as a stand-alone offering, rather than bundled with content, education, research, and events as is the case for most associations.

Where well-established associations can thrive in a rapidly changing world is in pro-actively building value through connections within their communities.

Enabling ‘happy accidents’

Engineering serendipity is about creating the conditions within which the ‘happy accidents’ of useful connections happen.

This is a significantly different frame from where most associations have come from. It certainly represents a significant part of their future.

More recently I have met Catherine Stace, CEO of Cure Brain Cancer Foundation, who has brought inspiring and truly disruptive approaches to medical research philanthropy, by focusing on making research far more collaborative and effective rather than simply funding antiquated research models.

It is no surprise that collaboration between Mark and Catherine has created something exceptional: SWITCH Festival, to be held in Sydney 27-29 August.

The event brings together large corporates from different industries, entrepreneurs, innovators, universities, students and more with the express intent of fostering inter-industry collaboration and to support “unlikely alliances”.

Major participating organisations include ANZ, Australia Post, Blackmore’s, IAG, and Scentre Group (Westfield), which are each sending around 20 staff each, while other companies are sending smaller teams. They will bring intellectual property and energy to the event, to see how the exceptional network present can catalyse new cross-domain ideas and innovations. The intent is to create compelling cross-boundary ideas and innovation that could not have come from a single organisation.

The first day will be a rich conference day with some oustanding speakers. I will be presenting on The Future of Work and Organisations.

Over the following two days teams will compete for the innovation prizes. I am honoured to be one of the judges among a highly distinguished group.

There are already 150 participants and limited remaining places, but individual tickets are available until 23 August for a 50% discount using the code SWITCHVIP. Entrepreneurs and students get an extremely low registration fee.

The fundamental capabilities of PR professionals are more relevant than ever in our intensely networked world. Arguably, PR should be at the center of the marketing universe, since it is better able than any other discipline to deal with a world driven by relationships, fueled by connectivity, social, mobile, and power shifting to the individual.

The big question is: will the PR industry seize the immense opportunity before it?

Both in my own work and that of my companies we work extensively with PR agencies.

I have personally worked with a number of major PR globally agencies in framing the future of media. I am also frequently engaged by PR agencies on behalf of their clients to deliver keynotes at customer events and to act as a spokesperson for media campaigns.

Among the many services that our companies work with PR agencies on, notably Future Exploration Network creates compelling futurist content to support media and B2B marketing campaigns, Advanced Human Technologies does organisational and influence network analysis for designing high-performance organisations and campaigns, and MemeStreme (to be launched soon) will offer world-class interactive information visualizations.

However beyond these direct engagement points, it is clear that in a networked world marketing is being completely transformed. I believe that leading PR professionals – whose business is relationships – are probably best equipped to truly understand a world of distributed relationships, and find successful pathways to the future.

Please have look at Creating the Future of PR, join the conversations in our Creating the Future of PR Facebook Group, and let us know if you would like to contribute to the publication.

We will also be running a Creating the Future of PR Forum in Sydney this October, and will collaborate with local partners to run events in other major cities around the world.

Please do participate and pass on word to those who would be interested in this, our intention is over time to build something that will be truly valuable for the industry.

Networks are always at the heart of innovation. The new comes from combining the old in original ways.

Chemist Kary Mullis aptly described how he arrived at his innovations that won him the Nobel Prize in 1993:

“I put together elements that were already there, but that’s what inventors always do. You can’t make up new elements, usually. The new element, if any, it was the combination, the way they were used.”

Whether it is bringing together existing ideas to create new ideas, or connecting people in ways that generate new insights, organizations must design how they work to facilitate value-generating connections.

Organizations are rapidly shifting to network frames for their structure and operations. Those that do it in such a way as to better support high-value innovation are leading the way.

Below are the slides for a recent keynote I gave to the C-level executives of clients of a major telecommunications firm.

While the slides were designed to support the story I told through my keynote, on their own they still give an indication of the issues I raised, in placing networks at the heart of innovation.

However organizations are regularly re-organized, requiring a new org chart to be created. In fact, organizations are completely dynamic, changing in ways small and large every single day.

A fantastic video (below) depicts the continuous and frequently dramatic changes in the org chart of Autodesk over a 4 year period, in what the creators describe as an OrgOrgChart (Organic Organizational Chart). It’s well worth watching.

While Autodesk was probably a particularly fast-changing organization in this period, the video gives a powerful indication of the extent to which organizations restructure.

Organizations are living entities, highly dynamic organisms that cannot be captured in a formal organizational chart.

I have worked with many clients to apply Organizational Network Analysis to understand the informal (as opposed to formal) structure of their organizations.

Network perspectives are essential to truly understand how organizations function (or dysfunction). Network visualizations can certainly assist the development of effective strategies for organizational development.

Rich time-series visualizations such as the one above can help to understand the deeper nature of change, how organizations function, and how to increase performance.

An article in Sydney Morning Herald today titled Beware Facebook creep, publishers warned opened by describing the new Facebook Instant Articles and went on to quote me:

But Ross Dawson, a media strategy adviser and futurist who delivered the keynote speech at the International News Media Association conference in New York last week, told Fairfax Media that publishers should be wary of becoming too reliant on Facebook.

He said news organisations needed to look at all alternatives to distributing their content, including building their own digital platforms as well as partnering with third parties.

“Facebook is offering very favourable terms and requiring no commitment from publishers to participate in Instant Articles, so there is no real downside in trying it out,” said Mr Dawson, who was Thomson Financial’s Tokyo bureau chief in the early 1990s and has worked for Merrill Lynch.

“The danger is that publishers become overly dependent on Facebook for distribution, with no guarantee that the favourable terms will continue. They can mitigate this risk by diversifying their distribution, and having clear plans on how they will shift their distribution if the Facebook deal becomes less attractive, particularly in restricting how they can distribute content on other platforms.”

In my keynote at INMA I emphasized how platform strategy must be at the heart of how news publishers shape their future. While publishers have their own platforms – sometimes including print – they must also consider carefully how they engage with others’ platforms.

In my email interview with Sydney Morning Herald I also noted:

News publishers need to look at all alternatives for distributing their content, including participating in third party platforms, and building their own platforms which encompass multiple participants.

In considering distributing content over other platforms, publishers need to look at both potential benefits and costs of participating, including the potential costs of forgoing other channels.

Publishers need to have a clear overall platform strategy, in which they choose which platforms they choose to engage with, but also establish contingency strategies for the case that things don’t work out as they hoped.

My comments at the conference were interpreted as words of caution, which is fair.

However the broader issue is that platform strategy is often about hedging your bets, making sure that you have strategic flexibility even if the landscape quickly changes, which happens often in a multi-platform world.

Seize opportunities, but also make sure your opportunity landscape continues to open up rather than closing down through too focused bets.

Click on the image below to view the segment.

The segment described some just-released research titled Computer-based personality judgments are more accurate than those made by humans in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which says:

This study compares the accuracy of personality judgment—a ubiquitous and important social-cognitive activity—between computer models and humans. Using several criteria, we show that computers’ judgments of people’s personalities based on their digital footprints are more accurate and valid than judgments made by their close others or acquaintances (friends, family, spouse, colleagues, etc.). Our findings highlight that people’s personalities can be predicted automatically and without involving human social-cognitive skills.

The personality-assessment algorithm was solely based on Facebook likes made by participants, with results compared to the assessments of people who know them well. As little as 150 likes was sufficient to provide a more accurate personality assessment than a family member such as a parent, while 300 likes enabled a better assessment than a spouse.

What was perhaps more interesting was the claim that “computer personality judgments have higher external validity when predicting life outcomes such as substance use, political attitudes, and physical health; for some outcomes, they even outperform the self-rated personality scores.”

The potential implications are profound. Article co-author Wu Youyou said “In this context, the human-computer interactions depicted in science fiction films such as ‘Her’ seem to be within our reach.”

Being able to interact with people in a way tailored to their personalities and designed to generate particular responses is certainly a fair way beyond being able to assess personalities accurately, but we are rapidly heading in that direction.

These findings are unlikely to give pause to people sharing their lives – and personalities – on social media, but we absolutely need to be aware quite how deep the insights about ourselves we are sharing in our everyday online behaviors.

The video below nicely summarizes highlights from the event, including some excerpts from my speech from 1:38.

One of the issues I discussed was the potential of open innovation.

Many of the world’s largest organizations, such as the US Department of Defence, Procter & Gamble and IBM are avid proponents of open innovation.

Despite their extraordinary in-house resources they recognize the necessity of going outside to tap literally an entire world of ideas and innovation.

As shown in the study done by Amex, mid-tier firms often feel that they lack the resources of large organizations and the nimbleness of startups.

Yet equally this could be turned around to be seen as having more flexibility than corporations, and more resources than startups and small companies.

Open innovation levels the playing field. Smaller and mid-sized companies can tap global resources equally as well as large organizations. They no longer need extensive in-house resources, but can compete better than they have ever been able to before.

Certainly there is much to learn in doing open innovation well, but these are the core competencies that will drive organizations’ future success. Certainly CFOs but also all other senior executives of mid-tier firms need to engage on the journey of finding innovation from outside.

This will bring them alongside – or often beyond – large companies that are burdened on over-reliant on their internal resources.

Given the context, I was able to delve a little deeper into the issues than I would for most audiences.

The video of my presentation was sliced into a number of brief segments. Below is the video of the section of my presentation on Networks.

Here is a summary of the points made in the video:

* Networks are fundamental not just to our communications but to many aspects of our lives.

* There are many network topologies. One of the most important is ‘scale-free’ networks, in which the structure is identical irrespective of its size.

* The internet has maintained the same scale-free structure throughout its growth over the last 21 years.

* Scale-free networks develop through ‘preferential attachment‘, in which better-connected nodes tend to get more connections, in a version of ‘the rich get richer’.

* Gaussian curves describe so-called ‘normal distributions’. Financial market variations are often assumed to follow normal distributions, but in fact they often exhibit heteroskedasticity, meaning that events that are thought to be unlikely in fact happen far more than expected. In fact these ‘black swans’ are increasingly likely.

* Scale-free networks, in contrast to Gaussian distributions, have power-law distributions, in which a few nodes have many connections, and down an exponential curve, many have few connections, a concept popularized as ‘the long tail.’

* There are many factors, such as positive feedback loops and self-organisation, that are shifting systems towards power-law distributions.

* This is happening in organisations today. As we move from hierarchical structures that define specific and limited communication paths, to open communication across many levels and functions, organisations are shifting to power-law distributions.

* The shift towards scale-free networks is visible across many domains, including social networks, industries, and politics. However these types of networks are also evident in biological systems such as cells and brains.

* In influence networks, messages and ideas can ‘cascade’ to reach many people. The network characteristics that shape whether and how messages can cascade, or to use more popular jargon, ‘go viral’, include network density and network homogeneity.

* Cascades are hard to engage, with well-connected influencers with heterogenous networks the most likely source of widespread message dissemination.