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Organizational Change and Social Network Analysis : Lessons from the Field Rob Cross

A number of forces both within and outside of an organization's boundary can impede a change effort. However, we consistently find that a lack of attention paid to an organization's informal structure results in unnecessary resistance to change. Social network analysis (SNA) provides a rich and systematic ability to assess informal structure by mapping and analyzing relationships among people, teams or even departments within an organization. Such a mapping can be used to facilitate change in a number of different ways. First, it can identify structurally key individuals that are in a position to further or to hinder a change (for a theoretical discussion of this point, see the piece by Brass in this symposium). Second, such a mapping can identify structural factors such as long path distances, disconnected regions, and the like that can impede change efforts (for a theoretical discussion of this point see the piece by Krackhardt in this symposium). Third, presenting the network to the organization members themselves can facilitate discussion and have a powerful transformational effect (an example will be presented in this paper). And fourth, multiple mappings over time serve to document structural change and identify areas that need more attention (see for example, the paper by Stevenson et al in this symposium). The purpose of this paper is to show how these four principal benefits can be realized in consulting settings. First, we studied a highly skilled virtual group within a global consulting company that was charged with providing thought leadership and specialized support to the organization's consultants in the area of knowledge management. By integrating highly specialized skill sets of this group, the firm felt it could provide a holistic knowledge management solution that would differentiate it from competitors focusing on solely technical or organizational solutions. However, the partner leading this virtual group felt intuitively that the team was not leveraging its abilities in as effective a fashion as possible. A social network analysis dramatically confirmed his intuition. As shown in the top half of Exhibit 1, when we looked at the information sharing network for this group, what we found was not one group at all but two distinct subgroups that were largely disconnected from each other. The basis for the groupings turned out to be their skill specialties: the group on the left focused on organizational aspects of