Vikas Narula is Creator and Co-Founder of Keyhubs – a software and services company specializing in workplace social analytics. In one of his blog posts, he makes the following statement;
"While companies look to their org charts as pathways for executing on strategy, our intuition and experience tells us there are informal channels and relationships that largely dictate how work really gets done."
He brings out a great point about finding the right people to enlist as change agents. The informal network may often be more influential and effective than the formal chain of command.This article in Twin Cities Business describes the tool that Mr. Narula developed. After gathering information from people in your organization, the tool can output a map that shows who wields the influence in your organization.In one of our older posts, we talked about looking for institutional knowledge when finding people to help with the change effort;
"...Their connections to and knowledge of the true power brokers (whether official or unofficial) can make or break you. You need to identify everybody who will need to be persuaded to be a champion and change agent for you — and an organizational chart doesn’t always give you the whole picture."
We agree that the formal chain of command may not be the best way to get change to happen and this tool looks like a great way to identify the informal network. And, it's very fun to see a visual of who your true change agents might be!