Discovery of slowness*

One of the value-creating use cases of Human Network Analysis #HNA is pattern detection. If one thinks about collaboration, as manifested in meetings, as Social Capital, then understanding the build up of Social Capital is a business-relevant question. To formulate a precise hypothesis: How does Social Capital build up over the duration of tenure, aka the belonging of the company.

You might remember your own first day in Ericsson (or any other large company), the company felt intimidating huge, as you hardly did know anyone (relax, it feels still a bit like this after 20 years). The Social Capital is very low and will grow over time.

This is what we intuitively expect, and this is what the graph below shows**. The graph also shows that the Social Capital is not growing into infinity but is going into saturation. ?

One explanation you might find in Dunbar’s number: Although the Social Capital is not identical to the number of connections and the proposed limit of the connections that can be maintained (Dunbar’s number), it is evident that you cannot hold contact with an ever growing number of people, friends and colleagues will leave, etc.. – While this might invite you to reflect on Dunbar’s number in business and in a company (we have limited the network to Ericsson, thus weren’t incorporating customers and suppliers, and the whole ecosystem), it is preparing only a much more surprising insight: The discovery of slowness of the build-up of Social Capital. Fact 1: Social Capital is low in the beginning of the employment and then increases. Fact 2: Social Capital in Ericsson goes into saturation. Fact 3: This process takes decades. The build-up of Social Capital is very slow.

We have used the term Social Capital on purpose. As it indicates that this is a substantial business problem. Would you invest somewhere, where the Return of Investment (ROI) is very slow?

The good news is the discovery of slowness is just a snap-shot observation. It is not a law of nature, and thus we can change it (blue arrow, and new blue curve):

Indeed, this is a problem worth solving.

Some finger food for mind:

·??????Another use case for Human Network Analysis is measuring the effectiveness of interventions, and we could show via HNA that an Ericsson Early Career Program is statistically significant increasing the Social Capital

·??????Cooperate and Collaborate is for a good reason one of the 5 Focus Areas of the Ericsson Culture Transformation Ericsson on the Move, and we could show that the Move as a Team workshop is increasing the Social Capital

·??????Strategy Perspectives (a self-organizing community in Ericsson) is a greenhouse for building Social Capital (Reference towards Strategy Perspective in Linkedin)

·??????We are now working with Ericsson Resource Groups Young Talents, Next Generation, … on building the awareness of the importance of Social Capital and how to efficiently grow it (fantastic discussions and many awesome constructive thoughts)

·??????How can we break the Twin Talk****?

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What are your thoughts? How can we increase the build up of Social Capital? What can do those, who are new to the company? What can do those, who are here already for a very long time?

But first of all: Do you see the same pattern in your company? Both in terms of the build up of Social Capital and in the ladder patterns?

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Appendix 1

*The Discovery of Slowness is the title of a book by Sten Nadolny

Appendix 2

**Betweenesscentrality is an HNA metric that measures the number of shortest path going through a specific node, and thus can be translated into the importance of a node to the overall network, and for this we use the short hand Social Capital.

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Appendix 3

Another pattern on the Social Capital and collaboration metrics is the ladder pattern***, also with the build up of Social Capital over tenure we see the ladder pattern, those higher in the hierarchy have a higher Social Capital and increase their Social Capital faster.

Appendix 4

*** ladder pattern describing the phenomena that there is a correlation between hierarchy and another variable, since the hierarchy is discrete and when visualized with bar chart (or other discrete graphs), the visualization resembles a ladder, see example below

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Appendix 5

HBR article:

Don’t

Underestimate the Value of Employee Tenure (hbr.org)

The article

stresses the value and importance of “firm-specific human capital” build in

tenure. They have done the job and proofing that this firm-specific human

capital translates in tangible business value / performance difference

Our investigations in Ericsson:

“firm specific human capital” is quite close to what we call “Social Capital”,

which again is our translation of the Human Network Analysis metric of

Betweenesscentrality (see graph in the main article on the slow buildup of

Social Capital” as a function of tenure).

Combining the findings of the HBR article and our investigations, we have quite a strong argument that higher Social Capital really translates into enhanced business value / superior performance.

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Appendix 6

Twin Talk we call a phenomenon that we have found in the data of collaboration in Ericsson describing that we over-proportionally talk to those who are alike. Young people in Ericsson talk more to other young people. People new to Ericsson talk more to other people new to Ericsson. Employees talk most in / around the same hierarchy level. Even females talk proportionally more to females than to males and vice versa.

Side note on the implications: Senior managers talk most to senior managers, however they take decisions also effecting very often employees in the lower ranks and hierarchical layers. In another study we have shown that collaboration shows typically ladder patterns, meaning, at least, the collaboration reality, if not all work reality, is very different for those high in the hierarchy in contrast to those low in the hierarchy.