Who should be in a group?

The theory

I always wanted this blog to be impersonal, neutral, boring nerdy stuff about how things self-organize, in human groups and in nature. Then life happens. There was a biggie in summer, when my husband died. Well, there's been another biggie this week, when I got laid off.

Which leads me straight to the question: Who should be in a group? This is part of what you need to think about as soon as you have a group. Even if it's a group of volunteers, does it mean that we should merrily accept anybody that comes and never ask anyone to go? Are the people who come always "the right people", or should we be looking for what we need?

There is a very simple rule of thumb you can apply whenever you wonder who should be there. Every member of a group needs to have two things:

• Something to give: Why does everybody else want this person here? If you start feeling that the answer is: "Well, nobody wants this person here..." something needs to be done about it. Either the person has to start offering something, or has to go.
• Something to take: Why does this person want to be here? If somebody starts feeling like they aren't getting anything from being here, they will go. Unless somebody notices first and they get given something they want.

Even when there is give and take, people may feel that the exchange isn't fair. When the general feeling is that a person is taking more than they're giving, there's trouble. Most people are careful to balance their goodwill books, to the point of keeping detailed track of what favours are owed to who.

The reverse is also true: whenever there's trouble in a group, people start looking for somebody who must be taking more than they're giving. This isn't necessarily the case (problems can be for all sorts of reasons), but it's such a common human reaction, that every time there is a recession, lay-offs are a common solution.

The practice

Experiment 1

The "give and take" rule doesn't apply just to humans, it's also the base of every community in nature. Look for examples of groups of animals - a beehive, a school of fish, a rabbit warren, or a family of birds - and try to answer these questions:

1. What does each individual give and take? This may include:

• Food
• A chance to rest
• Shelter
• Protection
• Propagation of the species

2. What happens with individuals that take more than they give? What happens with individuals that give much more than they take?

Experiment 2

You can do this in any group you are part of. Ask everyone to make a list of the things that they give to the group. Then another list of the things that they take. Then compare lists.

1. Are there many things in common between lists?

2. Is there anything that is given or taken that appears only in the list of one or two people? Does this look like it makes people more powerful or more vulnerable to have this special thing in their list?

3. Are there people that have one or two things only in their give list or their take list? Does this look like it makes people more powerful or more vulnerable?

Double bind

The theory

A commenter on the last post about how people change their mind said: "If people have to be manipulated into believing the truth, they aren't really believing the truth." This is a very good point, but not as easy as it seems at first blush. Because in actual fact, most of the things that we believe are true, we don't believe them because we know them first-hand or because we are following some careful logical reasoning. For example, most of my readers will believe that climate change is caused by humans burning fossil fuels, and that world oil production is already in decline or is going to decline soon. But we don't know these things first-hand, and if we are entirely honest with ourselves, we don't know all the ins and outs of the matter. We believe these things partly by reasoning and partly by accepting the authority of other people that we think are experts on the matter. Strictly speaking, we may have been manipulated into believing this.

Still, there are a few things we can take into account to reduce the chances of making mistakes, and one of them, as the commenter suggested, is knowing a bit more about our biases. I talked about this already on a previous post (Why things go wrong: emotional reasons). So today I'd like to touch on a particular case, a very nasty kind of confusion that is most often responsible for the worst tangles people knot themselves in. It's called "double bind". It happens when somebody believes at the same time three things:

• Belief 1
• Belief 2 that contradicts belief 1
• Belief 3 that states there isn't a contradiction between beliefs 1 and 2, or that if there is a contradiction, it shouldn't be talked about.
  

A couple of real life examples:

• The Earth is round, because it's the logical conclusion of observations.
• The Earth is flat, because it says so in the Bible, and the Bible is God's word.
• The Bible only contains the literal truth.

• You love your son dearly
• Your son is being asked to serve in a war, where there are good chances he'll be killed.
• You are patriotic, so you see your nation as your family. There is no difference between the loyalty you feel for your nation and the loyalty you feel for your family.
  

This is particularly relevant for activists that are trying to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels. One important reason that it's so difficult to convince some people to take some actions, is because they are tied in a double bind. The most common forms of this are:

The human ingenuity argument:

• Reduction in the use of fossil fuels is necessary to avoid climate change and deal with peak oil, both of which would have disastrous consequences.
• Increase in the use of fossil fuels is necessary to grow the economy, especially in developing countries.
  
• Human ingenuity will find a way out of this contradiction in time to avoid any disastrous problems.

The positivity argument:

• Reduction in the use of fossil fuels is necessary to avoid climate change and deal with peak oil, both of which would have disastrous consequences.
• Increase in the use of fossil fuels is almost certain in the current world political climate.
  
• Being negative about the outlook will lead people to inaction, so we must avoid pointing out this contradiction.

The behaviour of somebody trapped in a double bind is different from the behaviour of somebody that simply has to deal with bad news, even extremely bad news. Let's see it by comparing two typical examples:

Very bad news - your son has a possibly fatal disease:

• You know and accept that the solution to your problem may be difficult or impossible.
• You can express freely any mixed feelings and doubts
• Usual reactions include: Sadness, anger, efforts to limit the damage, efforts to prevent any further harm.

Double bind - your son must go to war:

• You feel like you're damned if you do, damned if you don't.
• You don't feel like you are allowed to express any mixed feelings or doubts.
• Usual reactions include: confusion, fear, erratic behaviour, denial, rationalization, actions to increase personal comfort that don't deal with the problem or are definitely inappropriate.
  

This comparison should make it easy to figure out when you are dealing with somebody trapped in a double bind.

The practice

Experiment 1

Animals get can get pulled in two opposite directions, the same as humans. When they do, they can engage in what's called displacement behaviour: Instead of doing something appropriate to the situation, they do something else, such as eating or grooming. Have you ever seen this? What was the exact situation?

Experiment 2

Do you know any example of somebody who seems to be trapped in a double bind? Next time that you try to talk with them about the issue, avoid a frontal attack and try something more roundabout. It's sometimes said that beliefs are like tables that are held by several legs. Try to figure out what are the legs for the particular belief that seems to be blocking this person. Ask them: Why do you believe that?

Once you have an impression about the legs for those beliefs, you can look at each of them in turn: Is this probably true but doesn't really support this belief? Is this probably false?

Another very useful question to ask is: when did you start believing that? It's much more difficult to change somebody's mind when they have been believing something since their childhood.

People don't change their mind the way they are supposed to

The theory

Ocassionally I get unsubscribe requests to the mailing list that tells people of updates to this site. Most of them happened when the site was launched, but a couple have arrived later. Every single one of them has been short and to the point, with the exception of one that I got recently, that contained some nasty swearing. This was a contact in my list that has always hated me, for no clear reason I can see, because we have never had much contact in the first place. As far as I can tell, he has some serious prejudices about me based on rumours, that he's never changed in the face of clear evidence that he might be wrong and that in any case, he doesn't know that much about me. And this takes me to an issue that most people don't think about, but it's sadly true: people don't change their minds about things the way they are supposed to. That's one of the reasons that influencing other people can be so difficult.

The way people are supposed to change their mind is something like this: They have some kind of rational belief based on their experience. You give them evidence that proves that they are wrong. They consider the evidence and, finding it convincing, they change their mind. Sadly, it isn't at all like that.

There have been experiments done on real people who had a wrong belief related to something that was in the news, after providing them with overwhelmingly clear evidence that their belief was wrong. To make the different answers clear, let's imagine the following wrong belief: "Bobby ripped Alice's dress and that's why Alice slapped him." People were given conclusive evidence that Bobby didn't rip Alice's dress, including Alice herself saying that the dress wasn't ripped at all. The results were as follows:

• About 1 in 3 (33%) just continued defending their position, finding an alternative justification to actions justified previously with this fact and downplaying the importance of this particular fact. "Bobby is a creep anyway, he deserves being slapped. It doesn't really matter what he did on this particular case."
  
• About 1 in 6 (16%) continued to believe what they believed before, and were unable to explain why they continued believing it. "I'm sure Bobby ripped the dress, I know he did."
  
• About another 1 in 6 (16%) defended that there must have been a good reason for the action justified with this fact, because otherwise it wouldn't have been done. "Alice wouldn't have slapped Bobby without good reason."
• About 1 in 7 (14%) said that they had never believed the fact anyway. "Oh, I never really believed that Bobby ripped her dress, it was clearly gossip."
  
• About 1 in 8 (12%) found some argument to continue believing what they believed. "I still think Bobby ripped the dress, I think Alice is lying to defend him."
• About 1 in 15 (7%) simply refused to discuss the matter. "I don't know, who knows what happened anyway?"
• Only 2% (about 1 in 50) did as they were supposed to: They said they considered the evidence, and changed their mind. "OK, I'm convinced, the dress wasn't ripped."
  

The statistics are depressing. Half the people will ignore the fact and continue defending an action justified with that fact, either finding alternative reasons for it or just assuming that there must have been good reason. More than a quarter will continue believing what they believed before anyway. Only 1 in 6 people will change their mind on the face of overwhelming evidence, and the vast majority of those will deny that it was the evidence, but will pretend or convince themselves that they have always believed what they believe now. And the rest will just refuse to talk about it.

All of these reactions are familiar to people that campaign about climate change. People's beliefs are incredibly "sticky", especially when they are beliefs used to justify certain actions. What can be done? A few approaches that might help:

• For those that continue defending their right to not change their actions, you can ask them, point black: "What would need to happen to convince you that you should/shouldn't do this?" Most people will give you an answer, they don't want to appear completely unreasonable and inflexible. Then see if you can provide them with the evidence or motivation that they require.
• For those that continue denying the facts, the best strategy is often an appeal to authority. Find out whose opinions they hold in high regard, and try to locate examples of those people defending the facts that you are presenting.
  
• Don't press people who actually change their mind to admit that you changed their mind. Most people resist admitting that their mind can be changed, they like to believe they are consistent. Let them be, or they may rather go back to their old beliefs.
  
• Don't press people who refuse to talk about it. For some people, this is a stage they need to go through before changing their mind. Pressing them can produce the opposite results of what you want.

The practice

This is your chance to shine! Use the techniques outlined in the post about influence to prepare a talk to convince people about something you consider important. Then, on the questions & answers session, use the pointers above to finish convincing the unconvinced.

Complexity

The theory

Some of my readers come from rather academic backgrounds, and make comments that sound like "Jabberwockies and slithy-toves are irrelevant!" (This seems to be the most usual type of communication from a university professor, as far as I can tell). A bit of googling is usually needed to understand what is their pet peeve, which may or may not have something to do with what you were talking about. I recently got one of those, and it got me thinking about something I've been wanting to post about for a while, and dreading at the same time. Complexity.

Complexity is one of the key concepts when you talk about systems. But it's difficult to talk about it because it's... well, complex. There are many definitions of complexity, and one of the most common says that a system is complex if it has emergent behaviour, in other words, it does things you wouldn't have guessed if somebody just told you about its parts and how they are put together. I don't like very much that definition because it's almost like saying: "A system is complex if you find it hard to understand" and that is really saying more about your intelligence than about the system. For example, you can tell the physics of the sea surface are more complex than the physics of the surface of a small lake, because the sea has waves and tides. Waves and tides are emergent behaviour that shows only in large bodies of water.

Another definition, that I like more, says that a system is complex if it's highly structured, in other words, if you can recognize a lot of clear patterns and configurations inside it. Highly structured systems almost always have emergent behaviour, so the two definitions are for most purposes equivalent. For example, a plant is definitely more complex than a rock, it has many more structures, configurations and all sorts of stuff going on inside it. It also has plenty of emergent behaviour: it grows, turns its leaves towards the light, etc. If you had never seen a plant in your life you wouldn't have guessed it could do that in a million years.

The most rigurous definitions, loved by mathematicians and people so brainy that they wish there was a quicker way of speaking formulas, use formulas that translated to plain English mean: a system is complex if it would take you a long time to describe it, when you describe it in the simplest possible terms. That has a bit of both of the other definitions: highly structured systems and anything that has emergent behaviour are going to be difficult to describe. For example, it would be much more complicated to describe a plant than it is to describe a rock. But for us plain mortals this definition sounds more "fuzzy", even though mathematically it isn't fuzzy at all, so I recommend that you stay with the idea that a complex system is something with a lot of different complicated patterns in it.

Complex is often confused with complicated, but they are different ideas. A complicated system has a lot of different parts, but the structure may be very simple. Complicated systems are a challenge to your memory and patience, complex systems are a challenge to your intelligence - often a challenge you will fail. A city is complex and complicated; beehives are complex but not too complicated; the people on a beach (that don't interact much with each other) and the sand and pebbles on the beach are simple systems; chess games and many gardens are complicated, but not very complex.

Whenever you are looking at any system, try to estimate how complex it is. The following are good signs that the system is complex:

• The system has a memory. It behaves differently depending on what has happened in the past. A plant has some memory, a rock doesn't.
• The system is nested. You can see that the parts it's made of have smaller parts inside them. A plant has leaves, roots, etc, that are made up of cells, that have a lot of interesting bits inside them called organelles.
• The system has a structured network. By this I mean that connections in the system make a network where some nodes are very highly connected while most of them aren't. In a forest, certain plants are eaten by lots of animals, while some are eaten only by a few. That's part of what makes a forest complex.
• You see the butterfly effect in action. The name of the butterfly effect comes from a saying about complex systems, "a butterfly beating its wings in Brazil could cause a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico a couple of months later". In complex systems, a small change can cause a huge difference in future behaviour. For example, some tiny vibrations in the air made by a small speaker make a sound that a little girl hears as: "Get lost." The girl starts crying, runs away and shortly afterwards she's well and truly lost. This could be followed by even bigger consequences.
• The system has lots of feedback. "Feedback" means that the result of an event has an influence in the chances of it happening again. For example, you get angry at somebody and you shout at them. Depending on how much this person loves you and their personality, this will reduce or increase the chances that this person does again what made you angry. What's unlikely is that they are completely indifferent. People give feedback to each other all the time, though sometimes they get positive and negative feedback mixed up.
• You have trouble to understand what's going on. This almost guarantees that the system is complex.

The practice

Experiment 1

Think of an organization you are part of (it could be your place of work or a voluntary organization you take part in). Ask the following questions:

• Is the internal structure simple, complex or complicated?
  
• Have you seen the organization behaving in a way unexpectectly well coordinated?
  
• Does it keep good records?
  
• Does it have subgroups within groups?
  
• What is the internal network like?
  
• Is it possible to make big permanent changes by starting small?
  
• Is there lots of feedback?

This should give you a feeling for how complex it is.

An organization that is too simple is just disorganized. Working inside it feels like walking through treacle: a lot of the time you feel like you can't get anywhere.

It's uncommon that an organization is too complex, but nowadays it happens more and more, mostly thanks to modern information and comms technology. You can tell it is if it seems to be taxing your brain a lot just to do the common things that you are supposed to do all the time, and you can't keep up with the speed that things are changing.

Experiment 2

Go to the nearest garden to where you live. It could be a park or a vegetable garden, it doesn't matter.

• Does it look simple, complex or just complicated?
• Is there anything in it that surprises you?
• How does it change with the seasons? Does it go round the same cycle every year, or do you see changes each year?
• How do changes start? Do they start small, or are they complete overhauls?
  
• What patterns can you see in the way different plants are situated?
• What interactions do you notice between plants? Are there many of them or few?
• How long do you think it would keep its character if there were no gardeners?
  
• Do these observations tell you something about what kind of training the gardeners had?

Tipping points

The theory

I'm going to deal today with the third question that's being debated about the constitution of an organization. The question is: "Should the quorum for general meetings be a fixed number or a percentage of membership?"

This ties in directly with the question of magic numbers that I wrote about in my last post. If you just think about that, it sounds like a strong case for a fixed number: It's easier to deal with a group when you know what kind of behaviour to expect. If you are thinking that when the organization grows or shrinks, the style of meetings will have to change, that makes it more difficult to prepare meetings. Keeping a fixed quorum is a way of keeping the size of meetings roughly about the same. If a meeting gets too big for comfort, the least enthusiastic people will decide themselves not to come to the next one, knowing that their presence isn't really necessary.

But there is another way of looking at this. Groups of people don't exist in a void, they exist as parts of larger groups. The people that come regularly to meetings are part of the larger group of people that consider themselves members of the organization, and that group is part of the larger group of people involved in similar issues in the city (in our case, environmental issues), and all the greenies are part of the larger group of all the residents in the city. The amount of influence that a group has within a larger group depends on several things, and one of the most important is the size of both groups.

It's magic numbers all over again, but this time think about proportions.

• If the small group is less than 0.5% of the larger group, they will feel like a very small minority that many people don't even know anything about. The first tipping point is reached when they are roughly around 0.5% of the larger group, when they are 1 in about 200, because that's when most people know at least one member of the smaller group. This is the threshold for awareness. That changes members of the smaller group from being an exotic exception to being something everybody's heard about. In the 70s, greenies crossed this tipping point in many places, going from being part of the lunatic fringe to a group of people with some ideas that everybody had heard about.
• If the small group is about 2% of the larger group, or 1 in 50 people, they will cross the second tipping point. This is the threshold for having a voice. At this point, the small group can have a say in large meetings, because usually there will be one of their members at most large meetings within the larger group. This point usually happens shortly after the first one. People are often surprised how new social movements can go from being almost unheard of to getting a clear voice in a matter of a few years, but it isn't so strange when you think of the numbers.
• If the small group is about 10% of the larger group, or 1 in 10 people, they will cross the third tipping point. That's when most times that a group of members of the larger group is sitting around a table is likely to include a member of the smaller group. The person in the smaller group will have a good chance, not only to have a say, but also to discuss things in more detail, and if this person is a good talker, it's a very good chance to be a big influence in the table. This is the threshold for normality. If people belonging to the small group were considered a bit weird before, after this tipping point most people will think they are very normal.
• If the small group is about half the size of the larger group, you'd expect that on average, if you took two people from the larger group, one would be part of the subgroup and the other wouldn't. They could have a comfortable conversation about any differences they had. If everything else is the same, they would feel like equals. If the person that isn't in the smaller group knows that everybody in the smaller group agrees on something, this person will think they're probably outnumbered and not push their case. That's the last tipping point: reaching a majority. Once a small group has a majority within a larger group, they know they are in control of the larger group.

Of course, these tipping points are only approximate, but they can give a very good idea of where a group stands.

If you were following closely the explanations above, you will have noticed that each tipping point happens when the smaller group is roughly 4 or 5 times larger than the previous tipping point. Social movements often grow exponentially: when the time has come for a new idea, the number of people that agree with that idea doubles in a fixed period of time, usually a few years, until there are as many people as possible agreeing with the idea (it's pretty much impossible for a tycoon to become communist). Once the first tipping point is passed, the rest of tipping points often appear to fall like dominoes, one after the other, in a relatively short period of time. Within 10 or 20 years, the same statement can go from "true without a doubt" to "false without a doubt" for the majority of people.



Applying this to the case of a green organization within a city: In most places, greenies have passed the tipping point of normality. In some places they are even a majority. There are so many of them now that a new green organization will find that it isn't so easy for them to cross the first two thresholds within the green community. It used to be that the first and second tipping points were crossed almost automatically, there were so few greenies that as soon as half a dozen people got together, they could be confident that all the rest of greenies within the city would know at least of one of them, and they would have a chance to have a say in any green consultation. Not any more. Nowadays, new organizations need to make an effort just so that other people notice that they exist.

When it comes to deciding on a quorum for meetings, ideally you want to pass the tipping point for control, but if your members aren't very keen on meetings, at the very least the tipping point for normality needs to be passed. Otherwise, you could have a situation where the people that go to meetings aren't even considered very normal by the rest of members, and many of them haven't had a chance to have a good talk with anybody that goes to meetings, and don't feel represented by them. You will get an apathetic membership, that even though in theory may be a significant proportion of all the greenies in the city, in practice see themselves as something else most of the time. The influence of a group is only as much as the influence of people that openly declare themselves as members of the group. You want all your members to feel and behave like they are members of the organization, not just the ones that regularly come to meetings.

If the quorum for general meetings is a fixed number, when the membership grows you run the risk that the tipping points for control and normality are passed in reverse. After the quorum passes the tipping point for normality, it's likely that the organization becomes unable to grow further, unless other factors are at play. Apathetic memberships don't usually grow very much; in fact, they tend to shrink. The only way out of this is having a quorum for meetings set at a percentage of membership, and when the meetings grow too large to work as they were usually working, change the way that meetings are done to serve the larger number.

The practice

Once again, think of all the groups of people you belong to, and order them from smallest to biggest. The first one should be only you, the next should be you and your partner if you have one, the next your family. Include anything you can think of: your circle of closest friends, the organization you work in, the team of people you work with, any association you belong to, your neighbourhood, the location you live in, your country. Estimate the number of people in each group. Think of the groups that are within bigger groups: Do the tipping points mentioned above seem to apply? If they don't, why do you think they aren't working as usual in this case?

Magic numbers

The theory

I'm going to tackle today the second question debated by this organization trying to draw up their constitution. The question for today is: "Should the organization have a register of members?"

The answer I'd give is a clear, resounding "YES", for any organization or group of people that you care to imagine. If you can possibly know who are the people in that group and you have a way of contacting each of them, it will make everything so much easier for everyone. If there is any reason people would like to be anonymous, find ways of keeping them anonymous... but at the very least, count them. There are many reasons for this, so I'll just focus on one of them today. It has to do with working at different scales.

People behave differently in groups of different sizes. Think of a meeting of two people, five people, 50 people, 200 people. People behave completely different in each of those groups. This has to do with practical limitations.

Two people are able to talk comfortably with each other and discuss any topic in any depth that both of them want. Five people can still talk comfortably, but the most introverted among them will say a lot less and may leave lots of things unsaid of what they are thinking, while the most extroverted will dominate unless somebody is trying to compensate this. Fifty people can't possibly engage in a group conversation. Turns have to be respected, people will have to raise hands to ask to speak, and chances are that many of them won't talk at all, unless they are all asked to introduce themselves in order or something like that. The only other alternative for fifty people is to divide into a lot of smaller groups that talk with each other, like in any birthday party. Two hundred is getting to the point that most people wouldn't even be able to remember everybody else they saw in the meeting, even if this was a regular meeting that happened again and again. Many people will keep behaving as if they are among strangers, no matter how many times the meeting is repeated.

If you don't keep a register of members, a lot of the time you won't even know what numbers to expect if you ask for people to come to an event, or to respond to any kind of calling. And it will be impossible to prepare appropriately, because the right preparation will depend on the number of people you get.

When it comes to groups of humans, the two main limits that explain different behaviour in groups of different sizes are:

• People can't listen and speak at the same time. In a group, you can have two kind of situations: either everybody is listening to the same person, and in that case they don't get a chance to speak, or people divide into smaller groups that chat with each other, and in that case they don't get a chance to hear what other groups are saying.
• People's memory is limited. Anybody can remember clearly the names, faces and a couple of personal details of five new people. Fifty new people is a stretch that only a few could manage. Two hundred is a stretch for most people, even if you have repeated chances to see them again.

Other animals are limited in different ways, and that affects in other ways the size of the groups that they usually make. For example, humans often prefer smaller groups because they like to talk, and talk is difficult in big groups. And they want to keep tabs of a lot of information on other people, while most animals couldn't possibly keep all that gossip in their minds. Other apes, such as chimps and gorillas, are able to remember details about their fellow chimps and gorillas, but because their capacity is more limited, their groups aren't ever as big as a human tribe. On the other hand, most animals don't talk or keep tabs on anyone except their closest family, they just keep visual contact with each other and make the ocassional sound that may be somewhat informative to others, but nothing like language. That's why many animals are quite comfortable in big herds, some much bigger than human tribes. But then, most animals don't want too much competition for food, and that is what often limits the size of their groups.

The practice

Experiment 1

Do some bird-watching and compare flocks of birds. Which birds have the biggest flocks? Which birds have smaller flocks? Which are usually solitary? Can you work out why different birds flock in different numbers?

Experiment 2

Think of all the groups of people you belong to, and order them from smallest to biggest. The first one should be only you, the next should be you and your partner if you have one, the next your family. Include anything you can think of: your circle of closest friends, the organization you work in, the team of people you work with, any association you belong to, your neighbourhood, the location you live in, your country. Estimate the number of people in each group. Can you notice things in common in the smallest groups? Can you notice things in common in the biggest groups? In what way are small groups different from big groups? What sizes seem to be the barriers that mark the difference between "small and intimate", "small", "like a big family", "so big I just feel like a number"?

How we see networks: the view from the node

The theory

I'm currently involved in the efforts of an organization to draw up their constitution. I have no idea if the efforts are going anywhere, but there are a number of questions that are hotly contested, and I thought it would be useful for other people to post my take on those questions on this blog. The first question is: "Should the organization have a chair?" Most people are interpreting "chair" here as "a central authority figure". There are ongoing discussions about the exact job description of the chair, but what is clear is that the question isn't so much about what the chair does as about having some kind of central authority.

This question takes us again to the subject of networks. Organizations are networks of people. Each of us sees the network from a different point of view. At the same time, there is often (but not always) some kind of "official" view of the network, some way of looking at it that is considered the standard view. In many organizations, they have some kind of "organization chart" that shows what's supposed to be everybody's place. What this "organization chart" shows is usually the view from the vantage point of the CEO. On the other hand, a receptionist often has another completely different view.

From the point of view of a CEO, there are usually a number of managers underneath, each of them with a number of underlings, all the way down to the "little people". From the point of view of a receptionist, there are a number of people she contacts regularly, whoever needs to meet people at the door often, maybe a contact in human resources, another one with the cleaners, another one in sales, etc. Each of them will take matters to somebody else as and when needed. The receptionist may be quite hazy on what happens with people after they cross the door, or may be very well informed, it really depends on how intelligent and curious she or he is.

The important thing to realise is that both the CEO and the receptionist actually have a lot of power in a company. The CEO may have the formal authority, but the receptionist gets to decide who can go through the door. That's a hell of a lot of power! And both know a lot of key people within the company.

Similar situations can happen in any kind of network, and not just networks of people. For example, think of food webs, the networks that represent which living creatures eat which. Usually, they are drawn with the biggest predators at the top. But not always. Compare these two food webs of marine life:



They both represent the same ecosystem roughly, but the first one has the biggest predator at the top, humans. The second is a food web drawn around krill, which is what's called a keystone species. A keystone species is any living creature that has such a critical place in the ecology, that if their numbers go down, the whole ecosystem could be in trouble.

This is a very important thing to realise. You can look at any network from the point of view of any node, and it will look different. And when you look at it from some nodes, it may become immediately clear that this node is very important for the whole network, but you may not see it until you think about that particular node.

There are several keystone species in any ecosystem, and there never is a single central authority figure in any organization that has more than 12 or so people. As soon as it gets any bigger, chances are that there will be several people in key positions of power, that if they went or refused to do their work properly, could cause endless trouble to everyone else (unless the network has a rather unusual structure - and in most unusual structures you would find it impossible to work anyway).

So the question becomes rather: "Should we only recognize one of these positions as an official position of power? Or do we make it clear that we realise there are several key positions?" Different situations call for a different answer to this question, but at least you need to be aware that this is the real question.

The practice

Experiment 1

Find a patch of wildlife that you have easy access to. A garden will do, but wild is best.

1. Pick a common plant and try to draw the food web around it. What animals seem to eat that plant? What eating connections can you identify between these animals?
2. Pick a common bird or bird-sized animal and try to do the same. What does this bird eat? Does any other animal eat this bird? What other eating connections can you see around these animals?

Compare the two. Could any of the two be a keystone species? If you can't tell, what would you need to know to be able to tell?

Experiment 2

Think of an organization you work in. If it has an organizational chart, get a copy of it. If not, try to draw yourself what it would look like.

Now, have some fun and draw it from several unusual points of view: a receptionist or administrator, the person dealing with your IT systems, or a person dealing with marketing and promotion. Try any other interesting point of view that you can think of. Can you start to see that there are several key positions?