The Better Business Analysis Institute presence.
The Better Business Analysis Podcast with Kenjamin Walsh.
Hi everybody, and welcome back to the Better Business Analysis
Podcast with Benjamin Walsh. And today we're going to be
talking about how information flows within an organization.
We're going to be touching on Node science and the various
different kind of people. If you like, it's called the Law
of the Few. If you've read The Tipping Point
by Malcolm Gladwell, you'll know what I'm talking about and how
this information comes together and helps you as ABA or anyone
within an organization understand how information
travels. It'll give you top tips in terms
of how you present and also be will push you down the line of
being concise, clear when you communicate, which is ultimately
what ABA should be doing all the time.
So let's get straight into it. I'm going to start and talk a
little bit around the different categories of kind of node
science. If you don't know what node
science is, think of a little dot on a piece of paper.
And if you drew lines between those dots, you will pretty much
outline exactly what node science is about.
So a node is a hub or a dot on your piece of paper, and the
lines are the information flow. And if you look at, say, a
typical organization, you could think of a node being the CIO
and then nodes under that and a line being the executive team,
and then under that the management team and then the
team leaders and then the workers, if you like.
OK, so this is, and you know a pyramid of dots is what you
would see there. And this structure that's a
hierarchical structure of nodes is very much how an organization
is and how information travels up and down from managing up to
the management team down to the workers.
And of course, it's not just that structure.
The pyramid hierarchy structure, there is just individuals in a
line. And if you've ever played what
they used to refer to as Chinese whispers, which I think is
culturally inappropriate these days.
But if you play a game where you're all in a line and someone
shares maybe a story at one end of the line, and you travel down
the nodes, the people in that line, and you go, I don't know,
more than five, then you will see that the story may change as
we pass information from person to person.
And you know, there's lots of games which involved
communication flow. And that's exactly a good
representation of how information travels through
nodes, servers. You can think of technical nodes
as well, how information travels through different servers and
you know the cloud. But generally things are
replicated or stored in such a way that all the information
that flows from one point to another gets transmitted.
But if one of those nodes or one of those servers is cut out,
then information doesn't travel. So node science is everywhere.
And I'm going to talk about just to start a really five year
areas in which node science is interesting.
It's also known as network science and IT and I'm also
going to explain five ways in which that relates to
information flow in an organization.
So one is the visualization of information flow.
As I stated, you could see employees and departments as
node and information that flows between them is, you know, the
connections. Any communication, any
information that flows through them, you could see is the
connections between the various department.
This is very, very, very important.
I've actually made a career out of using node science to my
advantage in the last maybe 10 years and and and really the art
of information flow is really what I practice in my BA
visualization these days. I'm going to talk about that and
give you some top tips. This is very much advanced what
I'd say senior BA plus, but understanding node science helps
everyone. You know, a small child, someone
trying to be ABA, someone who is a senior BA.
And I find that all information flow is actually a problem for
those B as you get stuck in a specialization.
So I'm going to talk about that too.
So in terms of visualization of information, number one, we
talked about the nodes being the people, the departments, but you
can also draw that up. You can draw a visual map of
these networks. You can show how information
starts and travels and potentially gets stuck.
It allows by visualizing that you can allow managers at a
holistic point and this kind of relates to the last episode we
talked about in terms of you know, where do you flice off or
where do you restructure your organization.
By visualizing information flow and nodes in your organization,
you can actually see where bottlenecks are, redundant paths
are or where information is not flowing to the right people.
So if you think about your external stakeholders as just
being another node, then you could think about how the fact
that one of your departments is communicating with them.
Another one is and maybe having inconsistent information from
two different nodes to one external node can cause a
problem. So the second part in terms of a
node science is around and this is really important.
We got to go, we got to go deep dive on this in a minute.
Thanks to Malcolm Gladwell, who I always referred to in this
podcast that's around identifying key communicator.
OK, so you probably haven't thought about it in a node
science point of view before, but there are certain
individuals or even departments in your organization usually say
maybe a marketing PR department. They're actors, hub, they
collect information from different parts of the network
and they influence, This is a really key point here.
They influence how information spreads.
All right. So if you imagine a situation
where, let's think about it from a point of view of sound
engineering, which is a passion of mine and what I I studied in
London, there are different ways in which you can manipulate
audio. OK, so this recording a band and
if you've listened to any music, you will see that on your track.
And if you listen very deeply, there are different things you
can do to the various tracks and songs made-up of tracks.
Let's say they're usually lots of tracks these days, but let's
say there's an an old eight track.
So what I mean by that is you might have vocals recorded on
one track, you might have drums recorded on a few tracks.
Depend you want to split the drums from the high and the low.
You might have a pad, you might have keyboard, you know, piano,
guitar based on different track. OK, And you can you can by
putting them through a mixer, putting them through a mixing
board and manipulating that. And that's what sound
engineering and music production's all about.
You can manipulate those tracks, right?
Every song has this, unless you're listening to something
directly live. And it could just be simply
putting a volume up, making one of those tracks louder than what
you recorded it. It could be just making it sound
more natural, normalizing the sound.
Or it could be to what we One of the major things you do as a
mixer, as a sound engineer, is simply changing frequencies or
what we call EQ. And you would have experienced
that probably on your phone or if you've not experienced it
anywhere else. But sometimes stereos allow you
to set it to action or movie, and all that's doing is applying
a different amount of EQ to the sound.
And so it's it's it's really cutting the highs and lows.
It's it's using science effectively to manipulate the
sound. That happens often on a track.
You can also spread the sound so you can make things sound more
on your left side of it's stereo and more on the right side and
some in the center and that allows you to hear all the makes
it sound a bit more like a a range of sound.
Sometimes if you record or you think hear things on the radio,
they just use what's called the mid and everything's in the
middle. And sometimes you miss the
guitar or the bass or the vocals because it's all stuck what
what's in the middle? And so there's a whole art to
sound engineering and and it's science and art just like
business analysis. The reason I I go off on that
tangent there is that you can enhance 1 sound over another.
OK And when you talk about key communicators in the
organization there are no and there are hubs within the
organization that help amplify and quiet information.
They are sly they may not be doing this on purpose, they may
well be and they are influencing you know just as you influence
or change sound on a music track.
They are influencing how you hear different information.
And so not only do you need to know that there are people that
influence them thus, and even if you don't like it, it happens.
By the way, you can help identify these hubs and
influences and you should involve them strategically in
your communication plan, right. And it allows you to use those
hubs to spread information. And I'm going to come back to
this point with before I go too deep and we're going to be
talking about the tipping point if you haven't read it and the
lure of the few in a minute. And so we're going to come back
to key influence communications and going to use Malcolm
Gladwell to expand on that outside of node science to to
more of the tipping point. The third area is network
analysis. So you can use techniques like
communication detection and patterns and communication
networks. A real technology network you
can use look at any kind of network and this this relates to
pandemics, this relates of you know in terms of illness like
COVID-19, but also information flow, information flows just
like a disease or a virus flows. And so you can actually look at
use network analysis to look at isolated groups, silos, you can
look at areas with slow information flow, departments
that rely on a single source of truth where maybe one manager
isn't good at communicating with their team.
You can actually see that by tracking information flow or
surveying those at the bottom of the worker pile.
So you can then understand those patterns.
And this is like seriously, there's a whole business to us
that you can get involved in and I tell you what BAS need to to,
to utilize those. The last area which is, well, I
guess there's two other areas. One number four is around
predicting information flows. So once you understand node
science, you can actually use node science to predict changes
in the network like well if we add a new hire to this area, we
do a restructure that might change the information flow.
And you can also you look at using predictive information
flow to anticipate adjusting communication strategies and
ensuring information exchange. So that's, I mean that's pretty
advanced and just understand no science to start off with before
you look at predictions, but you can get there too.
The last area is around optimizing communication
channels. And you can do this without
prediction. And that's really just looking
at effective pathways, right? How can you disseminate and
transmit information around the organization?
How can you allow managers to streamline reporting, right, and
choose the best ways in which you communicate?
Communication channels like e-mail, meetings, collaboration
platforms for information, different information types.
So you can survey and you can actually see or just, you know,
ask people, did you hear about that?
And they're like, well, you know, I didn't go on to the, I
didn't read that e-mail. So you can actually use this to
just map out your information flows across your organization.
And I actually just find this fascinating.
So they're the five areas in terms of node science.
And we're going to go off and we're going to talk about
identifying key communicators, which is #2.
And we're going to talk about these different types.
We're going to use Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point, If
you haven't read it, read it. And we're going to use some of
the personas that he talks about and talk about why that, why
they're important in an organization.
They're theories, but they you will definitely relate to some
of these personas in your organization.
And then I'm going to just give you an example of how you as ABA
need to use these ideas, but also the amount of information
that we expect managers to understand and why it's
important to be concise and clear, right.
So there, when we talk about Malcolm Gladwell and the kind of
tipping point, what we're referring to is the fact that
there is something called the lore of the few.
OK, So Gladwell suggests that a handful of people.
Connectors. Connectors.
I'm going to say that again. Maverick, Maverick, and
Salesman. OK, Connectors, Mavericks and
salesman. They have a disproportionately
amount of impact on how information spreads, how ideas
spread, how trends spread, how products spread.
OK. And it's around the fact that
these individuals, these three types of individuals, they are,
they are instrumental in terms of pushing an idea to a tipping
point where it spreads like wildfire.
OK. So the network effect, we call
it or if you like, it's a like how businesses rapidly achieve
scale, but it's also how information achieves scale and
it's called the tipping point. And once you get to that tipping
point, things are spread like wildfire.
Now I'm not going to spoil the book for you in terms of the
stories he has in it, which is what the which is what the
enjoyment factor is. But there are great real life
stories about how information spreads and how the the
psychology has been used for some very well known TV programs
that you may have watched. What I am going to talk about is
the lore of the few, the connectors, Mavericks and
salesman and how that relates to organizational hierarchy and the
reporting structure structure. OK, and how we can look at these
different type. So let's.
OK, we'll I'll explain what the connectors and Mavericks and
salespeople are in relation to an organization.
So connectors, these are the influences, OK.
These are the individuals, the influential individuals, who
have extensive network, OK, that the connectors, they have lots
of nodes that they connect with other nodes.
They're a node themselves and they have lots of connections
and they can bridge gaps between different teams and department.
So in a company, connectors might be senior managers, they
might be executives, right, Just because of their position.
Or they just might be employees who naturally connect with
people. Maybe the extroverts who talk to
a lot of people, or you know, Karen from accounts who knows
everyone. They play a critical role in
disseminating information across the organization.
So imagine a connector, like a central harbor node of a spider
web, connecting various strengths.
Now what's really important to say about connectors is that
they're influential, right? And depending on their
personality type, they're bias. They will change the information
as well. So they might disseminate
information. Doesn't mean it's exactly what
they heard in the 1st place. Really important to know the
next is Maverick. So Mavericks are the experts.
They are the go to people for specific information.
Sometimes we talk about them in the BA world as SMEs, right?
They really know about something.
Oh, they're the person that really understands career
planning. They understand how to plan a a
job, you know, career plan for kids in school.
Now they are the ones who deeply understand their domain.
They provide value in Pool, valuable insight and in an
organizational context. They are the SMEs or the tick
leads or the seasoned employees, you know, the ones with the IP.
And when they share information, others listen because they trust
their expertise. OK, we talked about the
connectors just before and said they can change this.
It's not a trust, it's just simply a relationship based on
information spread and they've got people skills.
Mavericks may not have those people skills.
However, when people ask them something they trust, they know
it. OK?
And this is like a like I got a friend of mine who really good
at saving money. OK, really top tip.
And if I want to know how to save money, I will ask because
he will know how to do that. OK, that you just trust that
they understand the topic. You take whatever they say as
true, and it may not always be true, but they try and make it
true. They're an expert in, you know,
a game. Maybe, you know, they're the the
go to and the last kind of influence in terms of
information that's really important to know about is the
salesman. OK, they are the persuasive
communicator. They sell ideas, they motivate
teams, they influence decision making.
And a company salesman can be charismatic leaders, OK?
And they could have got to that position because they are good
at selling. They may not do, may not be the
experts by the way. And you know these people, they
might be project managers, they might just be enthusiastic
colleague, They excel at convincing others to adopt new
ideas, embrace change or rally behind a vision.
So you know, if you can get someone who is a salesman and
aceo, then that's awesome. And if they can be a
communicator, even better. Right.
So these are some individuals can be all of these things, but
generally they are individual individuals and they generally
individually have their strength.
So they are really interesting in terms of communicators and
communicators of information across the organization.
You have connectors, Mavericks and salesman, OK.
And this is all explained, it's called the law of the few, OK,
which again is around a small group of influential individuals
that can significantly impact on the spread of information.
And you, if you want information to spread, if you want to create
a pandemic of information flow, you need to use these persona,
you need to use these individual.
OK, so if you understand that these are these types of
information, you model them out that you need to get them
involved in your change program. Now when it relates to business
analysis, BAS can different BAS, different, generally different
BAS can be some of these things. So like when you think about
connectors, that's really the BA is the liaison.
BAS act as a connector between business stakeholders and
technical teams. They bridge the gap by
facilitating clear and effective communication between the two
group. We're influential.
B as influential. If we're in those roles, we're
like a social, you know, in the social network we ensure that
information flows. We gather information from
stakeholders, We translate them so we could manipulate.
You know, we do manipulate. We do persuade and we make
judgement calls. So we are connectors in some of
our roles, right? And I appreciate that not all
BAS are all these things, but I do think that the BA role is
probably, when I read the tipping point, is probably the
one type of role that can be all these things.
And when it comes to Mavericks as experts, there are some BAS
or or sometimes they've come from this area or they just have
to understand an area of business process.
And I, I, I, I sometimes can get frustrated when B as become
maverick. But naturally sometimes you just
do, especially if you've been on a project for a while.
And when they become experts, maverick B as possess kind of a
deep understanding of the business process, industry
trends and regulation. They analyze the complex
problems, They dissect requirements, They're looking at
solutions. So to be honest, they you know,
we do have to become a pseudo maverick as part of our role.
Somebody has stayed here, somebody has come from there and
it's a dangerous place to stay. However, you know you can create
roles in terms of becoming a specialist in different areas.
Mavericks provide valuable insights and recommendations for
improvement. We ensure that the right
solutions are developed and communication, communicate
across domains and people. And that's when you become a
kind of an industry specialist like in banking or telco or
pharmaceuticals. And you know, and sometimes when
you hire BA, especially outside of New Zealand in America or the
UK, you've actually had to become a specialist in an area
because you know that's the, it's much bigger scale.
Whereas we're much more generalists in New Zealand and
we have to be across different industries.
And so you become an expert and you become a maverick, right?
So people trust that what you say about something is true.
And then, of course, BAS can be persuaded.
And we're going to touch it. We're going to, again, go off on
a tangent on this in a minute. But as salesman, BAS are
salesman or saleswoman or salesperson.
We play a vital role in stakeholder engagement.
We conduct workshops, interviews, collaborate with
technical teams, right? We need to be persuasive.
The best B, as I know, are persuasive.
They advocate for the projects, They ensure that the business
needs a meet, they're advocating on behalf of the business, and
they simplify the relationship between the IT department and
the company that bridge the gap, right.
So in terms of connectors, Mavericks, and sales people, B,
as can be all of these things. So this is really great.
And you can see even as your own skill, you could say, Oh well,
actually I'm not as much of A connector as I want to be or I'm
not a a Maverick. I need to know more about the
industry or I just, I'm just not persuasive enough.
These are areas where you can actually start to look at skill
development, right? It's really a really good point.
So these are just really interesting lore of the few
areas that you should take on. And when you look at information
travel, you can met that out using note science, right.
You can see that how connectors are, you know in the
organization where The Mavericks are, where the sales people are
And by using these you can provide more clarity and you can
be I guess being proactive in terms of your communication plan
as BA but also as a project. And you know this is what change
management's all about as well as you utilizing this channel.
So I'm going to jump now and I am being a bit jumpy, but I'm
going to jump now in terms of persuasion, persuasive
communication. And I'm just going to say, if we
go back and think of our pyramid in terms of node, what you've
got to also understand is not only does information travel
that way and some nodes are more important than others, the law
of the few, right, But also just the amount of information.
And this is something that I'm really hot on, OK.
And again, this is probably the area where I have been able to
make a bit of a niche in, in terms of what I do for
organizations in terms of consultancy.
And that's the fact that I understand the fact that node
science is everywhere and that if you're a manager, and I'm
going to give you this example, if you're a manager of an
organization, you cannot comprehend all the information
that is travelling throughout the organization.
And if you are trying to communicate to a manager
influence, be a salesman in the organization to convince or even
communicate or even give a status update to a line manager
and executive, you need to understand node science and how
much information they're being hit with.
And you need to manage your communication methods through
presentations, through red amber, green rag statuses and
concise, clear communication in order to be taken seriously or
understood. OK.
And I'm going to give you an example.
Why. Why, You may ask?
Let's take a medium sized company, just a medium sized
company anywhere, OK. And I've got a CIO, OK, normal.
And let's just say it's a product company.
So we'll keep it very simple. There's five product line with
five managers, SO5 product, different product lines, 5
managers who own it. So maybe it's like you know
fashion, maybe it, you know, health and Wellness, whatever
the product lines are, it doesn't really matter.
There are 5 managers, OK. And under those five managers,
each manager has been set up with five team leader who manage
the various aspects of maybe a, a, a product area.
OK. So maybe ones around within you
know health and beauty or you know, yeah health and beauty
line there might be something that's around, I don't know
personal product, OK. So one manager that runs that,
sorry one team leader under that manager runs that.
So 5 managers, 5 team leaders and each team leader has five
product managers and that's as low as we go in our
organization. So just kind of a three tier
plus the CIO and there are 5 product managers under each team
leader and they manage a product.
So I don't know shampoo or a spit shampoo.
So you could relate this to, I don't know, Palmolive or
something, right. This is a small organization, so
5 managers, 5 team leaders and five product managers each.
So the if you do 5 * 5, it's 25 and then you do it's 525 team
leaders times 5 product managers each.
You end up with a total if you add the five managers in of 155
staff members, right. Not not a huge organization.
And in relative terms it's, it's a one of the departments that
I'm working in at the moment at one of the ministries, 155
people, not many, right? And that doesn't include the CIO
or the executive. So we're just going to miss them
out. There's 155 people in the
organization. You say, OK, that's fine, 33
tiers, effectively 3 tiers and you think, OK, cool, that's
normal. How does that structure?
How does the node, just the nodes of people, influence
information flow? Well, if I'm a product manager,
right there are, there are 125 of them working on 125 different
products. Each product would have around,
I don't know 5K PIS that you might report on and these might
be things like customer acquisition cost, revenue,
profit, you know, just really simple KPIs, very simple ones,
customer satisfaction margin, customer life, market share or
sorry, customer life cycle value.
So these are just very simple totals with no information
behind them, right. We're not doing about user
stories here or particular stats and that's it. 5K PIS per
product. That means that one of our
lineman, OK or the executive, the CEO of this company has to
deal with 625 product KPIs being reported to them.
That's a lot. How do you even keep ahead of
625 different KPIs? So that is why we only report up
very small information. That's why we do red and the
green. And that is why we need to be
concise with our communication and use things like PowerPoint
and slides. And about three or four slides
is enough with an appendix if someone wants to dive deep.
But usually people only want to dive deep if there's something
unusual, as in things are going badly.
What can we do about it? What's our recommendation?
You know, here's the analysis we recommend.
We ask that you make some decisions on the following
there's 625 KPIs here and they they could have a huge amount of
work behind each of them. There could be whole teams
behind these development teams. So that is why you need to
understand node science and the amount of information you're
communicating and make sure you're concise when you
communicate up. Now, the other day, I'll end on
a story. The other day I was talking to a
manager, a line manager with about 155 staff and one of the
workers, one of the product managers.
Actually it's me. So even under a product manager,
even another tier was kind of suggesting that it was silly
that the manager didn't understand what was going on and
they were making a decision around a specific user story.
Now in that example, the particular project we're on
doing at the moment, they're around, I don't know and that
haven't even been elaborated yet.
At a high level, 100, maybe 100 user stories, OK, wrapped
around, I don't know 16 Epic. So it's not a huge project, but
there is a lot going on, a lot of people involved and a lot of
different managers involved. Now, if you think about the 155
people in our organization and this person's, you know there,
there's another tier in this organization.
If you use times that by 100, right, you're getting up to
about 15,000 different user stories.
This manager could be fed. They've shown all the user
stories. They can't know about
everything, let alone the what and the how and why you're doing
it. So just give them a break.
It's really hard. As a manager, you've got to have
a trust model, and the only way it works is the manager has to
trust down and trust in these experts, right?
But don't expect them to understand it all.
There's no way. And with the different tiers
you've got these different influences that they may not be
hearing what you hear. So as ABA, you need to try and
move your way directly to the person that matters and you need
to be concise and hope that your information is so concise and
straight to the point it doesn't need to be manipulated.
So this talks about having been very small in your documentation
and managing up through one to three slides with an appendix.
OK, so I just wanted to enter that note and I hope you've
learned a bit more about node science and how you can relate
it to your job as a VA EE you next time.