Of nets and networks

Last weekend I was in Villajoyosa, a Spanish fishing port, 'birthplace of the fishing net industry'. Walking around the harbour and seeing the nets all piled up started me thinking about what was caught in the nets and what escaped through them.

Earlier in the week we'd been discussing a paper by Niels Pflaeging on Organizing for Complexity where he outlines three types of organization structures: formal hierarchy, informal network, and value creation network. In this he argues that, 'value creation is never the result of individual action: It is a team-based process of working interactively, "with-one-another-for-each-other".'

The idea of networks of empowered teams as a new organizational model is one that we're hearing a lot about. Deloitte (a consultancy) describes, 'This new mode of organization-—a "network of teams" with a high degree of empowerment, strong communication, and rapid information flow' as integral to value creation.

But as Anne-Marie Slaughter, talking about her new book, says, 'Network theory is a whole branch of science, but it's relatively new in terms of the last 20 or 30 years. We haven't had a chance to take all that theory out of the universities and apply it to ask, "What kinds of networks should we build, and for what purposes?"'