The Invisible Organization

[Graham Durant-Law]

The Invisible Organization – How Informal Networks can Lead Organizational Change by Neil Famer has been on my book shelf for about 12 months, and I’ve read it three or four times. My heavy pencil annotations in the margins are testament to the usefulness of the book. The book is about applied social and organisational network analysis in a business context – it is not a text book or a book for serious academic application. The central thesis is that organisations have invisible and public structures, both of which can be accommodated and weaved. Farmer argues that weaving both networks will result in improved business communication and a more harmonious workplace.

Farmer says that most of the real leaders are in the invisible organisation and are part of lower echelon small groups. These people are the organisational influencers and they should be cultivated. He claims that all of the formal management hierarchy combined can probably identify less than a third of the local leaders, and that management’s power to influence represents less than 20% of the potential influencing capability across all employees. These are bold claims, but they resonate with me. The problem is if influencers are in the invisible organisation, then how can they be identified and their talents harnessed? This is where social and organisational network analysis comes into play, with a particular emphasis on influence networks.

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