Have you read Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody? Or at least watched his 20-min presentations on TED Talks? here and here.
He suggests that a strong network is a network of dense clusters. This is more efficient than a hierarchy, where everyone is critical to the organization. It’s also more efficient than everyone being connected to everyone, which soon becomes unmanageable.
Those of you participating (or hoping to) in the Jazz workshop, does this graphic ring a bell? Lead facilitators and “Jazz veterans” are the connectors between the groups. Newbies start just connected to their small group.
I think that’s why Jazz seems to be successfully growing without driving any of us crazy (yet). What do you think?
Are you in any other groups that have this type of network of dense clusters? Who is in YOUR cluster? Are you in more than one cluster? Are you passing information between them?
Here comes everybody is now on my “to read” list… but this seems to be a model similar to what we’re trying to do with the Fellows program… :0)