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.