Bad advice on social networks. For a fee…

The lead article in The McKinsey Quarterly issued today is titled Harnessing the Power of Informal Social Networks.

I’ll string a few sentences together to set the stage:

In any professional setting, networks flourish spontaneously: human nature, including mutual self-interest, leads people to share ideas and work together even when no one requires them to do so.

As we studied these social and informal networks, we made a surprising discovery: how much information and knowledge flows through them and how little through official hierarchical and matrix structures.

So it’s unfortunate, at a time when the ability to create value increasingly depends on the ideas and intangibles of talented workers, that corporate leaders don’t do far more to harness the power of informal networks.

So far, so good, but after this, the argument runs off the rails. One might expect that if these spontaneous networks are so valuable, a savvy company would nurture them. Unfortunately, relying on people’s innate desire to excel doesn’t generate million-dollar consulting fees.

The sort of thing that would fill McKinsey’s pockets is setting up internal networks. Swarms of freshly-minted MBAs would survey every living thing in the company. Giant organizational analysis maps would paper the walls. The consultants would mandate the existence of networks where they perceived a gap. In other words, they would try to micro-manage an organic process and wring the life out of it. The authors write:

The greatest limitation of these ad hoc arrangements is that they can’t be managed. They may not be visible to management, and even when they are it’s hard for corporations to take full advantage of them. Unintended barriers, corporate politics, and simple neglect can keep natural networks from flourishing. At worst, informal networks can make dysfunctional organizations even more so by adding complexity, muddling roles, or increasing the intensity of corporate politics.

McKinsey’s engineering approach abandons the human nature and enlightened self-interest mentioned in the first sentence. Instead of challenging people to do their best and make things work, McKinsey would hold network leaders responsible for performance. How long do you figure it would take to replicate the dysfunctional hierarchies the informal networks were subverting to get the job done?

Those of us who nurture purposeful social networks are like the landscape designers at new college campuses who don’t build walkways immediately. Rather, they see where students choose to walk and pave those pathways. You end up with pathways where people want to walk. McKinsey is more like the architect who begins by uprooting the trees on a building site because “it’s easier to design on a blank piece of paper.”

McKinsey’s suggestion to manage and measure reminds me of the bogus advice foisted off on banks in the early eighties. First a partner convinces management the bank will make millions if they just organize things properly. Swarms of recent college graduates show up with clipboards and amass mountains of data. Several million dollars later, the consultants hand off an elaborate report. I got a peek at some of the final reports. Invariably, if the bank was centralized, the advice was to decentralize. If the bank was decentralized, the advice was to rein control back to the home office.

Formalizing informal networks strikes me as a similar ruse.