To what extent do we use the wisdom of the whole workforce when it comes to resolving difficult issues? I'm a big fan of organisational network analysis (ONA). It maps and measures how communication, collaboration and influence really flow between people. It reveals the "hidden organisation": the informal networks that org charts never show. In leadership circles, we talk a lot about "collective” or "distributed” or “empowering” leadership. ONA often shows a different picture. @RLalleman77215 from @InnovisorInc recently shared data from an example organisation. The top two layers of leadership make up 4% of the workforce. They absorb roughly a quarter of all the requests for help. When those leaders need help themselves, they turn to each other three times more often than they turn to other colleagues. Because the senior group is so much smaller, person for person a senior colleague is around 70 times more likely to be asked than anyone else. Without ever deciding to, the most experienced people in the organisation have arranged things so almost every problem they struggle with is thought about by the same small group. A closed loop at the top: leadership talking to itself. This pattern is not unusual. Rob Cross's research across more than 300 organisations found that 20% to 35% of value-adding collaborations involve only 3% to 5% of people. 766,000 people responded to the most recent NHS Staff Survey. More than half did not agree they are involved in deciding on changes that affect their work area, and the proportion who do agree has fallen for the second year running. We measure it from the other end in the NHS, and the answer is the same. Different measure. Same conclusion. This means that: - A small group with similar jobs and experience makes the decisions, so they all miss the same things. - The people closest to the work hold knowledge that is never asked for, so better options go unseen. - Work queues behind a small number of overloaded leaders, so good decisions arrive slowly or too late. - People stop offering ideas once nothing comes of them and research shows that organisations with lower engagement tend to get worse outcomes. Some actions we can take as leaders: - Audit our own help networks. List the last ten people we went to with a hard problem. Count how many of them do the core work of the organisation. - Map the “hidden organisation”. ONA shows who people go to in practice and where to focus action. It seldom matches the org chart. - Change who is in the room. Make it a rule that decisions about a piece of work include someone who does that work. - Ask the questions only people at the front line or point of care can answer. Go and ask them directly, with nobody summarising in between. - Show what changed. Visible follow-through keeps people engaged. There is a massive, untapped well of wisdom within people inside our organisations. It stays largely untapped for as long as we keep turning to each other when we get stuck. Richard Santos Lalleman's original post (Innovisor organisational network analysis): linkedin.com/posts/richardsa… Cross R, Rebele R & Grant A. Collaborative Overload. Harvard Business Review, January-February 2016. hbr.org/2016/01/collaborativ…