How to Manage Networks: Managing Culture

Network mindset is encompassed in Collective Mind’s network diagnostic framework within the capacity of Culture - it is part of the shared values, norms, attitudes, and practices of a network that maintain its Shared Purpose and foster ongoing collaboration. In many ways, network mindset is at the heart of what we try to do through networks. It reminds us of why we organize via networks instead of more traditional organizations and how we have to operate differently in a network environment. Networks work horizontally instead of vertically. Instead of the top-down, directive approach of setting and achieving goals that we find in traditional organizations, networks operate through connections and relationships, without explicit lines of control and accountability. Activities to achieve outputs and outcomes in networks are facilitated and coordinated, and members’ participation in them is self-directed based on their interest in the network’s Shared Purpose and a desire to achieve that Shared Purpose through collective action.

Network mindset is about prioritizing and fostering the relationships between members through which everything in a network gets done. This means both prioritizing trust-building and facilitating and coordinating productive collaboration that reinforces the premise that goals can be set and achieved collectively. Network mindset is then both a belief and a practice. It is a belief that collective action that is collaborative as opposed to controlled can achieve shared goals. And it is the practice of facilitating and coordinating that collective action through inclusive, equitable participation. It’s about how things are done, and network leaders and managers, in particular, have a major responsibility in ensuring that network mindset is embedded into everything the network does and how it does it.

Members come into a network, often as volunteers, because they have shared goals and want to achieve them. At the same time, given the complexity of a network, they don't always see the whole picture of the network, how it operates, and what that means - which makes it challenging for them to understand what it means to function within a network. Being able to see all of that can help them understand what the network is there for and why we are working in a network instead of through a more traditional type of organization in a more directive, top-down sort of way. This understanding builds a network mindset: an approach that focuses on connections, relationships, shared decision-making, collective intelligence, and collaborative action as the basis for achieving shared goals.

Fostering this understanding - and a network mindset - happens very much in practice, in the interactions that you have with members and that members have with each other. These interactions may be one-on-one or in these shared spaces that you create for conceptualizing, planning, and implementing activities. In every interaction you have with members, though, you must consistently help them see what the network is best positioned to do and what we can achieve together within the network. This means helping them to understand both the different ways in which networks function and the different types of outcomes and impacts that networks can achieve, through practical examples that they ideally experience firsthand.