How to Manage Networks: Managing Infrastructure & Activities

Capturing and transferring institutional memory can be particularly tricky in the multi-faceted environment of networks, but can also result in a powerful knowledge resource for them. Managing networks’ institutional knowledge requires the same intentionality and consistency as any organizational knowledge-management plan and should be explicitly integrated into any network information management strategies and processes. Doing so can minimize the risk of losing the context, trust, methods, processes, and learnings that have been built up across the network over time.

Before any efforts are made to formally capture or transfer institutional knowledge, taking a few foundational steps can be beneficial. First is to designate a champion, or multiple champions, who are willing to shepherd such a process forward, gain buy-in from network managers and members, and commit to overseeing any process that is decided on. Another key part of their role is to also mainstream the idea that institutional memory is not just the responsibility of one individual but should be collectively developed, maintained, and valued across the network. Second, it can be helpful to frame and define the types of knowledge to be captured. Institutional knowledge can encompass explicit knowledge such as technical know-how, tacit knowledge such as relationship-building, and historical insights that can help a network learn and grow. Knowing the types of knowledge that need to be captured can help define the best methods to capture them and guide the development of an appropriate plan. Explicit knowledge, for example, may be best captured through some form of documentation. Tacit knowledge could be shared through a mentorship program, for example, by pairing experienced network members with newer members and sharing their connections and partnerships. Historical knowledge could be maintained by creating connections with and spaces for individuals who have left the network but still want to remain involved.

Complementing all of these efforts should be an onboarding and offboarding that includes institutional knowledge management systems at both the entrance and exit points for anyone involved with the network. Those systems could include activities such as training materials for incoming staff and templates for outgoing ones to provide a general accounting of how they undertook their activities. All of this effort, while requiring a lot of upfront time, streamlines learning and can improve productivity and confidence across the network. It also provides a baseline to reflect on how things were done in the past, how they’ve changed, and how to improve.

Organizational functions are one of the three components of Collective Mind’s Network Diagnostic Framework, along with network capacities and network functions. Organizational functions are defined as the core operational activities that underpin network functions, structures, and processes. They include communications, IT, human resources, finance, and administration, among others.

Any given network will have different organizational functions it needs to fulfill and different ways of doing so. What your network’s organizational functions are will be determined by lots of variables. A couple of common variables would be whether or not your network is its own registered legal entity and whether you have staff or not. Being a registered legal entity and/or having staff likely brings greater needs for fulfilling more organizational functions, such as human resources and IT to support staff or finance and administration systems to comply with legal requirements and regulations.

Let’s look at two real-life examples. The first example is a network that is not a registered legal entity but has 10 staff who are hired by four different member organizations on behalf of the network. Each of these hiring organizations will fulfill some organizational functions on behalf of the network, e.g. human resources in the hiring and payment of those staff. But some organizational functions might need to be cross-cutting, for example, where you need to track and manage finances across all of those staff and hiring organizations. You might then need a specific person, in-house to your network or outsourced, to be able to do this cross-network financial management and perhaps donor reporting.

Another example is a network that is a registered legal entity but doesn’t have any staff. That network is required by law to fulfill certain organizational functions, such as finance and administration, based on its legal status as an organization. In order to comply with regulations, it has set up a voluntary council with a one-year term and different task-focused committees to fulfill the organizational functions of the network.

These examples demonstrate that there are lots of potential configurations for how organizational functions will be fulfilled based on what a network needs. Your goal in whatever scenario you have is to minimize the complications. It's not an inherently bad thing, for example, to have the organizational functions spread across multiple entities or members. You just have to find clarity, transparency, and coherence in whatever your arrangements are.

For Collective Mind, thought leadership, together with field-building, is a network function, i.e. an activity through which a network seeks to achieve its Shared Purpose. In many cases, a network is working in a specific topical space and is bringing together different actors who work in that space, or field as we could call it. In order to work towards the network’s Shared Purpose, the network must spearhead technical and policy progress in that field, bringing attention and legitimacy to it by establishing good practice or promoting new ideas. Thought leadership and building the field can mean undertaking or synthesizing research, curating existing knowledge or fostering the development of further evidence, establishing foundational ideas and principles, or reevaluating and disproving commonly-held beliefs. In practice this could mean, for example, holding an annual conference that supports the production and dissemination of cutting-edge research for that field, building new conceptual frameworks to improve understanding and practice, or developing a set of best-practice standards for how practitioners and organizations working in that field should operate. Often these types of thought leadership and field-building activities also overlap with advocacy and policy influence activities.

What’s particularly important about how thought leadership and field-building is undertaken by a network is that these activities involve the network membership. New research or ideas developed and promoted by a multi-stakeholder network that represents different types of actors and organizations in that field can be more powerful than that developed by one individual or organization. Activities to build the field are more coherent, comprehensive, and impactful when you include and integrate the views and ideas of the range of key actors in that field. This is where the power of networks lies.