My friends Jessica Lipnack and Jeff Stamps of Netage have written an interesting paper, The Stadium Parable - Mapping the Whole Organization. As Jessica wrote on her blog, Endless Knots, “We wondered what would happen if you could "see" the whole organization at once: who works for whom, who reports "dotted-line," who belongs to what team, how the workflow itself progresses.”
So they wrote the Stadium Parable where you, mythical CEO, invite your whole organization to a stadium to conduct an exercise whereby everyone draws all the lines of work connections. It plays out in interesting ways. Going way beyond the normal organizational chart, you can see some of the many ways that connections occur within an enterprise.
They conclude with some of the many insights that can be obtained from looking at the whole organization and its connections. These include discovering more direct communication paths, finding the highly connected managers and those with the largest organizations, and uneven work loads. If you want to learn more about your organization try putting it in a stadium with their guide, at least do it virtually.
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