I love to write and talk about Project Management… uhm, Leadership… or “The Thing That A Project Manager Does To Move His Project In The Proper Direction, Related To People“.

I want to share new and exciting stuff and hope it challenges your thinking, enhances your mental flexibility and provides you with useful information.

I really appreciate the audience (hi!). Although I sometimes say things excited and full of passion (“you need to…”), it’s always an invitation to look at the information and consider it for your own use. If you like it, great! If you have no use for it, that’s cool too. Because I appreciate you, as my readers.

Luckily for me, the internet is a huge place, I mean, BIG! From billions of people, a handful of them (hi!) take the time to read my ideas and thoughts about “The Thing That A PM…”

I need an audience to share my thoughts. So does everyone.

But what if I tried to do my thing limited to one building with one Project Manager? The chance that this one PM likes talking about Bobsleds and Pirate Ships are zero. And even if, one person is not an audience. (yeah, yeah, I should learn humility… I know).

I either stop doing my thing. Or I look outside the building. Or I turn into myself and become weird.

If you want to nurture information leadership (calling it “thought leadership” would be too much, would it?), you have to make sure there is a big enough audience. Keeping things limited to one part of the organization might be counterproductive sometimes, just because of this reason.

What I recommend (kindly suggest) is to go through this presentation about Knowledge Management in Enterprise 2.0. It explains why knowledge sharing in most companies doesn’t work. Hint: this is the exact same argument, but better presented.

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - Size Matters: Without Enough Audience, No Leaders is a post from: Project Shrink.

This post is an early draft of a concept I am working on. It will focus on the supply and demand of information to nodes in social networks. People have a need for information (demand), some people have a need for an audience for their information (supply). I will use the notion of leaders (supply) and followers (demand). Inherent to social networks is the fact that you have way more followers than leaders. The system maintains this balance. Problems occur when boundaries make it difficult to ensure this balance.

Image by James Cridland.

Yes, this is a simplification of reality. It’s a model. It’s not The Real World… argh … don’t get me started about The Real World.

It needs references. It needs some examples and clarification. I am working on that. But I also was kind of hoping on your feedback

20% Holds 80% Of Information

Within social networks information is not distributed equally. A few have a lot. A lot have few. I think that information follows a Pareto distribution: 80% of the information is held by or accessible from 20% of the people.

When looking at the flow of information in organizations, you will find the existence of a few hubs: nodes in the network that are highly connected. In organizations not everyone has a relationship with every other employee. There are a couple of employees that know a lot of people, and most people in the organization know these few so-called “hubs”, leaders in information brokerage.

In networks you find many more followers than leaders.

In human networks you’ll find more people listening than speaking. Looking at the online world, we’ll see the 90-9-1 principle, which says that “in a community, the rule of thumb is that 90% of visitors only view the content, 9% only comment or react to it, and 1% create it.” Few people create, lots of people consume.

A person can be a leader and a follower at the same time, but for different topics. Leading in Project Management and following in SOA technology.

This is not some evil plot. It’s inherent to the social system.

From the information input perspective, you don’t want to be swamped in information. You limit the amount of sources. You want these few sources to be “the best”. “The best” being measured in popular demand skews the choice of information hubs towards a limited few. You want your sources easy to find, which also turns you to the more popular hubs. It’s similar to “the rich get richer”. If you are a popular hub, you become even more popular.

From the information output side you get a similar view. Leaders need demand for their information. A higher demand means larger influence, more recognition, a larger reputation. Leaders will behave to maximize the amount of followers. They need to be a very small minority.

Leaders are born with this urge. You really want to be a hub.

Within social networks there is a balance for the distribution of leaders and followers. There is an “natural amount” of hubs within a network.

Blue Ocean, Red Ocean

Once a follower has found a good source, it will remain connected as long as the need for the information exists. The relationship from follower-to-leader remains mainly stable.

What does a leader do without followers? It’s going to look for them throughout the network. Hubs move around to stay hubs.

For example, a couple of years ago a blog about Project Management was almost alone in its category. You could have quite a following with your blog. As more and more blogs come into existence about this topic, it gets harder and harder to build up your audience. Lot of leaders and not enough followers. An imbalance between supply and demand of information.

So, hubs start to move. They are leaving the red ocean, in search for a blue one. “Blue Ocean Strategy” is a business strategy book written by Kim and Mauborgne, that promotes creating new market space or “Blue Ocean” rather than competing in an existing crowded industry (Red Ocean).

In the case of Project Management blogs, you are trying to differentiate yourself. Looking for a different or more specific niche. Change the medium by adding video, audio and presentations. Looking for your fresh, blue ocean.

Next up:

What happens when boundaries prohibit movement and a leader cannot move throughout the network? What if you shrink to ocean into a pond (moving from organization to project)?

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - Leaders And Followers In Social Networks is a post from: Project Shrink.