By Dr Leandro Herrero
Is the future of the organization ‘Network First’? The knowledge base organization looks certainly more and more like a networkracy. We are moving from the prominence of hierarchies to understanding connectivity and collaboration as a real engine, and beyond words. All that will require many changes, including the way we lead.
In 1973 – a little while ago now – Mark Granovetter opened a new door in our understanding of human connection with his seminal paper The Strength of Weak Ties. He famously demonstrated that so-called weak ties — those looser relationships we might maintain with old colleagues or occasional acquaintances—often play a more significant role in our lives than the strong, close ones. You’re more likely to get a job lead, for instance, through someone you send a Christmas card to once a year than through the colleague sitting next to you. It was a counterintuitive truth — and a powerful one.
Jump forward a few decades, and the study of networks finds a new hero in Duncan Watts. His Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks between Order and Randomness (2003) brought public attention to the idea that, remarkably, any two people on the planet are separated by no more than six degrees. Hollywood, ever resourceful, tested this theory through “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” where actors were connected to the titular star through six or fewer links of shared film credits.
These insights point to a world that is neither random nor rigidly ordered, but somewhere in between — where clusters of tightly-knit groups are joined by surprising, often serendipitous links. Network science tells us two things at once: that most nodes (or people) are close to each other through a short chain, and that those nodes tend to cluster. In other words, the world is both large and small, dense and sparse, and this applies as much to the social world as to the structure of the internet.
The Company as Two Coexisting Worlds
Despite these revelations, the world of business has been slow to adapt. While marketers rushed to exploit the ‘commercial use’ of social networks, few executives paused to consider what network theory could tell them about the nature of the organization itself.
Most companies still operate as if they were made of just one system: the formal one. The Formal Organization is what you find on the org chart: a tidy, hierarchical world of bosses and subordinates, authority lines, KPIs, and HR files. It tells you who gets paid, who gets promoted, and who gets blamed.
But squatting — often invisibly — within that world is another one altogether: the Informal Organization. This one is built on relationships, not reporting lines. It thrives on trust, influence, and informal authority. Here is where things get done — or don’t. It is where one turns not for a directive, but to understand “what’s really going on.” A healthy informal culture is one where oxygen flows freely. People can breathe.
Yet management theory, and the business schools that propagate it, have historically ignored this world — treating it as anecdotal or, at best, ‘interesting’. Peer influence was something that happened in school playgrounds, not in corporate corridors. “Peer pressure” was a warning sign, not a strategic lever. I exaggerate, of course, but only to make the point: only recently have we begun to acknowledge the immense power of informal networks inside organizations.
Now, perhaps inevitably, we risk turning in the opposite direction. The network is being idolized. Hierarchies, some argue, must die. But to paraphrase Twain, reports of their death are greatly exaggerated.
Networks and hierarchies are not binary opposites. They coexist. And if we reorient ourselves to recognize the power of networks — truly recognize it — we stand to benefit immensely.
Mapping the Invisible, Leading from the back of the room
Understanding networks means recognizing something fundamentally uncomfortable to most organizational designers: connectivity is not evenly distributed. People do not form tidy bell curves of influence. Quite the opposite. In most organizations, a small number of people are extremely well connected, disproportionately influential, and critically positioned. The rest are not. This is not an HR issue — it’s a Power Law distribution. And for those with a mathematical curiosity, it is as fascinating as it is disruptive.
Every sizeable organization should develop the capacity to map its own internal networks, uncover hidden influencers, and optimize peer-to-peer dynamics. Not for decoration, but to get work done more effectively. I advocate for Backstage Leadership — leadership that doesn’t command from the spotlight but curates the conditions for others to thrive behind the scenes. It is about enabling the fluidity of the informal, where the velocity of action often far outpaces the clunky machinery of the formal.
We are, I believe, in the post-adolescent phase of the network conversation. Networks are no longer a footnote or a gadget of IT teams. They are not merely a metaphor for ‘connection’ or a data set to be visualized on a dashboard. With today’s ability to scientifically map internal networks — and the emerging power of AI to help us use these maps intelligently — we now have the chance to rethink the very nature of work.
And yet, a word of caution. To my friends in the Excited Network Tribe: don’t forget that a vast proportion of human labour is not flexible, fluid, or virtual. Surgeons will not operate remotely. Care workers will not look after patients via Zoom. The man repairing the gas line outside my house will not be joining a Slack channel any time soon. Not to fix the pipes anyway.
Dr Leandro Herrero
