If you are a regular reader of this blog you probably know that I am enormous believer in the power of networking. It helps us in our careers. Networks help companies to share knowledge and even develop new knowledge through innovation and they facilitate the development of supportive relationships that help people fight stress and isolation.

You also might know that I am a big fan of the RSA Animate whiteboard videos of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (http://thersa.org) in England. So today I would like to recommend one of their videos, produced by Manuel Lima, a lead designer of the Bing search product at Microsoft.

In his presentation “The Power of Networks” Mr. Lima suggests that humankind has long used the image of the tree to describe the relationships from things as diverse as family relationships, species, and the branches of science. It helps us to see connections in a way that is symmetrical and hierarchical. But Lima postulates that we are beginning to understand that our world is too complex fit into a tree metaphor and for that reason we need think about relationships as networks. He says we are in a time of organized complexity (search for "complexity" on this site to see other treatments of this topic) where the relationships between things really are more web-like than branch-like and to embrace this paradigm shift is to recognize why we talk today about flat organizations, matrix structures and redundancies – exactly the way that biologists are beginning to understand the workings of the human brain.

As always, RSA gives us two ways to get in touch with Lima’s ideas on YouTube. His full 18 minute talk is available at http://youtu.be/_0LVSIwifpI. Or if you like the edited whiteboard version (11 minutes), click here: http://youtu.be/nJmGrNdJ5Gw. (I personally love the visual impact of the whiteboard versions of talks.)

- Herb