Krebs calls this effect the horizon of observability. The most effective organizations, he says, are the ones with the best reach -- that is, the richest interconnections within that horizon. He cites a project for IBM that studied fifteen client companies following major changes (mergers, downsizing, etc.), and scored them on how well they handled the change. The winners had two things in common: high reach, and emergent leaders (sometimes formal, sometimes not) who were plugging structural holes
...
Today, some of this mapping (of one's personal networks) can be done automatically, by watching the flow of email and documents, but much of it requires self-reported data on contacts that don't leave measurable trails. As social and computer networks converge, that will inevitably change. We'll see relationships more clearly and -- for better and worse -- more analytically.
