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Network-Centric Thinking: The Internet's Challenge to Ego-Centric Institutions
Jed Miller and Rob Stuart
When advocacy groups embrace digital democracy, the reverberations shake the whole organization.
 The tools of digital democracy enable us to become activists with a new flexibility and independence. Email lists, online petitions, meet-ups and blogs have altered citizens' expectations for how advocacy groups should engage their members. MoveOn.org and the Howard Dean campaign have pioneered new models for democratic, flexible, "network-centric" approaches, but many organizations stick resolutely to traditional "ego-centric" methods. There's a simmering tension between ego-centric thinking and network-centric thinking – the tension between the institutional power that emanates from an organization and the transactional power that inheres in its members' myriad interactions.
Civil society groups now face a crossroads, and a combination of forces has kept most from exploring network-centric practices. If this trend continues, organizational effectiveness will diminish across the civil society sector and many groups could see their core base of constituents drift away.
How can groups open themselves to the kinds of transactionally-based activities that thrive in the age of networks? What does it take for an ego-centric organization to become more network-centric?
We come to this question after years of work in digital technology and community activism. Jed managed online communities for The New York Times, and later came to Web Lab, a non-profit dedicated to building online dialogues that engage citizens in decision-making, and invite them to examine their own assumptions about volatile issues. Rob spent ten years as a public interest lobbyist focusing on environmental legislation, and was already proficient at grassroots campaigning when he started to integrate online technology into his work. Since the mid-90s, when he developed a "circuit rider" approach to help grantees of the Rockefeller Family Fund adopt the Internet as a tool for advocacy, Rob has been helping civil society organizations build their capacity through the use of information technology.
A consistent theme for both of us is the belief that people become activists because of their passions, not in response to dictated messages. Online or in person, the best way to mobilize the public has always been to create an effective platform for shared passions to emerge and develop into action. Online tools offer a variety of ways for advocacy groups to reach beyond traditional activities. Ego-centric organizations, however, resist taking advantage of these opportunities, while network-centric ones work to embrace them.
Network-centric thinking may be counter-intuitive to those who came of age inside traditional civil society organizations. It certainly requires a commitment of time and resources in areas that are lower priorities for many non-profits. In this article, we try to show why the effort is worth it.
A Scary Story
When we try to describe network-driven advocacy, or technology strategy, or online community, jargon is often an obstacle. So we look for stories to explain the benefits of network thinking and networked action. Instead of proselytizing about "the power of networks," we remind people how Tom Sawyer got his fence painted. We explain how networks work like George Bailey's friends at the end of "It's a Wonderful Life" – they pass information quickly and pool their resources to make a difference.
Rob recently got some story-telling help from the best audience anywhere, his five-year-old daughter. One night on parent duty, with the dishes washed, and the kids supposedly tucked in, he was emailing with a good friend, a network-centric advocacy guru. A discussion that began with network-centric warfare had moved to the hobbled condition of the environmental movement.
Why, for instance, did environmental advocates insist on announcing new initiatives well in advance at big press conferences, which gave opponents ample time to analyze the announcement and craft responses or pre-emptive strategies of their own? Maybe press is all that matters, they mused, when you're not winning on the issues. Maybe visibility becomes the only way you can think of to measure effectiveness. In the lead-up to the recent pro-choice march, for instance, Rob had heard that women's groups were competing over the order of their quotes in New York Times' articles.
"It was quite sad," Rob continued. "There were people who everyone trusted to work on the problem, but... they spent most of the time competing with each other."
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How can a movement build a network, Rob wondered that night, when competition and organizational ego are fundamental values? If network-centric organizing relies on things like information-sharing and distributed power, can the traditional organizations ever hope to break their own habits and mobilize ever-bigger, ever-stronger networks? And if they can't, what's to become of us?
Rob's anxious reverie was interrupted when his sleepless daughter Amelia tromped downstairs and asked him to tell her a bedtime story. The standard Stuart ritual involves the reading of stories, not the telling of them, but Rob took the new challenge to heart. "What kind of story do you want," he asked as they climbed the stairs.
"I want to hear something about space," was the reply.
Sitting at Amelia's bedside, Rob began to weave a story with the threads of the things on his mind. He told Amelia about a world far away that was wracked by environmental devastation. Water tasted bad and the air made people sick. Species were disappearing. The people on this planet knew something was wrong, but the big company that was causing the destruction didn't want to admit they were doing anything bad. The company pretended things weren't so bad and never told anyone they could solve the problem.
Amelia began to realize this was not the usual fare. There were no dogs traveling to space in the toy balloon that hangs in her room. No pets or people from the Stuart family had appeared yet. "Is this our planet" she asked with concern.
"No," Rob assured her, "this is another planet."
For a five-year-old, this disclaimer was apparently enough. "What happened next?" she asked.
"It was quite sad," Rob continued. "There were people who everyone trusted to work on the problem, but instead of looking for solutions, they spent most of the time competing with each other. Some of them wanted money. Some of them wanted attention. Some of them weren't sure what exactly they wanted. But they all wanted one thing most of all – they wanted to be the one who got the credit for trying to save the world.
"What these people who were supposed to fix things didn't realize, is that each one of them had a piece of the answer, and that if they could only work together and tell each other everything they knew, the world would be saved.
"By now, the planet was starting to collapse. It was clear that if the solution wasn't found soon, the world would end."
"Did they finally work together and save the world?" asked Amelia, who's familiar with Disney stories.
"No," Rob answered, thinking about his talk with his network-centric guru friend. "The people who should have been helping decided that if the end really was near, it was important to have a race to see who could get noticed the most before the end came. In fact, on the day before the last day, instead of working on the problem, each group held a press conference. You see, with the world ending and all, there was only going to be one more newspaper, and each group wanted to get the very first quote in the very last newspaper."
"So their world ended?"
"Yep. What do you think?"
"That's a silly story about silly people."
Using Amelia's simple taxonomy, a host of people on our own planet fall unambiguously into the Silly People category, including such obvious competitive juggernauts as Microsoft and Walt Disney, but also including groups who ought to know better, like most political campaigns, many national advocacy groups, and the vast majority of charitable foundations.
Driven by top-down hierarchies, cultures of personality, and an ingrained resistance to knowledge-sharing, these Silly People organizations remain unready, unwilling, or unable to embrace network-centric organizational models. They cling instead to its opposite, the "ego-centric" model for organizations and organizing.
Ego-centric institutions are hardly dysfunctional, but the world is changing, and traditional models for organizing, fund-raising, management, marketing, and warfare are all slipping into ineffectuality.
By presenting the contrasts between network-centric and ego-centric models, this article is not trying to wow you like a slick consultant might, and convince you network-centric thinking is the Honeymooners' Happy Housewife Helper of social change. We're biased toward the network-centric model, sure. (Rob's more likely to say "She's in the network." than "She's a friend of mine." Jed actually writes gushing emails back to Eli at MoveOn just to say "That was a great message, man!") But our goal is expansive, not promotional.
More urgent than a sector-wide conversion to network-centric thinking is a deepened understanding of the elements of both network-centric and ego-centric models for business, outreach and mobilization. Warfare has adapted to confront, a post-9/11, post-dot-com world and the tools of organizing must do the same. Our goal is to help expand the toolkit with an introduction to ego-centric thinking, network-centric thinking, and the critical distinctions between them.
Beyond Howard's End
Like the dot-com boom that pre-figured it, the Howard Dean craze made exaggerated claims that were undeliverable. This movement, fueled by unsupervised local initiatives and virally-activated small donors, could not reach far enough beyond its loyal, wired base. Politics as we know it did not change overnight, as John Kerry's presidential campaign proved in Iowa, and as the Republican spin machine and the complicit media proved again in the subsequent demolition of the Dean candidacy.
The Dean campaign's most-repeated claim, however, was its truest. "You did it!" Dean said as he mounted the stage in Manhattan's Bryant Park, clutching the red bat his blog-constituency had decided he should bring with him. The Dean phenomenon emblematized, and in critical ways confirmed, a new model for political power, a model that makes second-person pronouns as important as the first person.
Candidates have been claiming to speak for commoners for centuries. The Dean campaign empowered constituents to speak for themselves, and to hear themselves speak, using an online platform created by the campaign. Observers and even insiders differ on how well the top echelons of the Dean campaign actually absorbed the input of its grassroots participants, but the campaign's use of blogs, email, online donations, and grassroots comments were a milestone in presidential politics.
Even Dean detractors, who claim the grassroots effect was only donation-deep, will not deny that Dean's initial MeetUp build-up was rooted in local, non-sponsored action. "Dean supporters do not drive 200 miles through 10 inches of snow to see a political candidate or a representative of his staff," wrote Samantha Shapiro in The New York Times Magazine. "They drive that far to see each other."
Every candidate's site got a blog and a meet-up... the HTML equivalent of the Teamster jacket and baseball cap candidates wear at union rallies.
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For non-profit technologists and online community builders, Dean's initial success was a glorious affirmation. Dean, the Dean team, and the teeming Deaniacs showed that if you build a platform that empowers members to seek affinity, speak effectively, and influence strategy, they will come – and they'll bring their credit cards and their social networks with them.
For journalists, Dean's rise gave a sleepy campaign season an early kick. For entrepreneurs, it helped unlock torrents of venture capital for "social network software," tools like Tribe and Friendster that capture who you know and the facets of those connections in order to augment the "social capital" of the larger network represented.
For politicians and organizers, the Dean meme was a call to action. But how many have really listened? On the surface, most appeared to have responded and retrofitted. Long before the Iowa caucuses, other Democratic candidates had reorganized their campaign web sites to resemble deanforamerica.com. Everyone got a blog and a MeetUp and attempted to adopt a breezier tone in their communications. General Wesley Clark's official site put a sophisticated blog community platform in place not long after launching. With speed and efficiency, the Bush-Cheney campaign re-launched its website to include the language and some local organizing tools made popular by the Dean site.
But for the most part these changes were cosmetic, the HTML equivalent of the Teamster jacket and baseball cap candidates wear at union rallies. They didn't reflect changes in approach, only in presentation. Though General Clark entered the race on a swell of "Draft Clark" support online, his email communications resembled "top-down" style broadcasts requesting campaign funds. Despite the apparent sophistication of the Bush-Cheney grassroots web strategy, the feedback page at whitehouse.gov remained a cramped contraption that steered all but the most dogged user toward chances to praise non-controversial policies.
As of spring 2004 – still early in campaign terms – the Kerry campaign continues to use the Internet primarily to seek money, not engagement or opinion, though their hiring of a lead coordinator from MoveOn.org betokens an eagerness to adapt. The Bush campaign, on the other hand, continues to adopt the appearance of its opponents online just as it did on camera at the 2000 Republican National Convention. The Bush-Cheney site launched a massive house-party initiative for July, giving supporters tools to coordinate hundreds of simultaneous local events, invite their friends and distribute campaign materials. The online kit comes complete with a MoveOn-style national map to reflect house-party locations and show members that they're part of a larger "movement."
To be fair, the Kerry page does have a house party area, but there's no map, and clicking on the homepage link takes you to johnkerry.com/fundraising, while a similar click on the Bush campaign page takes you to georgewbush.com/party. It may be a subtle "branding" distinction, but it's meaningful when combined with a Bush campaign's email outreach that chided, "John Kerry sent an e-mail to supporters telling them it's 'time to get local.' Their idea of getting local? Asking for more of your hard-earned money. Our idea of getting local is asking you to open your home, invite in some friends and neighbors, and tell them why you support the President."
Of course, whatever his web site may say, the president regularly dismisses public opinion as an irrelevant "focus group." But after Howard Dean, the onus is on every political organization to enlist its base not merely as financial contributors, but as active participants, if not full campaign partners.
Old Power
Persuaded by the successes of the Dean campaign, civil society institutions often ask us, "How can we get some of what they had?" Unfortunately, given the tendencies of most advocacy groups, the transition to network-centric strategies can be fitful and confusing. Traditional organizations are not set up to take full advantage of the emerging network-centric model. In fact, the practical lessons garnered from years of successful grassroots leadership may make it impossible for them to adapt and become more transparent, collaborative institutions that can draw strength from a network-centric approach.
It is a disturbing but real possibility that many advocacy organizations will stagnate or falter, as a new generation of Web-savvy activists find their methods to be detached and uninspiring. But the converse is also true. If civil society institutions can invest their activities with more network-centric thinking, they can attract a huge pool of untapped supporters into their campaigns. Of the two million people who joined MoveOn.org, most had not previously thought of themselves as activists.
The characteristics of the "ego-centric model" will probably sound familiar. Authority and decision making are maintained within the organization, not shared with membership or affiliates. Power is concentrated at the top.
Civil society groups are often founded by a single charasmatic figure, and live or die thanks to the leadership skills of that person. But when we talk about the ego-centric behavior of organizations, we are not referring to the big egos of individuals. In fact, charismatic leadership can also play an important role in network-centric groups. Ego-centric organizational behavior, however, involves a kind of "systemic ego" that pervades an institution. The concentration of power in relatively few offices is only one consequence of a more insidious dynamic: the tendency of power to aggregate around the organization and its staff, rather than to propagate outward among its membership and allies.
Old Power acts differently than New Power to achieve its aims.
Old Power, the kind you think of when you picture people "going to the office" or "working for an institution," makes the organization the central character of the narrative. Individuals within this framework have power to the extent that they can speak decisively for the group or its program. Organizational agendas and tactics are developed by those at the top of a hierarchy, the board or the senior staff. Success is then measured by individual and team achievements in service of the goals handed down from above.
Organizational leadership promotes the image of a strong, institutional identity (even if that means papering over legitimate internal differences of opinion). Leadership calls for team cohesion but in reality campaigns often occur in isolation from one another, even competing management attention or company resources. Leadership encourages program managers to compare notes and exchange information, but program managers are often stretched too thin to coordinate with each other or delegate the task. Staff meetings are long and retreats are regular occurrences, even if most staff consider such convenings non-productive and distracting.
Leaders are not unaware of the liabilities of the traditional approach. They realize that, despite their best efforts, knowledge does not flow easily inside their organizations. They can see, for example, that the development staff does not share membership data with the outreach team. But they excuse themselves because of limited resources. The time and money to get all the teams in synch are too costly, they reason. After all, it's hard enough just to keep an organization alive year after year.
Old Power keeps a single focus on how to keep donors donating. Since most donors respond to good press, media attention and well-timed public appearances are a priority. As a result, internally, organizational prominence becomes confused with actual progress toward the group's goals. In Rob's story of the Failed Planet, the ego-centric organizations are more concerned with getting credit than with real-world outcomes. Ego-centric thinking leads to a obsession with having a high organizational profile. Progress is measured in media quotes and references, which can be used for fundraising newsletters and meetings with foundation program officers.
So the ego-centric institution becomes the hero of its own story, the central character in a drama where peer organizations inevitably are bit players. Rather than leveraging opportunities to collaborate on projects, to share risk and responsibility to pursue common goals, they tend to seek funds to replicate past successes and to control satellite projects by themselves.
Funding proposals and appeal letters portray the group's work as indispensable to real progress and social change. Its programs are heralded for their superiority to the programs of other groups with similar strategies (and success rates). The organization's work is described as a model for the field, while the contributions of others go unmentioned. Phrases like "definitive model," "best-of-breed," and "groundbreaking" appear frequently in its marketing materials. Of course, to support these kinds of assertions, the organization can rarely tell the whole story. In fact, quite the opposite: it needs to obscure the ambiguous, unflattering details that are inevitably part of any advocacy campaign (though the difficulties that arise during a campaign are often where the most valuable learning gets done). In order to be successful in its fundraising, an ego-centric organization simply cannot afford to be transparent.
The ego-centric institution becomes the hero of its own story, the central character in a drama where peer organizations are bit players.
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When "messaging" and "key differentiators" are primary values for an organization, a reluctance to share knowledge with peers is a common and unfortunate consequence. Effective methods become ways to beat out sibling groups. Access to information becomes a strategic advantage. Most groups do not even publish a calendar of upcoming press events, out of concern that they will tip their hands to peers with whom they compete. So it's not surprising that draft reports are rarely shared before publication, nor are data sets made easily available in order to advance the general knowledge of a sector -- let alone to get timely information to the public as soon as possible. The extent to which this attitude mars the civil society sector is awe-inspiring.
When the non-profit Benetech wanted to help human rights organizations share data with its Martus software, they met surprising resistance. Some of the concern was over security. Information on human rights abuses is sensitive, and its release into the wrong hands could have dire consequences. But according to Martus product manager Marc Levine, some organizations also have ego-centric motives that frustrate cooperation. "You want to have information-sharing at the grassroots level," he said, "so every one has access to more of the information that they need, but in practice organizations don't see a near-term benefit."
In fact, he continued, some organizations feel threatened by the prospect of sharing. "They want to be the go-to group for information," he explained. "Otherwise, they worry they won't be relevant." Funders contribute to this syndrome by creating a climate in which uniqueness gives grant-seekers an apparent edge in the race for money, which discourages cooperative practices between like-minded but competitive organizations. Ultimately, Benetech was able to address the security concerns, and, after much effort, designed a distributed, network-centric system that human rights groups embraced. But getting them to overcome their initial resistance was a challenge.
This competitive attitude can even be found between the national and local offices of a single organization. Most prominent civil society institutions refuse to share member data with their state affiliates, worried that the chapters will develop closer ties to members and thus erode the perceived value and donor-base of the national group. Clearly the opposite is the case. The national office should enhance the state chapter's standing, and their activities should be coordinated. But Old Power thinking is deeply ingrained. More often than not, state groups are left to seek their own members.
Despite these long-standing challenges to effectiveness, advocacy groups achieve crucial victories on behalf of citizens to benefit civil society, often in the face of well-funded corporate opposition. The most engaged and committed citizens, those concerned about a particular issue, join advocacy groups and become members. But in the ego-centric model, a member's contribution is strictly financial. Leadership sets an organization's agenda, and members endorse the strategy by sending checks. Communication materials solicit donations, and occasionally offer opportunities to volunteer. Members may receive a perennial survey, but the collected "feedback" is only meant to support further fundraising.
Ego-centric groups treat members as anonymous donors who support the organization by responding to direct mail. They are passive, like TV viewers. For an Old Power group, the success of the year-end appeal is like a Nielsen rating. Response rates are the only feedback that many organizations get from their members. How is that feedback measured? For direct mail, a successful response rate is one percent. Two percent is a home run. So even if 98 percent of direct mail recipients don't respond, the organization still breaks out the champagne. After you join, no action or creativity is required. In fact, ego-centric organizations are rarely prepared to answer questions when members phone. Too often the response is, "We'll send you our newsletter."
Old Power groups see membership renewals as a ringing endorsement of their go-it-alone approach. But membership means less to members than leadership likes to think. In fact, the evidence shows that citizens are more active in the process of governance when they are members of more than one group devoted to a particular issue. They vote more regularly, participate in email campaigns, and engage in lobbying. But if groups don't share their membership lists, they will never recognize that their most active base of support are members they already share with peer organizations.
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