6/5/07  Karen Stephenson

A Quantum Theory of Trust

How to map and manage the informal social networks that can determine the levels of collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and innovation in your organization.

For a long time, everybody talked about the profound effects that informal networks have on how effectively organizations function, but nobody did much about it.

Dr. Karen Stephenson changed all that about twenty years ago, and she's still the leading expert for diagnosing and fixing the human systems that drive organizational performance. An anthropologist by training and now the president of NetForm and a faculty member at Harvard, she creates virtual X-rays of how people in an organization interact and shows how to alter those interactions to produce higher levels of collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and innovation.

In addition to scores of business clients that include IBM, JP Morgan, TRW, and Motorola, her work has been used by the Centers for Disease Control to understand global contagion and by the U.S. and British governments to diagnose and detect terrorism.

She is a contributing member for five think tanks, including The Global Business Network and The Design Futures Council. Her work has been admired throughout the media, including feature stories in The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Financial Times, Wired, The Economist, Forbes, and Strategy+Business.

You'll learn to spot the gatekeepers, pulse-takers, hubs, and other key actors in your organization and how to use a variety of strategies - many of them remarkably simple - to configure any organization's informal dynamics for dramatically improved performance.