Impact Networks: Create Connection, Spark Collaboration, and Catalyze Systemic Change

A greater circulation of information means that more resources and expertise can be shared across the system.

Strong information flows in particular unlock many other essential capacities of networks. “Most of what goes wrong in systems goes wrong because of biased, late, or missing information,” writes Donella Meadows in Thinking in Systems. “Information holds systems together.”

“The best fertilizer is the footsteps of the farmer.”

Trust increases the network’s collective intelligence and avoids the pitfalls of conformism and groupthink.

Trust creates cohesion while a network’s more formal structures and processes are being formed.

Third, magic happens in unstructured time.

The crux of good facilitation, according to Adam Kahane, author of Facilitating Breakthrough, is not to get people to work together, but to remove the obstacles to connection and collaboration—obstacles like disconnection, debilitating conflict, and other forms of “stuckness.

Human and biological networks (like the networks of neurons in our brains) in particular have been shown to have a “breakpoint,

Indeed, “the network effect” tells us that networks become more valuable as more people are connected to them.