Bruce Hoppe has some very compelling insights Connectedness: Visualizing organizational change. It definitely has a cool look to it (for a collective intelligence geek like myself, anyway), but my intuition is that there is something fundamental to this form of data visualization that we'll start seeing more frequently. Getting a sense of what's going on in a collective is a very difficult thing to visualize, and Bruce's demonstration makes great strides toward giving deep and valuable feedback.
The visualization displays the network interactions that occur during a merger/acquisition, and how to view the network interactions to get a better sense of internal dynamics.
Although incredibly insightful, I did find myself being a bit distracted while watching the flash video (after it finishes loading, you have to click the black rectangle void to get it to play). Something seemed counter-intuitive about the way the data was being displayed.
The problem for me is in the way the two organizations are displayed. The big bureaucratic company is displayed as a radiating fractal tree structure, while the small company is displayed as a clump of tight links. The more connections one has, the tighter the links, and the closer the nodes are to one another. I've been thinking a bunch about the relationship of "reactive surface area" to network connectivity.
The counter intuitive part of the visualization is that it looks like the bigger bureaucratic organization has a lot of reactive surface area, and it is actually the opposite. The smaller organization with lots of tight links actually has greater reactive surface area. The way that Bruce displays networks, the more splayed out networks are actually mapping the inverse of reactive surface area. So a big star-like fractal is not looking to embrace you with warmth, but is rather more like a porcupine, trying like the dickens to repel connections.
The disparity between the connection styles of the two companies is probably the biggest component of the fate between them, but the access that the small company has into the large company is the main issue to focus on.
The insight I had about surface area and networks continues to blossom, and I think if Bruce, et al, could incorporate the visual display of reactive surface area, it would help the intuitive nature of the visualization tremendously.
The links between nodes should be representative of contact points (voice, email, etc.), and should be displayed as brighter as frequency/unit-time goes up. How I wish I had a system that watched my gestures in this way and implicitly mapped my interactions as attention trails (hint, hint, for anyone reading along).
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