The Social Butterfly

Consider an organisation with thousands of employees, such as a local council. It is impossible to expect every employee to know who's-who, nor the myriad of functions of each department. And many people will have experience of the difficulties of finding the right person to talk too. This issue could easily trigger freedom of information requests. It also stifles colloboration between departments.

As a ecological system thinker I thought this could be improved and so whilst working for Sutton and Brent Councils I explored what could help. These reccomendations are described below:

1. Mycrozial
"A network which forms a highly sophisticated ecological "meeting" or connection point" : This is LinkedIn! A brilliant place to find fellow employees where conversations happen with ease. Follow key people and find out a host of useful information about what matters to different teams.

2. Ecotone
"The meeting place of two or more habitats" : This is Microsoft Outlook! In particular setting outlook calenders and meeting schedules with no permissions. This enables anyone to get in touch irrespective of their role in the organisation. This massively helps with colloboration.

3. Foodweb
"A comprehensive network of interconnected chains that maps an entire ecosystem" This is an organisations organigram. The majority only show senior management, a very tiny proportion of employees. What if an organisation organigram could include everyone and their roles. This would help massively with communicaton. Like a food web current organisation graphs focus only on the top predators but it's the bottom rows, that are the primary producers.

4. Butterflies
Animals that exhibit highly social, interactive, or outgoing traits" This is a person (human animal) with similar trait that are highly likely to know people outside their immediate teams.

5. Veteran
"A tree that has reached a mature or post-mature age and possesses specific features that make it irreplaceable for biodiversity" This is a long service employee! They are invaluable as a source of knowledge about who to speak too. When they go, physical connections between teams go too.