How to Identify the Informal Influencers in Your Organization
Leaders often guess wrong about who carries influence. Here are the four steps we use to find the people a change depends on: predict, map who people go to, match the right person to the change, and clear the way.
Before You Measure Anything, Ask Your Executives to Predict the Results
A leadership team nearly cut a role that carried 90% of the connections between product and sales. Nobody on the team would have named her. Asking executives to predict the results before a survey runs turns that kind of blind spot into a finding you can act on, and makes the return on people data concrete.
Engagement Surveys Locate the Symptom. They Rarely Locate the Cause.
Engagement surveys are one of the most widely used tools in organizational listening. They are also frequently misread. A score tells you that a problem exists somewhere in the organization. It rarely tells you where the problem starts.
EP 136: Victor Bilgen on Influence and Operations — The Emergency Mind Podcast
I joined Dan Dworkis on The Emergency Mind Podcast to talk about the gap between how organizations think work gets done and how it actually does — covering informal networks, brokers, leverage points, and what network maps reveal that org charts never will.
What Network Maps Reveal That Org Charts Never Will
After reading hundreds of network maps, three patterns show up in nearly every organization that struggles to execute. Here's what to look for.
Why the Most Connected Person in Your Organization Might Be Your Biggest Risk
Every time we share network analysis findings with a leadership team, the same thing happens. Before anyone engages with what the data means, people start looking for their names.
The Real Reason Your Strategy Isn't Landing
Most strategy failures aren't strategy problems. They're execution infrastructure problems — and they show up the same way, across industries, every time.