Sociograms

Sociograms are maps of informal networks of relationships, displaying the connections between people based on specific criteria. They can be live and in the moment, drawn by hand or computer generated with data provided by group members responding to specific questions. Some sociograms are the perceptions of the researcher or investigator who has gathered information from public data sources.

Some examples of our work are here:

Figure 1: Problem solving interconnections amongst four groups seeking to develop greater collaboration. For this group, the individual data and learning of mutual and one-way relationships initiated the greatest development in collaborative behaviour.

Figure 2: Here we have trust relationships amongst a group of executives moving from business unit silos to collaboration as a senior executive team. You'll notice the GMs of the business units don't choose one another on this criteria. We discovered was that the density of positive mutuals was 38%. Executives in this team shared their reasons for their choices and this was a major factor in the development of relationships. Another factor was the capacity of the CEO for mutual relationships..

We repeated the exploration the following year, with the same criteria and discovered the density of mutual relationships had increased to 67%

Figure 3.

In this company we explored 'who do you discuss your work concerns with? You can see from this sociogram some people (Amanda, Andrea) are relatively isolated from their peers and there are strong subgroups. The non-mutual relationships between the CEO and his team were a concern.

Other Sociograms:

Figure 4

Jacob Moreno (1989 - 1974), the originator of sociometry and sociograms, created this sociogram of relationships amongst and between children in two schools; boys (the triangles) and girls (the circles). This sociogram was published in the New York Times in 1933. You can see the relationships amongst the groups, the subgroups which form, and the connections between the two groups. Moreno said 'with these charts, we have the opportunity to grap the myriad of networks of human relations and at the same time, view any part or portion which we desire to relate to or distinguish.' At the top right we see two girls isolated from the rest. Moreno and those he was working with, predicted these two girls would run away, and they did. People who are isolated have yet to find their true 'companions', the group and people they accept and who accept them. .

Figure 5

(from http://www.robcross.org/sna10.htm)

This sociogram by Rob Cross looks at the interconnections of a geographically distributed company. Here you can see how connected people are within each country, and those people who connect countries. Cross invites those in the company to discover 'are the people in the middle connectors or bottlenecks?'