The Organizational Network Fieldbook: Best Practices, Techniques, and Exercises to Drive Organizational Innovation and Performance

22.5. Key Insights

After going through this process, we were convinced that the more precise the questions you ask, the more powerful the results of an ONA will be. We went into the analysis with clear questions—and a hypothesis—about the state of our external network, and the results confirmed our expectations. We wish that at the outset we had formulated equally penetrating questions about our internal network—we would have saved time and gained additional value from the analysis.

Even with visible evidence of the impact of individual connections on business success, it took a lot of work and encouragement to make the necessary changes. Ideally, we would have assisted with the building of the external and internal networks and tracked progress, ...