About OrgScope

The OrgScope Project began in Spring 2003 in an airport. We were on our way back from, strangely enough, the first week-long Joint Forces-Army war game, where we served as experts on networked organizations. A Scientific American cover on"Scale-Free Networks" caught Jeff's eye. and kicked off new thinking and the development of this tool, OrgScope.

What happend? Familiarity with the ground-breaking work by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi and others on network theory combined with a deep immersion in the question of "echelonment," or hierarchy in the military. What if, we thought, we mapped the organization as a network? If we did, would we find"hubs," vital centers of connection, in the organizational network?

We took the idea to a long-time client who agreed to fund the initial development. This story was published as the last chapter of the The Handbook of High Performance Virtual Teams (Jossey-Bass, 2008), called "The Virtual, Networked Organization: How One Company Became Transparent".

Since then, we've been creating concepts, methodology, and technology to understand organizations as networks of positions and people.