From structural signals in a collaboration network to turning a report into action. What we have learned about reducing repetitive communication.
6 articles
Two people look at the same network map. One sees dots and lines; the other reads out bottlenecks, silos and brokers. Five structural signals, and the organisational symptom each one points to.
Repetitive communication rarely shows up labelled as waste. It hides in alignment meetings, second confirmations, and context explained for the third time. A cost model that needs nothing but frequency and channel.
The ceiling on how much you can trust a diagnosis is set the moment you assemble the data. What you must prepare, what you can skip, and the four mistakes that most often distort the result.
A collaboration diagnosis needs to know who interacted with whom, and when — not what was said. Why this boundary holds technically, why it is required legally, and which questions it rightly rules out.
When a silo appears, the reflex is to replace someone or add a meeting. The distribution of structural holes and weak ties usually says otherwise: the missing piece is a cross-team edge, not a person.
Health score, centralisation index, weak ties — these are not a scorecard, they are a way to order your to-do list. How to translate each of the three structural problems into one executable action.