In information architecture, we work with graphs a lot. An influential blog about information architecture was named Boxes and Arrows after the graph-like visualisations we often use. They are a common way to visualise networks.
In graph theory, the things in a system are called nodes. The connections between nodes are called edges.
It is easy to fixate on the nodes more than the edges. Nodes are much more tangible. Edges may be visualised in a graph, but in real life they are often invisible.
For example, in information architecture we can use a graph to define the nodes (objects such as content types) that need to be represented in the system. The edges define how those objects relate to each other.
Objects are more tangible than relationships
The object itself is often relatively easy to visualise as a prototype, for example of a webpage. These prototypes may look a lot like the final result, so they can feel very real.
The relationships between the objects are much harder to visualise. By their nature, as the connections between things, they are often not tangible in real life.
The best tool we have to visualise these relationships is lines on a graph. But this is much more abstract than a prototype of a webpage.
On such a prototype, connections can be shown as a hyperlink. But this fails to convey the importance of the relationship. For a start, it makes a relationship look like a tiny sub-part of the object, under-representing it.
This is one reason why it is easy to focus on relatively irrelevant details about how a webpage looks, rather than the underlying architectural foundations that drive a user experience.
Relationships are important, but hard to perceive
But in a way, the relationships are more important than the objects. Those relationships define how different items of content come together — to be assembled as webpages, or in the way they link to each other to form a navigation system.
In graph terms, the edges are the webby bit of the web.
We struggle to perceive them. Yet relationships are fundamental to our understanding of everything. As noted in Information Architecture for the Web and Beyond (page 53): “We only understand things in relationship to something else”
Relationships are also important in organisations
I recently explored the similarities between sitemaps and organisational charts. Here there is another parallel, because challenges around perceiving relationships between things persist in the way organisations often work.
It is easy to assume that increasing the size of a team will improve its effectiveness. I also catch myself saying it.
“Many hands make light work.”
Yet when teams increase in size, we often end up getting more bogged down.
“Too many cooks spoil the broth.”
Increasing a team’s size can make relationships harder to manage
An enlightening diagram in the book Meeting Design by Kevin M Hoffman brings to life why this is the case. He calls it a points-of-agreement model.
When a team is formed of two people, there is a single point of agreement between those two people. The agreement is the invisible line that connects the two people.
This is really the relationship between these people. If they have a good relationship, decisions can be made quickly.
In a team of three people, there are three relationships in total.
But after that, things start to get unwieldy.
Between five people, there are 10 relationships in play. Between seven people, there are 21 relationships. In a team of 12, there are 66 relationships!
By this stage, and given human nature, there is a strong chance that some of those relationships will be difficult. Some might even be toxic enough to drag the entire team down. I have experienced multiple times in the past where the addition of one new person to a team changed the dynamic in unexpected ways, making it harder to get things done.
When framed like this, it is easy to see why decision-making becomes harder in larger teams. We don’t often think about teams of 12 people as being unusually large. Perhaps we should instead call them teams of 66 relationships. If just a few of those relationships contain friction, the team’s ability to stay aligned and make decisions can quickly become compromised.
The number of decision-makers can impact the quality of decisions
It’s not that smaller teams with fewer relationships are necessarily better. Just because a two-person team has only one point of agreement, it doesn’t follow that their agreement will be a good one.
I have witnessed situations where two people with a close relationship merely reinforced each others’ bad ideas. There is a psychiatric syndrome known as folie à deux, from the French for “madness of two”. Here, two people become deluded together, in a vicious cycle. It can arise when two people have a strong relationship with each other, but weak relationships with other people.
A graph with two nodes and one edge is so fragile, it is barely a structure.
The most effective team I have ever been in was a team of three. The skills were complementary, the relationships were strong, and it was easy to stay aligned. That team’s decisions were often made quickly, and they were often good.
It is true that we were very lucky to have three strong people and three strong relationships. A triangle is one of the strongest shapes going. But if one of the edges is weak, it can collapse.
Kevin M Hoffman suggests capping decision-making groups or breakout groups in workshops at six, where there are 15 points of agreement. A team of six people is in zone where you can feed the team with two pizzas.
(Is it a coincidence that the hexagon is one of the most commonly-found shapes in nature?)
Google has expressed disdain for glue people
A team’s effectiveness has as much to do with the relationships between the people as the people themselves. But it can be easy to forget this.
Google suffers from this. In 2015, its executive chairman Eric Schmidt gave a lecture in which he expressed his disdain for “glue people”:
When I was at Novell, I had learned that there were people who I call “glue people”. The glue people are incredibly nice people who sit at interstitial boundaries between groups, and they assist in activity. And they are very, very loyal, and people love them, and you don’t need them at all. At Novell, I kept trying to get rid of these glue people, because they were getting in the way, because they slowed everything down.
Lorin Hochstein suggested there may be a connection between this contempt for glue people and Google’s fragmented offerings, particularly around messaging.
Glue people are highly valuable
Research actually shows that glue people are highly valuable to an organisation. Social scientists call it boundary spanning. This is an unofficial but vital function within organisations, serving to share information across social groups and helping to break down siloed ways of working.
Behavioural scientist Jon Levy found that glue people are crucial as they “hold organisations together” and “make teams thrive”.
At NHS Horizons, Helen Bevan found that 3% of people in an organisation are “superconnectors” who influence 85% of the organisation. These people “make or break change”. Yet they are “largely unknown to formal leaders”.
At the height of the social media era in 2014, Jules Birch argued that people with a large digital presence could hold more influence than formal leaders within an organisation: “Networked power could be displacing hierarchical power.”
On the importance of connectors, Paul Taylor said:
Connectors are now starting to enable the things that sector leaders have failed to do — the removal of silo thinking, the rapid dissemination of information and the mobilisation of people into action.
The web has lost its glue
This all brings us back to the web.
Heather Buchel explored why web design now sucks. She argued that it was partly because over time the role of web designer was split into two: user experience designer and front-end developer. She also noted how this split was heavily gendered. User experience tends to be viewed as a feminine role in comparison to the “manly man” engineering work.
In response, James Royal-Lawson said there should be more “bridging roles” occupied by glue people.
The glue that connects together all the aspects that are needed to make digital things work — something to hold together the sticky mess that are digital interfaces.
A role that embodies the utility and spirit of a webmaster, decoupled from the need to do everything yourself, resulting in people on “both sides” that increase the knowledge overlap.
He also explored what we lost since the role of webmaster became unfashionable. The word webmaster makes me cringe, partly because it feels like it was designed to be exclusionary and gendered in all the worst ways.
(Webmaster is in fact derived from postmaster, which was a title used by mail server administrators. That in turn was named after the historical government position of postmaster general.)
Webmasters were collaborative by nature
According to the web historian Jay Hoffman, the first webmaster was a woman — Louise Addis. She was a head librarian at Stanford University. One of her roles was to maintain a particle physics database. Academics the world over made requests for information from this database, and librarians would have to manually retrieve and send those records.
When Louise Addis made a web interface that allowed academics to directly search the database themselves, it became one of the web’s earliest success stories.
Jay Hoffman argued that early webmasters like Louise Addis had to be versatile, collaborative, and value cross-disciplinary knowledge. These qualities are what helped webmasters achieve great things in the early days of the web.
The web has an edge
The web has always been about more than things. It is about making connections between things. The people initially drawn to the web were interested in connecting information. It was perhaps natural that they would also be good at connecting people as well.
It can be hard to visualise the importance of the relationships between things rather than the things themselves. But the quiet success of glue people in organisations shows what can be done when you value relationships.
You might say: it gives them the edge. And the edges are what makes the web.