Day 15: Mapping Value Flows

On Day 9, we watched a short video about relationships and exchanges among trees and fungi in mycorrhizal networks. Today, we bring that idea to the situation you're exploring. We'll consider value flows, including information flows. One way to do that, is with Value Network Maps from Verna Allee. They're useful, because they draw our attention not only to exchanges or goods, services, funds, and so forth, but also intangible benefits or value that establishes or strengthens network relationships.

  • Identify some of the roles and groups and organizations relevant to this situation (indicate them with labelled nodes).
  • Add labelled, solid directed links, to show tangible value flows between these roles or groups, and show intangible value flows with labelled, dashed directed links between them. (See diagram above.)
  • Add other entities (people/roles, teams/groups, organizations, etc.) and value flows, as they occur to you.

Tangible value includes revenue and physical and knowledge products or services, and other tangible exchanges or contracted deliverables. Intangible value includes knowledge and information, and relationship fostering value, like building trust or respect. "These include exchanges of strategic information, planning knowledge, process knowledge, technical know-how, collaborative design work, joint planning activities, and policy development. Although these intangibles may have a strong element of expectation, they tend to be informal, not part of the contract, and rarely deliberately negotiated." (Verna Allee, 2008 (pdf)).

If you have time remaining, you can ask questions like: What is the overall pattern of exchanges and value creation in the system as a whole? How healthy is the network and how well is it converting value? What impact does each value input have on the roles involved in terms of value realization? What is the best way to create, extend, and leverage value, either through adding value, extending value to other roles, or converting one type of value to another? (Verna Allee, 2008 (pdf)).

 

“Because the network is the primary economic mechanism for value conversion, network analysis can be used to describe the value creation dynamics of work groups, organisations, business webs, and purposeful networks engaging in both tangible and intangible value exchanges to support the achievement of specific outcomes and to generate economic and social good.“

"Value is therefore an emergent property of the network, so understanding the functioning of the network as a whole is essential to understanding exactly how and why value is created."

— Verna Allee, Value network analysis (pdf) and value conversion of tangible and intangible assets, 2008