From the New Scientist:
EMAIL logs can provide advance warning of an organisation reaching crisis point. That’s the tantalising suggestion to emerge from the pattern of messages exchanged by Enron employees.
Florida Institute of Technology (Melbourne) academics Ben Collingsworth and Ronaldo Menezes have analysed around 517,000 emails sent between Enron’s 150 senior-most staff in the 18-months leading up to the firm’s bankruptcy. The conclusion is common-sensicle but fascinating nevertheless:
Menezes thinks he and Collingsworth may have identified a characteristic change that occurs as stress builds within a company: employees start talking directly to people they feel comfortable with, and stop sharing information more widely.
The point here is that group introversion email trend became statistically noticeable one month before the bankruptcy.
…the number of active email cliques, defined as groups in which every member has had direct email contact with every other member, jumped from 100 to almost 800 around a month before the December 2001 collapse. Messages were also increasingly exchanged within these groups and not shared with other employees.
Of course, the applicability of this all is rather more slippery. The only reason Enron’s emails were available is because the firm went bankrupt. You can be pretty sure that the degree to which email exchanges reverted to such peer/confidante clusters shot up at Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup in late 2008. They didn’t necessarily go bust, of course.
And while email network dynamics may, nevertheless, be a perfectly valid indicator of organisational stress, they’re not necessarily a leading indicator. The very reason such changes occur is probably as a result of widespread external speculation about a company’s health. A company would have to be already identified as being in trouble before email patterns might change significantly. The degree to which they do change, though, would certainly be a valuable indicator of employees’ own confidence in the firm. Comparing Goldman email patterns to those at Merrill, for example, might be revealing.
Related link:
Recovery fears trigger insider sell-off - FT
