Culture is not felt in a PowerPoint. It is felt in who helps you when you don’t understand something.
In who tells you where to go. In who you check with before sending an important email. In who teaches you, who slows you down, who moves you forward, who opens doors for you—or who closes them.
That is the real organization: an invisible network through which trust, knowledge, shortcuts, and power flow.
Formal processes exist; but the work gets done through who influences whom.
The statistics behind the human side: centrality, entropy, and the “probability of surprise”
In organizational networks, we talk about centrality—not to identify who “has authority,” but to understand who sustains the system. The person who explains when no one else does. Who listens when no one else listens. Who keeps the work moving even when it’s not their responsibility.
We also talk about entropy: how predictable or unpredictable your work network is.
A low-entropy network seems calm… until the person who has been holding everything together “under the surface” for years leaves. A high-entropy network has more paths, more resilience, and less destructive surprise.
The “probability of surprise” ultimately describes something simple:
How likely is it that work will break down because we depend on a single person?
O.N.A. (Organizational Network Analysis) is not a diagnosis nor just sociometry; it is an honest way of seeing what is really happening.
In Readiness to Change, when we identify drivers and resistors of change, we do not do it to label anyone. We do it to simulate:
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who could best train others,
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who will be a great key user even without an impressive title,
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which political alliances need to be worked on before moving a piece,
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who influences quietly more than any executive.
Because change does not depend on a plan; it depends on the network that will execute it.
With LAT, that same network reveals hidden leaders who do not show up in meetings, but without whom the climate falls apart. And the question is not “who are they,” but what we do with them: Do we formally develop them? Do we protect them? Do we move them strategically?
In the end, it’s not about measuring relationships; it’s about anticipating consequences.
O.N.A. becomes powerful when it is combined with predictive models—when we can see what would happen if… if we move someone, if we train a group, if an informal leader becomes a formal one, if a key resistor is ignored or integrated.
The strength is not in the network itself, but in the decisions it enables.
Processes define how the organization should work. Networks define how it actually works.
If we want to change cultures, leadership, or ways of working, it’s not enough to measure climate or design training programs.
We need to understand the human network where the work really happens. That is where the risks, the opportunities, and the solutions that always seemed invisible are found.
That is where change begins.
By Yoel Kluk, Partner at Olivia Mexico.