Few months ago at work there was a email thread where whoever is invited to respond with a challenge has to nominate few others.

Many responded and I got interested in the invitation patterns within and across groups responders belonged to.

The result is the below:

• thicker the circle circumference the more within-group communication
• thicker the edge the more communication occurred between those two groups
• bottom arrows represent communication from left-side teams to the right-side ones
• top arrows represent the communication from right-side teams to the left-side ones

It’s clear which teams interact with other teams the most and which don’t. Organizations looking to improve cross-team collaborations and communication need to look at non-project interactions.

Note that the data considered here isn’t w.r.t. to a project where tasks are assigned to people and they communicate progress. This was one of a kind setup where people could nominate whoever they wanted to for contributions.