I received this note from my good friend Etienne Wenger this week. He is a pioneer in collaborative communities and author of two books on communities of practice.

"Wow, you have gone a long way with the value networks. I had always thought of it as reflection tool for organizations in relation to how they interact with their markets, rather than a community-building tool. But if it becomes a way to visualize people’s mutual aspirations and expectations, then it could serve reflection in community-building efforts. Have you seen it used that way?"

The answer is yes, value network analysis (VNA) is a simple but very powerful language for developing team and community collaboration. Quite a number of people are starting to use VNA as way to negotiate peer-to-peer collaboration both within and between organizations. This is a growing trend for the simple reason that many believe in community and collaboration, but really don't know what it means. We know how to cooperate quite well, but real collaboration and community building involves sets of behaviors that are largely untapped in organizations. One of those key skills how to talk about the often unspoken world of aspirations and expectations – the unspoken world of intangible value and support that is essential for successful collaboration.

We have many examples of people using VNA to negotiate across boundaries. Some are simple work team challenges such as reducing scheduling time to reorganizing entire businesses of several thousand people. In other cases people use it to negotiate complex change processes. During a comprehensive reorganization at a global manufacturing company people smoothly and easily transitioned into renegotiation roles and relationships during the mapping process. In many cases these negotiations became the foundation for internal Service Level Agreements. Others are using VNA to negotiate the Roles and expectations as they launch projects. http://www.value-networks.com/Articles/Allee-Meggitt-for-APM-06AUG06.pdf.

Here is a picture of people using our NetMat™ activity in just such a community negotiation. In this case it was an internal community of practice focused on organizational change. A new role was being created to serve the community and VNA helped them all gain better understanding and support for that role.