Process of Network Formation
Discussion
Benjamin Life:
Formalizing Networks: From Invisible to Visible
"Formalizing networks, making them visible and explicit, serves multiple essential functions.
First, it enables better information flow. When organizations understand themselves as nodes within a network, they can share knowledge more intelligently, avoiding duplication while building on each other’s learning. Information becomes a resource that circulates through the system rather than remaining trapped within organizational silos.
Second, formalization enables coordinated resource attraction. Rather than competing for the same limited pool of funding, networked organizations can present themselves as a synergistic portfolio. They can make the case to funders that supporting the network represents investment in an entire ecosystem rather than isolated projects. This fundamentally changes the value proposition: funders are not betting on individual winners but nurturing the conditions for emergence across an interconnected system.
Third, visibility allows for better role clarity and reduces wasteful redundancy. This is not about eliminating all overlap, again, redundancy can be valuable, but about ensuring that when similar functions exist, they are coordinated rather than competing, aligned in purpose rather than working at cross-purposes."
(https://omniharmonic.substack.com/p/the-mycelial-sensing-of-networks?)
Network Formation in Practice: Bioregional and Digital Examples
"This process of network formation is currently underway in multiple contexts, both digital and bioregional.
In the online sphere, we see the emergence of Network Nations, communities organized around shared values, purposes, or identities that transcend geographic boundaries. These digital networks enable global affiliations and alignments, allowing people to organize around shared commitments regardless of physical location.
Simultaneously, we are witnessing the formation of bioregional networks rooted in geographic proximity and shared environmental context. I observe this happening in Cascadia in the Pacific North West, on the Front Range of Colorado, and emerging to some extent in the Northeast and the Bay Area. These bioregional networks recognize that certain challenges and opportunities are intrinsically tied to place, and that collaboration among geographically proximate actors can generate unique forms of synergy.
Here in Boulder, on the Front Range, I see many organizations playing unique roles while only beginning to recognize themselves as a network. The process underway involves identifying what exists in the space between our different organizations and efforts, what network-level functions might need support, what shared infrastructure might benefit the whole, what forms of coordination might unlock new possibilities.
This is fundamentally a process of intuitive sensing: how do our initiatives relate to each other? What is the right relationship between our organizations? This might involve recalibrating expectations about what we can uniquely contribute, releasing certain functions that others are better positioned to serve, while claiming more fully those capacities that represent our genuine differentiation.
The result is not a static division of labor but a living ecology of relationships that can adapt as conditions change, as new actors emerge, as new needs become apparent."
(https://omniharmonic.substack.com/p/the-mycelial-sensing-of-networks?)
The Promise of Networked Organization
"When networks function well, when the mycelial sensing process is allowed to unfold with integrity, they create upward spirals. By knowing our unique gifts and our role in the larger ecology, we generate conditions for holism: the whole becomes exponentially greater than the sum of its parts.
This is more than rhetorical flourish. In concrete terms, it means that networked organizations amplify each other’s impact. A convening by one organization generates insights that inform programming by another. Resources flow to where they can be most effectively deployed. Redundant efforts are minimized not through competition but through coordination. New actors entering the system can more quickly find their place and their people. The entire ecosystem becomes more intelligent, more resilient, more capable.
This is the promise of networks: not merely improved efficiency (though that often follows) but the emergence of collective intelligence and capability that exceeds what any individual organization could achieve in isolation."
(https://omniharmonic.substack.com/p/the-mycelial-sensing-of-networks?)
Learning to Sense the Mycelium
"We are, all of us, already embedded in networks. The question is not whether to participate in networks but whether to participate consciously, whether to make visible and formal the relationships that already constitute the living tissue of our communities, our movements, our shared work.
Learning to sense the mycelium is an ongoing practice. It requires cultivating awareness of the ecological context within which we operate. It demands the humility to recognize that our organization or project is not the center but one node among many. It asks us to develop comfort with emergence, with self-organization, with forms of coordination that cannot be controlled from the top down.
This is challenging work, particularly for those of us trained in conventional organizational paradigms. It asks us to trust in processes that feel less certain, more organic, more dependent on relationship than on formal authority. It requires patience with the pace at which genuine trust and alignment develop.
Yet the alternative, remaining within parasitic organizational forms that deny the networked reality we already inhabit, becomes increasingly untenable. The challenges we face, from climate disruption to social fragmentation to economic inequality, are systemic in nature. They cannot be addressed through isolated interventions but require the coordinated intelligence of networks.
The mycelial sensing of networks is not a technique to be mastered but an orientation to cultivate: an ongoing attentiveness to relationship, to complementarity, to the larger ecology within which we are always already embedded. As we develop this capacity, individually and collectively, we participate in the emergence of organizational forms adequate to the complexity and interconnection of our time.
The network is already here. Our work is to see it, to formalize it, to tend it with the care it requires. In doing so, we may discover that we are not building something new but rather remembering something ancient: the fundamental pattern of life itself, expressed now through conscious human-ecological organization."
(https://omniharmonic.substack.com/p/the-mycelial-sensing-of-networks?)