Ecosystem Optimisation That Works
As an organisation grows, it gets increasingly difficult to manage collaboration at scale, yet it is your company’s strongest asset. In a constantly changing, multi-angled environment, understanding & optimising your people networks is one of the most complex and vital tasks in all of enterprise.
Our people analytics platform helps you to deeply and objectively understand your organisation’s interactions via stats, benchmarks, and an explorable ecosystem map:
We then give you tools to: optimise your people and teams for sustainable performance, adapt to continuous change, and track ecosystem improvements over time.
Fast Set-Up & Easy To Use
Active and Auto Data Gathering Options
Quick ‘Real-Time’ Results
Maintain Peak
Performance
Unlocking Potential helps you optimise & sculpt your organisational culture & ecosystem so the parts click together, creating a system of continuous improvement.
Discover & Track Your Performance Metrics
Unlocking Potential’s benchmarking tool allows you to measure the six network performance scores, track them through time & compare different projects.
Prove & Scale Your
Business Impact
Are your projects really packing as much punch as you hope they are?
Unlocking Potential helps you measure & prove the impact of your business optimisations* and then scale it beyond expectations.
*Impact proof can easily be turned into a report for executives, investors, or stakeholders with a button press.
Get Instant Insights
With A Single Glance
Your app dashboard neatly presents all the relevant ecosystem data and performance scores allowing you to gain instant insights into your ecosystem’s performance.
“We used the insights gained from using Unlocking Potential in a successful application for a major grant.”
Stephen McCarron, Manager, ACDI
“Unlocking Potential has given us tremendous insight and an excellent measurement of our success.
This gave us the confidence to make the right decisions saving us a lot of time and money.”
Tynah Matembe, Cofounder, MoneyMatix
Unlocking Potential really helped make the case for our partnership approach and his now helping to extend the impact of the programme in other localities”
Kevin McDermott, CLD Team Leader, Aberdeenshire Council
“For the first time we’re able to use an evaluation framework that recognises and measures the things that are important to us.”
Tressa Burke, CEO, Glasgow Disability Alliance
“Unlocking Potential gives us clarity on our key contacts; which stakeholders support us and who are the most and the least engaged.
This helps us manage our resources more efficiently.”
Stuart Dearden, Networking Manager, Royal Bank of Scotland HQ
Frequently Asked Questions
About Unlocking Potential
What is Social Network Analysis? Why do I need it?
Social Network Analysis (SNA) is not an analysis of your social media accounts. In reality, Social Network Analysis is the analysis of the relationships between people in a given network – usually the network of a company and other relevant people (investors, mentors, etc…).
All social networks have a structure or constellation that is determined by all the different connections between people and what those relationships are like. The structure of the network is constantly changing and is influenced by many, many factors.
- Someone in the network gaining new connections.
- Two employees developing a stronger working relationship.
- A key player leaving the job.
- etc.
Here’s what’s crucial to understand:
The structure and design of the relationships in any given network has been shown time and time again to accurately determine the efficiency and effectiveness, thus performance, of the company in question [1][2][3][4].
Therefore, analysing your network gives you the opportunity to design and optimise it for high performance towards your company’s particular goals.
In practice this means: Unlocking a superior level of company performance that was previously unattainable.
Some of the things you can expect to unlock through social network analysis and design:
- Avoidance of redundant effort: an optimised network design removes confusion and streamlines communication channels. This reduces the need for interventions to clarify direction.
- Better and faster decision making, even in large companies, leading to delivering results more quickly.
- Efficient and automatic problem solving: leading to a deepened focus on providing your solution to the world and less time wasted on reducing bottlenecks to performance (because there aren’t any), on over-management of your team, and on conflict management.
- A deeper knowledge of your organisation’s ecosystem and where & how you and your people fit into it will lead to many more improvements and optimisations on a level unique to your company that depend on your unique situation.
- Respond to complex performance barriers before they happen (e.g. issues with mergers & acquisitions, or lack of inclusion or diversity): using our predictive simulations allows you to see how your network will develop over time without intervention, which gives you an unprecedented competitive advantage to anticipate complex issues while vastly improving employee performance, productivity and wellbeing, and simultaneously significantly increasing ROI for your stakeholders and investors.
Why use Unlocking Potential vs other SNA services?
Most SNA softwares will do some basic visualisation of your network for you. However, Unlocking Potential’s secret to success is in our unique analysis of the network which allows us to do:
- Clear and organised statistics and metrics about your network
- Allow you to optimise your performance metrics
- Instantly give you insights into your network
- Predictive future simulations – The ability to design the company network combined with our predictive future simulations is an incredibly powerful combination as it means companies can identify and respond to complex and difficult problems before they even happen (e.g. issues with mergers & acquisitions, or lack of inclusion or diversity)
- Standardised results to be able to compare between projects and over time and do impact analysis – social capital indicators
- Prove and scale business impact (Impact evaluation)
Other than our powerful proprietary analysis, Unlocking Potential also goes above and beyond other SNA products by giving you:
- Automatically generated reports to prove high impact to executives, stakeholders, investors and other critical parties.
- Tools to custom design your own network configuration to your own goals not just follow the standard set of rules – your company is unique and you need a unique solution that will take your values into consideration and not try to put you in the same box as everyone else.
Roadmap to future success / That being said – we won’t leave you in the dark. You don’t need to be an expert in social capital and social network design – we’ll help you design your optimised network step-by-step so that you can be confident that the network you are designing is going to provide the results that you need.
How does Unlocking Potential help me optimise my business?
To put it as clearly as possible, Unlocking Potential collects data about the people in your company or project and then it creates a picture of your network so that you can literally see the shape of your network.
From there: Unlocking Potential analyses the network (its shape, the number and quality of the connections in it, etc.) and condenses all the valuable and relevant data, which is then neatly presented on a dashboard for you to see and explore.
With a complete picture of your network and its structure, glaring problems that need quick attention (like isolated individuals or a lack of communication) are immediately obvious, especially if you are well acquainted with the people in your network.
However, U>P goes above and beyond just showing you the network and the immediately obvious issues by helping you custom optimise your network to your specific goals.
Not another survey... I don't like doing surveys!
We agree, surveys are a pain, however Unlocking Potential is not a survey, it is a network analysis and evaluation. It requires a certain amount of data about relationships in the network.
We’ve done our best to make the data collection a breeze by developing integrations with common business communication platforms (like slack and outlook) so most of our data can be collected automatically.
However, we do need to actively collect some qualitative data that only individuals can provide. We’ve optimised our questions so that they are very simple to understand and easily completed.
The whole data collection system has been designed to require minimal effort from you while still providing the best results so you can get in & out and on with your day.
The immediate performance benefits and long-term results your company gains as a whole from using Unlocking Potential completely justifies the short time it takes to see impactful results (about a morning for network managers and about 30 mins for everyone else).
I already have a CRM, why would I use Unlocking Potential?
The short answer is: Unlocking Potential is not a CRM.
The long answer: CRM’s are great for organising your contacts, clients and sales pipeline however. Unlocking Potential does not replace a CRM, rather it supplements it.
Please refer to the answers above about Social Network Analysis and how U>P differs from competitors to understand what we do.
U>P does the following (whereas a CRM doesn’t):
- Social network analysis
- Predictive future simulations
- Helping you custom design your company culture for high performance
- Unlock your potential
This sounds pretty complicated, I’m not sure I’ll know how to use it!
It doesn’t take long to learn how to use the Unlocking Potential platform, for most employees it will be intuitive enough to pick up while using it.
For network managers, to gain a deeper understanding of your network, it may take slightly longer:
Learning the theory behind high-performance network design is something that usually requires at least a Masters degree. However, we’ve worked hard to design our platform to give you the practical parts of high-performance network design in an intuitive and digestible way that could take a single morning to learn (though you can learn at your own pace with the prompts and reminders the platform gives you).
The third thing we have kept in mind with regards to intuitiveness is the generation of reports for executives, stakeholders, investors and other interested parties.
Reports generated using Unlocking Potential are designed so that anyone reading them will intuitively grasp the value of social network analysis and immediately see the impact that custom network design could have (or the impact it already has had if it’s an impact evaluation report).
How long will it take to see results?
Results update in real time so they are immediate. You can build a tangible and explorable network model in as little as an hour depending on the size of your company.
To get results that map out a large company’s network accurately, you’ll need about 20-25% of your people to fill out the survey.
Results that measure impact require time to have passed (since impact is measured over time), this will depend on whatever time period you want to measure impact over – 6 months, a year, or a week – it’s up to you.
Do you ensure my business’s data is kept private?
We take privacy very seriously and our data is all encrypted and anonymous, so you can be confident nobody is going to be snooping.
Please refer to our GDPR compliant privacy policy.
Finally unlock the true potential of the network you’ve worked so hard to cultivate