Dawna Jones has been working in network science for twenty years. She wrote Decision Making for Dummies, spent the mid-2000s inside Hewlett-Packard’s original social network mapping research, and has interviewed and been interviewed more times than either of us could count. In this episode, she joins me to talk about Vital Cartography, her new project, and why the same principles that make a network resilient also make a body, an organisation, and a planet resilient.
We started with why she joined the Network First Manifesto in the first place. Her answer went back to her years as a facilitator working across sectors, watching the same pattern repeat: good intentions moving forward in the room, and an undertow working against them underneath. Networks were always the thing quietly running the show, whether anyone named them or not.
From there we got into something I think is genuinely underappreciated: the difference between hierarchy as it exists in nature, and hierarchy as most organisations actually use it. Hierarchies are real, Dawna argues, and demonising them has been convenient rather than accurate. What matters is whether you are running a centralised, autocratic version of hierarchy, or a dynamic, trust-based network where the real question is simply who you go to for what.
Vital Cartography is where the conversation opened up the most. Dawna built it on the recognition that the body’s eleven systems — endocrine, digestive, lymphatic, circulatory, and the rest — are treated by healthcare as separate, when in reality they are constantly talking to one another, shaped by context, emotion, and thought as much as by biology. The project scales that idea from the personal to the organisational — an organisation has something like a respiratory system, something like a cardiovascular system — and all the way up to the planetary, where the Amazon rainforest plays the role of lungs. It is now taking physical shape as an immersive installation: sound, colour, and interactive elements, built around five of the eleven systems most affected by stress.
Underneath the science sits something more personal. Dawna spoke about staying well as a non-negotiable when you are a single parent running your own business — nobody is going to pay you to be sick — and that is what pulled her into studying the actual mechanics of burnout. We also talked, briefly, about Steve Jobs, and the uncomfortable fact that even extraordinary success does not exempt you from the basic truth that health is the precondition for everything else you are trying to build.
That led naturally into decision making, which is where Dawna’s earlier work and this new project meet. She traced it back to a moment writing Decision Making for Dummies, being asked casually by strangers what the most important part of decision making actually is, and landing on one word: awareness. Self-awareness, and contextual awareness. As long as you are on autopilot, she argues, you are making decisions off assumptions that are usually not true.
We closed on the word that kept surfacing through the whole conversation: responsibility. Once you accept responsibility for the direction you are heading and the circumstances you are actually in, you can move forward. Dawna sees real potential for this to become its own layer within the Network First Manifesto framework — the human, embodied piece underneath the network science.
CHAPTERS 0:00 Welcome — what is making Dawna happy right now 1:46 Why she joined the Network First Manifesto 4:10 Hierarchy versus networks — why NFM has none 6:23 Vital Cartography — mapping health, complexity, and the planet 12:18 What Steve Jobs got right about health 14:34 Decision making, awareness, and getting off autopilot 17:57 Responsibility as the ultimate form of agency
One line to sit with: we become the shape of who we are with.
Nat
Network First Podcast is part of the Network First Manifesto. If this conversation was useful, send it to one person who needs to hear it.
