Many thanks to David Pescovitz of Boing Boing for spotting this, originally published in New Scientist – “Email patterns can predict impending doom“

The Boing-Boing post, Mining email traffic for bad omens, in its entirety:

Researchers examined Enron email logs during the 18 months before the shit really hit the fan. Amazingly, just analyzing the number of emails and their paths, without peeking at the content, hinted at the crisis to come. Of course, hindsight is everything. Still, the stiudy, by computer scientists at the Florida Institute of Technology, is provocative. From New Scientist:

After US energy giant Enron collapsed in December 2001, federal investigators obtained records of emails sent by around 150 senior staff during the company’s final 18 months. The logs, which record 517,000 emails sent to around 15,000 employees, provide a rare insight into how communication within an organisation changes during stressful times…

(Rolando) Menezes says he expected communication networks to change during

Hub and spoke; spokes have no direct connection with eachother. Courtesy of NetworkWeaving.com

moments of crisis. Yet the researchers found that the biggest changes actually happened around a month before. For example, the number of active email cliques, defined as groups in which every member has had direct email contact with every other member, jumped from 100 to almost 800 around a month before the December 2001 collapse. Messages were also increasingly exchanged within these groups and not shared with other employees.

Menezes thinks he and (Ben) Collingsworth may have identified a characteristic change that occurs as stress builds within a company: employees start talking directly to people they feel comfortable with, and stop sharing information more widely.

Of course – as a large organization breaks into smaller networks which don’t communicate with each other, it loses the robustness associated with redundantly connected social systems.

See, e.g.,

Project 3-2: Robust Wireless Communications in Complex Environments,Principal Investigators Arogyaswami Paulraj and George Papanicolaou,

Effective military wireless communications require robust networks that can operate in complex environments. Links must be reliable, rapid, and multimedia-capable, connecting large, dynamic, mobile networks of users. Such networks must resist hostile jamming and signal “spoofing” while minimizing consumption of electrical power. Designing such communications systems requires the rapid, high-throughput resources provided by high performance computing.

However, enemy action is not required in cases like Enron, where the leadership itself has pointed the ship directly at the iceberg.