PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to review a systemic organizational change initiative for improving collaboration, innovation and value creation at a global telecom.Design/methodology/approachBased on a comprehensive internal assessment Telenor identified core issues and challenges in supporting collaboration after several years of dramatic global expansion. From the assessment the change leaders built a business case for launching a systemic change initiative. They chose a collaboration and partnering approach with multiple management groups, with an emphasis on networks and innovation. A two‐year roadmap was developed to build three meta capabilities in collaborative technologies, social innovation and network behaviors and new business thinking.FindingsThe case study is a mid‐point assessment of how the implementation is working. A small and smart approach for introducing new ideas and learning innovations into receptive and influential groups within Telenor, new ways of working are taking hold quickly. The equal emphasis on bringing in social innovation such as communities of practice and introducing a next generation of management tools is effectively changing behaviors that are supported by new collaborative technologies.Originality/valueCollaboration and knowledge sharing at Telenor is seen equally as a technology issue, a social innovation and behavior issue and a business issue. Many change efforts around knowledge sharing and collaboration emphasize technology or behaviors, but rarely address both effectively. This approach is more systemic than most because it not only addresses these two arenas, but also puts an unusually high emphasis on educating people into new business fundamentals such as the importance of intangible value and the power of networks.

Over the last 40 years, organizational scholars have repeatedly called for more research to reconcile formalist and social network approaches to the intraorganizational structure. The former has primarily been concerned with the reporting relationship which manifests as the chain of command while research on the informal social structure relegates the reporting relationship to a wide and varied range of instrumental and affective relationships such as advice-seeking, knowledgesharing, trust, and friendship which span the boundaries that the chain of command defines. In this study, we employ the chain of command distance-the length along the chain of command of a path connecting a pair of organizational actors-as the basis for formulating and testing hypotheses about how the formal organization and the informal social structure influence one another. First, we argue that whereas the formal structure affords only one, often very lengthy, path between any pair of actors, the combination of formal and informal structures results in a greater number of significantly shorter paths between actors. Next, we consider one effect of the formal organization on the informal social structure. In particular, we argue that there is an inverse relationship between the chain of command distance and the likelihood of a social or informal connection forming between a pair of actors. We test our hypotheses with demographic data collected from a public sector provider of health, education, and welfare services in rural Norway.