The Inimitable Tiff

Menezes thinks he and 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. They presented their findings at the International Workshop on Complex Networks, held last month in Catania, Italy.

Gilbert Peterson at the Air Force Institute of Technology in Dayton, Ohio, has also worked with the Enron emails. He says that if further research backs up Menezes’s idea, this shift in communication patterns could be used as an early warning sign of growing discontent within an organisation. “Human resources folk would probably find this extremely useful,” he says.