The Social Organization

You Are Not All That & Why You Shouldn't Ever Believe It

I grew up in a unique position. My father was powerful - at least within our family's community - he was the minister of a 350-year-old church in Cambridge, MA. I sat at the "right arm of power" in that little realm. People liked me. I never trusted it because I knew it was due in part to where I sat in the community in relation to my father. To be fair, people were (for the most part) not explicit about this connection and didn't try to use it in a manipulative way but my position put me front and center.

I learned a few things from this:

• A person's position in a system is often more important than their own personality/skills/value in determining the amount of attention, influence, and popularity they get.
• Attention feeds on itself.
• People who get a lot of attention shouldn't take themselves too seriously - if you believe that you deserve the attention because of something you did yourself, you are often deceiving yourself.
• I really dislike obsequiousness - I'm not looking to form a posse - because it doesn't typically add any real value. It tends to be hollow because people are drafting on the attention you are getting.

The downside of this lesson is that I often discount people that genuinely want to connect with me but I think that is a fair trade for maintaining a realistic sense my own value. I've realized over the years that other people never learned this lesson and they feed off of the attention they garner because of their position vs. their value - essentially looking in a fun house mirror and believing that what they see is real. That reflection, of course, does contain elements of reality but it is deceptive.

Now that online social networks have enabled people to collect friends and followers far beyond what they would be able to do in the real world, it seems difficult for people to separate out the fun house mirror from the real mirror. For me, the real mirror is found in the in-person (i.e. offline) connections I make and the value I produce for which others are willing to pay or exchange for other value. It is perhaps why I distrust Facebook 'likes' and many freemium models - in those environments it is very hard to understand who really cares about what you are doing and people who are tailgating.

If you work in this space, it is worth evaluating both for yourself and for the organizations with whom you work how you determine what is real and what is drafting.

Picture by Susan NYC

The Value of Latent Ties & Communities

Weak ties are valuable to have - they will share information with us that we may not have otherwise discovered, answer simple questions, and expose us to new things that we never knew existed - but it is still pretty random, especially as we collect thousands of 'friends' online.

We cannot live without strong ties - it is how we create and transfer value.

However, I am intrigued by connections somewhere in the middle - the latent strong ties, the strong ties of those with whom we have strong ties, &  the connections that would be much closer if circumstances were different.

In Connected, Nicholas Christakis & James Fowler explain the surprising power of friends-of-friends to influence complex behaviors like obesity and smoking. Personally, I have been blown away by the value I've realized through latent strong ties - people that I once worked with, friends I used to live close to, family friends who I don't see as much as I once did.... people for whom our relationship has gone into hibernation mode.  When circumstances do bring us back together and provide a reason for us to re-engage, the relationship is as good as it ever was or better.

I believe in the concept behind Dunbar's number. I can't really keep track of more than ~150 people in any amount of detail. But what's interesting to me is that it is 150 people at any one time. Because I've held a variety of jobs in different markets and I've lived in many different places, I have a large number of latent strong relationships. What I've found surprising is that with those relationships I've left well, I've also left goodwill. When circumstances and context brings us together again, the relationship springs to life and is productive very quickly.

On an individual level, this is quite interesting but I also believe that this is why communities are so powerful for organizations. Communities sit at the sweet spot between strong & weak ties - big enough to allow for growth and innovation but not so big that people are lost and unsure of the social/political dynamic which can inhibit deep participation. Communities maintain relationships between the episodes of rich collaboration and latency and accelerate the ability to execute when new issues and opportunities arise. We often don't value the middle path because we see it as a partial solution and not necessarily as exciting or interesting as the extremes, but it is where long term sustainable value lies.

The questions I have are this: How many latent relationships can a person have and how could we better understand the 'Dunbar's number' of an organization?

Picture by Slawek Puklo