Do You Have Enough Random Friends?

What makes the best networker?

I was reading today and the following extract resonated strongly, particularly

“We tend to think of someone as being well connected if he or she knows a particular world very well. But …. research shows that the best-connected people are really the ones who have the most diverse group of contacts.”

(A fuller extract is included below)

I think this is increasingly important as in general, post-COVID, we are tending to meet fewer people in person and our online interactions are increasingly created by some kind of matching algorithm using artificial intelligence. This makes it increasingly important to sustain a constructive degree of randomness and serendipity in all we do and who we connect with.

I realised the risk of a diminishing network early in the pandemic and took steps to mitigate matters. While life is easier now I still see the risk of overly structured networks. The steps I take are:-

1. Meeting in person where and when I can

2. Making the most of the times I do travel and not rushing home

3. Being open to left-field invitations/suggestions ie being curious

4. Being open to unexpected connection requests and not rejecting them out of hand

5. Not limiting myself to linear or quick-win transactions/interactions - payback is often not obvious nor necessarily quick.

6. Committing a certain amount of time each week to mechanisms such as Lunchclub.

 I wonder what others do to address this problem?

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 “The Value of Random Friends

Social networks are like lattice graphs because they have order and structure in them. Your collection of friends most likely includes people you grew up with, people you went to school with, colleagues from work, people in your profession, and your current neighbors. This means that, because we tend to draw friends from social pools, your friends have a greater-than-average likelihood of knowing each other. All social networks have very identifiable clusters, or cliques. For example, dentists in St. Louis tend to know each other, as do airplane enthusiasts in Stuttgart. The existence of these clusters shows that the network is not random but has order and structure.

Although our social networks are structured, we also all have a few random friends as well, people who are not in our normal social circle or just outside it, but who we have somehow met and become friendly with. It might be someone you got to know while on vacation, or in the waiting room of a doctor’s office. These people who don’t fit in our normal cluster are bridges out of our social networks and connect us to other social networks. It turns out that if you take a nicely structured lattice graph and then throw in a few random connections scattered around it, you get the best of both worlds. You get identifiable clusters, but with short degrees of separation, for instance, “most of my friends might be dentists in St. Louis, but I know this guy at my gym who used to work in Hollywood …” and pretty soon you are talking to Madonna. Thus, our random friends are like the express flight from Charlotte to San Diego.

Newman and Watts have been able to quantify this effect. Let’s say we have a population of 1,000 people with 10 friends each and no “random” friends. That is, everyone’s friends are drawn only from a strictly defined social circle. Then the average degree of separation is 50; in other words, on average it will take fifty hops to get from one randomly selected person to another. But if we now say that 25 percent of everyone’s friends are random, that is, drawn from outside their normal social circle, then the average degree of separation drops dramatically to 3.6. (For the mathematics behind this calculation, see Newman (1999) pp. 3–4.) Interestingly, the idea of random friends runs somewhat counterintuitive to our idea of what constitutes a good networker. We tend to think of someone as being well connected if he or she knows a particular world very well. But Watts and Newman’s research shows that the best-connected people are really the ones who have the most diverse group of contacts. We all know people who seem to be able to talk to just about anyone and pick up friends from all walks of life and circumstances—these are the people who are truly well connected.

The structure of social networks is not only important for us as individuals, but also makes a big difference in the functioning of large organizations. If an organization keeps people in strict career ladders and has silo-like business units and divisions, then the social network will be overly structured, with insufficient randomness. This, in turn, means long chains of hops for information to be transmitted around, resulting in poor communications and slow decision making. In contrast, some organizations quite deliberately move people across functions and businesses in their careers, thus creating social networks within the company social networks that have a greater diversity of connections. Too much churning of people can turn a social network into a random mush, but a moderate amount can dramatically improve its functioning. General Electric, for example, is famous for moving people across organizational boundaries and for using training programs to give people from different geographies an opportunity to forge lasting social connections.”

— The Origin Of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics by Eric Beinhocker

 NB Economics has never really resonated with me, but this book was itself suggested to me by a Lunchclub connection proved to be very stimulating and makes more sense to me than classical economics.