Glory be to the Christmas card

In recent years the number of Christmas cards on my mantelpiece has noticeably declined. Maybe I did lose contact with a few people, but I think that technology is the main reason. In my inbox and Facebook feed there are ever larger numbers of seasons greetings bouncing around.

I’m not sure whether to feel nostalgic about the demise of the Christmas card. I fondly remember a childhood ritual of opening cards together, cringing at self-congratulatory round robin letters and mocking the insipid religious scenes. Christmas cards have an old-world feel now. They cause trees to be cut down, delivery vans to pollute the air and they burden the postal services. Yes they create jobs, but seasonal, antisocial jobs that fill a cash hole for December and leave it hungry in the new year. 30% of purchases make a contribution to good causes, but a more meaningful impact would be made by giving away the whole amount spent on cards. All in all, Christmas cards seem a fairly frivolous use of the world’s resources.

Frivolous they may be, but there is still a reason to send them. A study of Christmas card lists by Russell Hill and Robin Dunbar found that people send an average of 68 cards, to households comprising 150 members. A crowd of 150 is said to be the maximum number of meaningful relationships we can maintain (see Who's in your camp?). Beyond 150 things start to become impersonal; our so-called friends are more like semi-strangers because our brains simply can’t process that much social information. 

This research highlights the reason for Christmas cards. Unlike an email or text, a Christmas card remains visible for the whole festive season. A card is like a placeholder – a statement by others who are letting me know that I am still part of their crowd. Do virtual Christmas greetings do the same job? I think not, for the simple reason that the marginal effort required to send a message to 300 or even 3,000 people is minimal. A card has to be bought, written, sealed and sent. For that reason, I will treasure the cards I receive as an affirmation of my importance to the people who sent them. I hope those of you in my crowd will do the same for mine, which is shown here:

Who is in your camp?

Last week I gave a TEDx talk to 450 teenagers, on the science of social networks. In my talk, I proposed that we should think about our social networks in terms of a core, clique, camp and crowd. The camp, in my view, is critical for creativity, for reasons I will explain here.

The key point of departure for the talk was Robin Dunbar's number: 150. Dunbar argues that our brains have evolved to deal with a maximum of 150 individuals that we can really know as people. Increase your social circle beyond 150, and people start to become semi-strangers. For one thing you can't spend enough time know about them and what makes them tick. Also, each time a new person joins our group, we are programmed - Dunbar says - to monitor the relationship that person has with others in our group. As our social groups become bigger the number of potential relationships in the network increases exponentially. There is an impressive breadth of research evidence showing that 150 is natural organising unit for human groups.

Even within a group of 150, of course, we don't lavish the same amount of emotional investment on everyone. Dunbar suggests that our social groups of 150 - or what I call a crowd - is organised into layers or circles, which each layer being approximately three times larger than the previous one. We typically have 3-5 people closest to us with whom we invest a great deal of emotional energy. I call this group the 'core'. Add another 10 or so to the core and you have a 'clique' or posse - likely to include the people you are known to hang around with and those whose loss or death would be truly devastating for you. 

The next group, around 50, I refer to as a camp. I suggest this is the most important group for creative thinking, because it is the maximum number of people whose conversations, activities, online content, and offline goings-on we can pay attention to. By the same token, unless we are rich, famous or influential in the digital world, there are probably only about 50 people in our worlds who we spend enough time with that they keep abreast of what we are up to. 

Your camp is the people who will listen to what your have to say, talk to your about your ideas and challenge your thinking. Your camp may be much smaller than 50. If so, and especially if it is barely larger than your clique, you may not have much influence outside that close-knit group of friends and family, and your thinking may converge. Structure matters too. You need some members of your camp to act as weak ties to other groups if you are to be able to spread ideas and to put them into action. 

Think about the people you've been in contact with in the last month. Are they all in your neighbourhood (local to your home, all working in the same office)? Are they all part of the same personal community?  Be willing to seek new members for your camp from time to time, paying more attention to people you have not listened to for a while, and engaging them in conversation. It takes effort, but it may bring new creative insights. 

Do your weak ties boost your creativity?

It used to be the case that social network analysis was an arcane and esoteric field of science pursued by mathematicians, sociologists and business researchers. Collecting the necessary data was often onerous, and analysing it typically required programming skills. The results of these studies were published in relatively inaccessible books and journals, for an elite readership.

Now, with tools like Facebook and LinkedIn, social networks are rendered visible and relevant. We now make conscious choices about who to connect with on LinkedIn and whether to follow someone on Google+. We are increasingly aware of whether the people we know are also connected each other. A variety of tools make is possible to visualise our social neighbourhood. In effect, we can all now be social network practitioners.

But what do we do with this new window into our social world once we have it? There are some easy knee-jerk reactions. When I first looked at my professional network on LinkedIn, I immediately concluded that it did not reflect either the size or the diversity my 'real life' network and quickly issued a batch of new invitations to connect.

What rules or principles might we apply - as social network practitioners - to manage our social neighbourhoods?

This week I had the honour of listening to a conversation between two esteemed scholars of social networks: Martin Kilduff and Rob Cross. We started the conversation by asking what managers could usefully know from the academic literature on social networks. Martin highlighted four themes that have aroused much discussion and debate: weak ties, structural holes, cognition and personality. In this and subsequent posts, I intend to examine each in turn and their importance for creativity. Here I start with weak ties.

Weak ties are useful for finding jobs. That was the important insight from Granovetter's 1973 article, and subsequent book. Granovetter argued that people you see infrequently are more fruitful sources of fresh news about job opportunities. He called these weak ties. On the other hand, so-called strong ties, people you spent time with, and to whom you feel close, are more likely to have the same friends as you do. For that reason, any news these close friends could bring you about job opportunities is likely to be information that has already been shared within your social circle.

The crux of this argument hangs on the idea that if you invest time and energy in a relationship with someone, it's likely that their friends become friends of yours too. Strong ties tend to form themselves into clumps of people who all know each other. The stronger the tie between two people, the more their social neighbourhoods overlap.

This tendency to make friends with your friends' friends does not apply to weak ties. As less social energy is invested in people we only know casually, our friendship groups don't clump together. Weak ties therefore act as bridges between clumps of closely connected people allowing news, gossip and referrals to flow between groups. A social graph like the one shown here (created using TouchGraph) can help to start thinking about where such strong-tie clumps might exist in my network.

What does this mean for creativity? There is plenty of evidence to suggest that weak ties are important for creativity. (See my last post on the Goldilocks network.) Weak ties are more likely to bring novel ideas and perspectives that can be usefully combined with what we already know to generate creative insights.

Here are two thoughts about what this means for our networks.

First, the potential access we have to our weak ties is growing. Feeds from Facebook enable us to keep up with the lives of casual acquaintances from a peripheral perspective. It is ever easier to keep track of the likes and dislikes of our more distant connections and possibly to be influenced or inspired by what they do or say. Feeds from strangers on Twitter or Google+ function as surrogate weak ties - providing snippets that lead us to discover new stuff or catch up with trending stories. In all, it's likely that we have more weak ties, and more insight in what they are up to, than people did in Granovetter's day.

That presents a challenge. Attention is increasingly a precious commodity - perhaps the most precious - in an information-loaded world. There are only so many conversations, news feeds, articles or videos we can concentrate on in one day, even with multi-tasking. How do we choose who to pay attention to? Keeping up with strong ties will happen naturally because we see them often. Which weak ties are worth paying attention to, and how often? It is too easy to become cognitively overloaded by too many relationships to attend to, with a likely detriment on our ability to appreciate the significance of new ideas when they come our way.

Second, the important thing about weak ties is that some of them have a vital role to play in connecting communities together. Weak ties that act as bridges between strongly tied groups provide a channel for flows of innovation and ideas that - by propagating through social neighbourhoods in a relatively efficient way - create social cohesion. Granovetter said that the more bridges exist in a community, the more capable that community is of acting in concert.

This is vital for putting creative ideas into action. Transferring ideas from one social neighbourhood to another is not easy to do, especially when those ideas are complex or where they challenge the prevailing values or mindset of a strong-tie clump. (See Morten Hansen's work, for example, on transferring ideas between R&D teams.)  For this reason, it's important to be aware of who - in the various social neighbourhoods you operate in - plays a role validating your ideas as well as who is useful for sourcing them.

So do your weak ties boost your creativity? Here are some questions to help answer that question:

1. Try playing with a tool to visualise your Facebook or LinkedIn network. On your social graph, which clumps are energised by strong ties, with people investing time together, and which are weak groups? How many strong clumps are you part of?

2. Are you a local bridge between any clumps? Do you have casual acquaintances or distant friends who are immersed in strong clumps?  Do you have the potential to act as a bridge between their social neighbourhood and yours? Could there be some value in doing so?

3. Make a list of 10 people you know or know of (face-to-face or online) whose comments, posts or talk you pay attention to. How many of these people know each other? How frequently do you interact? How distinctive is what they have to say?

4. Think about people you don't see often or who mainly participate in different social worlds to your own? Among these, who might be a useful source of novel ideas?

The Goldilocks Network - being prepared for serendipity

Is your personal network optimised for creativity? Do your social worlds - both on and offline - serve up fresh droplets of insight and sparks of illumination?  Do you know people who bring you unexpected nuggets - pieces of a bigger picture that you would never have thought to go looking for? Have you ever thought about who is in your inspiration network and whether that network is working for you?

Surely, I hear you say, these things happen through serendipity and chance encounters - by inadvertently stumbling on interesting tidbits or by allowing a conversation to take a free course? Surely we can't plan or manage our networks to make us more creative? Anyway, who wants to be the kind of instrumental networker who schmoozes some people and ditches others, just to be more creative?

Well, I take your point, but it may be that your inspiration network is suffering from a Goldilocks problem - it might be too big or too small; too diverse or not diverse enough; too strong or too weak. To figure out whether that is the case, it is helpful to know something about network terminology.

• Size refers to the number of people in your inspiration network; it's all the people you get ideas and insights from - whether intended or unintended. In Goldilocks' terms, it's the size of the chair you sit in for ideas. 
• Strength refers to the closeness, frequency and length of time you have known each of these people. It's the extent of warmth and familiarity in the relationships that serve you (a porridge of) ideas 
• Diversity refers to extent of heterogeneity in your inspiration network - the extent of overlap in the social and intellectual worlds of those who inspire you over. Think of this as the texture of the bed you lie in - it could be uniformly ironed and smooth, or wrinkled and lumpy. A bed with lumps is less comfortable to sleep in, and similarly being exposed to a heterogeneity of ideas can be conflicting and difficult to reconcile 

A study looking at the relationship between idea networks and creativity showed that the size, strength and diversity of employees' idea networks was related to their creativity (as rated by their supervisors).  Markus Baer studied the idea networks of employees in a global agricultural firm. Creativity was greater for employees with low network strength and high diversity, consistent with Granovetter's arguments about the value of weak (low strength) ties for access to novel information. Baer also showed that the employees with the largest and smallest networks tended to be less creative than those with moderately sized networks - the Goldilocks effect.

There is evidence, from this and other studies, that creativity can be enhanced by seeking inspiration from people you don't know too well, and by making sure that these people intersect a range of social and intellectual worlds. Throw too many people into this mix, however, and you may have such a cacophony of competing perspectives to attend to that it may become costly or time-consuming to make serendipitous connections between them.

Because, after all, the assumption underlying Baer's work is that low-strength, high-diversity networks maximise the likelihood of being able to make hitherto unforeseen connections and combinations of ideas. Such networks make serendipitous discoveries more likely.

In a neat echo of the Goldilocks story, Baer has one other important finding. Was it serendipitous that Goldilocks stumbled on the three bears' house when she was hungry and tired? Or did her hunger and tiredness make her more inclined to experiment with the porridge, the chairs and the beds once she got there? Baer found that, not only did the size, diversity and strength of a network matter for employees' creativity, but so did the extent to which the employees were open to experience. This is a way of thinking that is open to integration and combination of new information.

If we are alert to the potential for creativity in our networks, we are more likely to notice and to make use of opportunities for combining novel ideas together to make unanticipated discoveries. Optimising your network for creativity is not a case of schmoozing with some people and ditching others, though it may be valuable to think about whether your inspiration sources are diverse enough and whether you are attentive to too few or too many. It is also about being ready to notice coincidences and alignments as they occur, making associations and, in effect, being prepared for serendipity.

Optimising your social network - a glossary

Here is a list of the terms I use when writing about social networks:


Social network - the humanity around me - both online and offline. I like to think of my social network as comprising three different kinds of social group:

• Social convoy - the people I go through life with. People who are important to me, and for whom I am important, even if I don't see them often 
• Personal community - people I interact with in the course of my daily life, be that at work, school, college, in my neighbourhood or as a result of other stuff I do
• Inspiration network - people who give me stimulus and ideas

Activities that add contacts to our network

• Scanning - looking out for people who it might be useful to be connected to 
• Collecting - adding people to my network as a result of making preliminary contact either virtually or face-to-face 
• Reacting -  responding to collecting or connecting approaches - deciding how to respond to the requests or suggestion from someone else
• Reaching - asking people I know to connect me to others

Activities that change the connections between people in our network

• Connecting - introducing two people in my network who don’t know each other (maybe in response to reaching by someone else, or as a result of mapping)
• Catalysing - bringing about a change in the relationship between other people in my network (for example by encouraging them to start a conversation with each other)
• Mapping - studying the structure or shape of our network to decide where and how new connections could be made or new conversations started

Activities that contribute to the thinking of people in our network

• Firing - starting a private conversation to get people sharing ideas
• Fusing - adding people to a conversation 
• Broadcasting - inviting people in a network to contribute ideas on something
• Tuning - attending to the conversations that people in the network are broadcasting
• Digging - passing on ideas from one connection to another
• Moulding - refining, reframing or interpreting an idea for someone else
• Burying - closing down or choosing not to pass on ideas from one connection to another
• Resourcing - giving time to someone to help them develop ideas
• Recruiting - asking people to give time to help with the development of ideas 

Circles: A way to think about your social network

What does the term 'social network' make you think of? Increasingly, people use the term to refer to online social networking sites, like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. It is as if a social network, in their minds, is something people interact with online.

In my mind, a social network is the humanity around me - both online and offline. I like to think of my social network as comprising three different kinds of social group. I depict these groups as circles, inspired by Google+ - a tool which makes it possible to assign contacts and friends to self-defined circles and have Facebook-like interactions with them.

Your social convoy is the people you go through life with. People who are there for you or with you. People who are important to you, and for whom you are important, even if you don't see them often. These are close and reciprocated ties to people you know alot about, like family, friends and relatives, former friends from education or work.

Your personal community comprises people you interact with in the course of your daily life, be that at work, school, college, in your neighbourhood or as a result of other stuff you do. We typically co-exist in many different personal communities, some of which overlap. Relationships in a personal community are more short-lived than in a social convoy - people you know and interact while you have something in common. You may see them frequently but not know them very well. Over time, some may become a part of your social convoy but many pass on as your lives diverge.

Your inspiration network is the set of people who give you stimulus and ideas. They may be authors, bloggers, artists, journalists, commentators or creators of one sort or another. You may not know them at all. They may never have heard of you. An inspiration network may consist of very ephemeral relationships with a short half-life; people you find inspiring for a short time only. Or it may include a following of people you don't know but who tune in and respond to your tweets or posts. Over time, some members of your inspiration network may become part of a personal community, while you lose interest in others as the novelty of their ideas declines.

Of course, there are overlaps between these circles. But it's useful to think about how ideas move from one circle to the next. To make use of ideas that originate in the inspiration network, we need to migrate those ideas into a relevant personal community and get them accepted there. For example, I've been inspired by Mike Wesch's ideas on using digital media in education, but his ideas will only change how I teach if I can persuade my students and my colleagues to accept and embrace a very different way of teaching and learning.

Ideas from the inspiration network are developed, implemented and put into action in a personal community of some kind - a work-based community or group of friends whose opinions shape what we can do. Smart networking involves knowing who in a personal community is important for validating a new idea and influencing other people to embrace it. Also clever is the ability to spot who is in reach within your inspiration network and to develop techniques for drawing them into a personal community - by following them, digging them, commenting on their feeds or finding a way to meet them face-to-face.

Where does online social networking fit in to my concept of a social network?  For me, utilities like Facebook and LinkedIn are ways to connect with people in various of my personal communities - college friends, former colleagues or friends from some time ago. I am also connected on Facebook and LinkedIn to people in my social convoy too but that is not the main way I interact with them. Twitter and the blogosphere are how I maintain and refresh my inspiration network, as they give me a great way to tune into the ideas of people I don't know. Often it's through the suggestions of people in the other social circles that I find new people to add to my inspiration network. In effect, our personal communities and our social convoy shapes the ideas that we tune into.

The terms social convoy and personal community are inspired by Rah Pahl's book 'On Friendship'. The term inspiration network is my own.

An exercise in collaborative creativity

Liza Donnelly inspired me to invite suggestions for a caption for one of my cartoons. So here it is (a cartoon that is inspired by Liza's book When Do They Serve the Wine). Please tweet to @zellak with suggested captions.

The value of a validation network

Shortly after the Haiti earthquake in 2010, I created a charitable venture called Business Heroes with my friend Simon. Our plan was to get university students to use their business skills to raise money to support Save the Children's disaster relief work in Haiti. We would create a charity-related business game that would inspire massive interest and exposure on social networking sites, capturing the attention of the digital generation Save the Children were so keen to reach. We invested a huge amount of personal time, and money, in getting the idea off the ground with corporate sponsorship in a very short period of time.

The net result: £5,000 invested, plus corporate sponsorship, to raise only around £1,000 for Save the Children.

Looking back, the biggest reason that Business Heroes failed was because we did not involve other people in validating it. We were wowed by our idea and believed others would be too. We were successful in recruiting people in our personal networks to help develop and deliver the solution. But at no time during that process did we ask people to question the idea, to challenge us on how it would work or to argue with us about whether it would capture the attention of the very students it was supposed to inspire.

This experience has shaped my thinking about creative networks. Our networks - both online and offline - are great resource for creativity, making it possible to combine our own knowledge with the ideas, insights and inspiration of others in pursuit of novelty and innovation. But we tend to think more about the ideation role of our networks than we do about their role in validating and testing ideas. We need what Randall Collins refers to as an argumentative community in which we create opportunities for rivalrous ideas to compete. By pitching our own ideas in opposition to others, we can see their strengths and weaknesses. Academic communities are naturally organised to do this. Some businesses are better at it than others.

There is another role of networks that is also overlooked. Although we are not always aware of it, when we talk about ideas the people around us reframe what we are talking about by reinforcing and developing some aspects of the idea and downplaying others. The more the people around us are part of a cohesive group who all know each other, the more likely it is that they will reframe the idea in similar and consistent ways. The more different they are in terms of cognitive structure and context, the more likely it is that they will reframe the idea in different ways. Thus, conversations with diverse, unconnected others are more likely to generate competing solutions and rivalrous ideas. That can be good for ideation and clarification. But for development and implementation, better to talk to people who know and understand the context in which are the ideas are to be implemented.

What can we take from this for everyday life? That different parts of our network are important for the various stages of the creative process. A bit like parts of the brain being activated for different activities.

The ideation parts of your network might involve all sorts of creative inputs, including the blogs, social networking sites, books, videos etc. that you tune into, as well as people you know who pass on ideas to you and people who are good to generate ideas with.

Here are some ways to think about the validation areas of your creative network.

Think about your argumentative connections - people who present opposing solutions or conflicting ideas

1. Who in your network do you go to test ideas, to put the opposite point of view to your own, to argue about your solution? Do you have people in your network who do this for you? 
2. Next time you have a solution or idea that you believe in, explain it to someone and ask them for three challenging questions about it. 
3. Who might you ask to act as an argumentative connection? The answer to that question depend on the nature of ideas you currently working with. Useful argumentative connections might be experts in the particular field, or people who could bring a naive perspective to the problem. 
4. Ask an argumentative connection for one alternative solution. Look for insights in their answers that could strengthen your solution. 
5. A high turnover and variety of argumentative connections should be a natural part of your network. They may be relatively unaware of the work setting or community in which you operate, or the expectations of your stakeholders.

Think about your reframing connections - people who help interpret your solution and apply it in a particular context 

1. Who are the people you commonly refer to for implementing ideas or for developing solutions? How knowledgeable are they about the setting you operate in? 
2. Next time you put an idea to them, think about how they reframe it. What aspects do they reinforce, and what do they downplay? Does their reframing reflect an understanding of the context that is important to you, and the setting in which you need to implement your idea?
3. Do your reframing connections impose too much of their own context, and not enough of yours? Could someone else reframe it differently? 
4. A high turnover and variety of reframing connections might in some cases be appropriate, but it is often the case that to be effective in implementing our ideas, we need a stable group - including our boss, our peers, relevant clients or suppliers etc - who understand our setting. 
5. However, when applying a solution into a context we are unfamiliar with, it may be necessary to find new connections - immersed in that context - to help with reframing. 

If we had applied these principles to our Business Heroes idea, would the outcome have been different? We spent plenty of time talking to corporate stakeholders about our idea, and to Save the Children, but not much time talking to students, despite the fact that Simon and I both knew students we could easily have asked. By asking them to contest and challenge the idea in an argumentative way, we would have learned why it was not likely to have a widespread appeal. If we had asked them to reframe the idea, and listened to the aspects they liked, and reinforced, we might have been able to develop a different proposition that delivered more effectively on Save the Children's desire to engage student fundraisers.  

(For the record, although the initial Business Heroes initiative was not successful, after a good deal of follow-up and validation, Save the Children took forward the idea; see Business Heroes)

Networks v. networking. What's the difference?

When I started writing this post, my intention was to call it ‘Why I hate the term networking’. It’s a term I try not to use. Last week I received an invitation to ‘an evening of great networking’ on the Dixie Green, a replica paddleboat that churns up and down the Thames. Is there out there who feels enthusiastic about the idea of a whole evening of networking?

I have always disliked the word because of its connotations. To me networking conveys a self-interested, instrumental way of interacting with people, in which others are viewed as a means to further one’s own agenda. It makes me think of those awkward conversations where people look over your shoulder to see who might be more useful to talk to in the room. This has happened to me many times, but I fear that on even more occasions I’ve done it to someone else, driven by my own ‘need to network’.

So my intention, in this post, was to suggest that it is much more enlightening to think about the social network of people in your life, rather than about networking.  Your social network is the set of individuals who you are connected to - the people who are significant in your life. Your social network is the most amazing resource, providing tips, gossip, expertise, camaraderie, advice, humour, fantasy, entertainment, company, practical help, money, emotional support, a way to help others ... and a million other things that make life the social bundle that it is. And sadly, for some, the lack of a meaningful social network and/or network dysfunctions are the most profound causes of misery and stress.

The word networking is just not subtle enough to capture all the intricate ways in which our networks are configured, and reconfigured, nor to express the myriad of ways in which we can choose to interact with the people around us. Most of these interactions we do intuitively, without thinking about them, because it is in our human nature to do so.  In thinking and reading about networks I’ve come to appreciate that they can be constraining as well as empowering. Our networks are likely to ‘serve up’ people who are generally socially similar to us. (For more on this, I recommend Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler’s book Connected.) For creativity, that may be a bad thing. The goal of this blog is to offer ways to think deliberately about our networks, in order to fuel our creativity.

And so, ironically, networking - in the sense of building and sustaining a network - is exactly what this blog is all about. The more I thought about the word networking, the more I had to accept that deliberate, purposeful reflection about the people around us and how to interact with them is a valuable activity. I would like to qualify that, however, by saying that networking does not have to be purely self-interested. We also reach out to others for their benefit, rather than ours.

Another reason for my dislike of the word networking was that it has now become synonymous with the use of social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Diigo, Digg,  Netvibes and LinkedIn. These are platforms that make it possible to share ideas, activities, events, and interests with people in your social network. They also make it possible to broadcast your thoughts, news, status or ideas to a much wider audience, as well as to tune into those of others.

Networking is both more and less than the use of social networking sites. More, because networking is done offline as well as online, and our online connections may be a poor representation of the people we really care about. Online social networking gives me a way to communicate efficiently with a globally distributed group of people, but it  is not how I choose to interact with to my family, dearest friends or closest collaborators. 

Less, because social networking sites connect people through ideas in a way that conventional networking (collecting business cards, getting introduced via acquaintances) cannot. I am still trying to understand the potential of social networking sites for deliberately and accidentally building our creative capacity through networks. I’m sure this will be the subject of future posts.

But all of this makes it clear to me that the word networking is not going away. But I would like to rename it ‘netshaping’ because that gives a sense of seeing a bigger picture, and shaping our networks accordingly. 

Here are some of the activities that I think might be incorporated within the term ‘netshaping’.

Activities that add contacts to our network

• Scanning - looking out for people who it might be useful to be connected to 
• Collecting - add people to our network as a result of making preliminary contact either virtually or face-to-face 
• Reacting -  responding to collecting or connecting approaches - deciding how to respond to the requests or suggestion from someone else
• Reaching - asking people we know to connect us to others

Activities that change the connections between people in our network

• Connecting - introducing two people in our network who don’t know each other (maybe in response to reaching by someone else, or as a result of mapping)
• Catalysing - effecting a change in the relationship between other people in our network (for example by encouraging them to start a conversation with each other)
• Mapping - studying the structure or shape of our network to decide where and how new connections could be made or new conversations started

Activities that contribute to the thinking of people in our network

• Firing - starting a private conversation to get people sharing ideas
• Fusing - adding people to a conversation 
• Broadcasting - inviting people in a network to contribute ideas on something
• Tuning - attending to the conversations that people in the network are broadcasting
• Digging - passing on ideas from one connection to another
• Moulding - refining, reframing or interpreting an idea for someone else
• Burying - closing down or choosing not to pass on ideas from one connection to another
• Resourcing - giving time to someone to help them develop ideas
• Recruiting - asking people to give time to help with the development of ideas 

Although this is just a playful list, I find it provokes some interesting questions. For example, how should I balance the time I spend scanning for new people to know, versus mapping to see how to work differently with the people I already know. When reacting to people approaching me, what steps might I apply to decide whether to follow up? It is pretty easy to broadcast, because that takes a manageable amount of time, but do I spend enough time tuning in to what others are broadcasting? Could I do better at digging, and how would I know whom to pass what ideas on to? Do I do too much digging; would the quality of what I forward to others be improved if I moulded it more before passing it on?

Thank you for tuning into this conversation. I would love to hear your thoughts on and additions to the ideas I have broadcast here. Feel free to dig or mould the ideas for the benefit of other people you know - and of course to bury them if you don’t think they have value. But if something here speaks to you, let me know and please fuse other people into the conversation. 

Why and how are networks important for creativity?

Most of us implicitly understand that ideas develop through social interaction. As Peter Semmelhack put it: "No idea exists in a vacuum. Ideas are social. The worst punishment for any idea, just like a human, is solitary confinement." He was citing a blog post by Venture Capitalist Blad Burnham, who has found in the VC world that entrepreneurs who are aggressively open in describing their plans seem to do better than those who are protective. 


But in this blog we are saying something more than "ideas are social". Our point is that social networks matter for ideas. Your social network is the primary determinant of the ideas you encounter, how you perceive and pursue opportunities and the ways in which you involve others in the development of your ideas. 


Why should this be the case? Let's first explain what we mean by your social network. It is the set of individuals around you and the connections (or ties) between them. A focus on connections is what  distinguishes a network view from other ways of thinking about the social world. The presence and absence of connections between people that you know create both opportunities and constraints. If everyone you share ideas with also shares ideas with each other, it's likely that your ideas will readily be accepted within your immediate social circle, but also you may not have access to many new ideas as the same ideas keep circulating. If few of the people you share ideas with also share ideas with each other, you may have access to a greater range of novel ideas, but also potentially more conflicting viewpoints.  


Be clear that a social network is distinct from social networking tools like Facebook and LinkedIn. These tools help you record, visualise and communicate with people in your social network, but whether or not you use these tools, you still have a social network. For example, here is a network visualisation of all the people I am connected to today on LinkedIn, created using InMaps. This is by no means everyone I am connected to professionally, but it does give a sense of what my professional network looks like, showing connections between the people I know. 

The first thing I did, on seeing this map, is reflect on how many different communities my network spans. At 10 and 11 o'clock are my work colleagues at Henley Business School and the University of Reading. At 7 and 8 o'clock are two distinct communities of academics researching in HRM and social networks, with a few individuals attempting (along with me) to connect the two communities. At 2 o'clock on the periphery are technology people I know through my research on plastic electronics and inside them is an emerging set of connections to professional creativity facilitators. 


So why do social networks matter for creativity? Because the patterns of connections between the people you know - the extent to which ties between them are present or absent - affects what ideas reach you, how you see and solve problems, what ideas you have the potential to create, and what you can do with those ideas. By studying our networks - and crucially the connections between people in our networks - we can learn how the structure of our networks creates and constrains opportunities for us, and we can start to design our networks in ways that increase our creative potential.


Let me illustrate this with reference to my own network. In my network there are lots of weak ties. Weak ties are connections to people you know but do not see frequently, and who generally have different acquaintances to you. Mark Granovetter in a famous paper argued that weak ties act as bridges between densely knit clumps of close friends, and that people with few weak ties would be deprived of novel information from distant parts of a social system. Strong ties (those that are emotionally close and frequent) are important for other reasons, but they may be associated with a degree of redundancy because within a tight-knit group, ways of thinking and ideas are more likely to be shared.  Jill Perry Smith's research has shown that weak ties are important for creativity. She argues that through exposure to non-redundant information, weak ties enhance creativity by making it easier to combine ideas from diverse perspectives and draw unusual connections. 


Since my network is spread across many distinct communities, in theory I should have access to lots of diverse ideas and non-redundant information ... and by extension that should help my creativity. Certainly, the concept of creative networks came about because I bridge a community of professionals interested in creativity and a community of academics interested in networks. So yes, the bridging nature of my network was responsible for this creative insight. But that is only part of the story. In the blog post mentioned earlier, Brad Burnham imagines that in an entrepreneur's network, there are people in an inner circle who understand the opportunity or technology well, who can help shape the opportunity. In the further reaches of a network more distant people may be useful for passing along useful information, but less likely to be able help translate that into useful insights. 


When putting ideas into action, I have a choice about which people in my network I think should be in my inner circle. So for developing and validating the idea of 'designing a creative network' and taking it forward, which of these two communities (creativity professionals and network academics) should I refer to? Whose success criteria will be in my mind? There are people in both communities who could help me develop the idea, but which individuals I choose to work with will determine how the idea moves forward from here. Should I write academic papers on creativity and networks, or should I design practical tools to help people understand and build their creative networks? There is perhaps the potential to do both, but there is considerable scope for role conflict along the way, not only because the two communities have very different expectations about what I might do with my ideas but also because they are largely socially disconnected so the likelihood of my connections aligning behind shared expectations of me is relatively remote. In the crucible that is required to develop and implement the idea, it may be that strong ties will be far more helpful to me than weak ties. 


By examining the structure of my network, I can surface both the opportunities within it, and its inherent tensions, enabling me to think creatively about how to resolve these tensions. So today's challenge is this: how might I make use of the different communities represented within my professional network to develop the idea of 'designing your ideal creative network'?  

The social life of ideas

Think of the most recent good idea that you had - at work, in your home life or for your career. Was it the product of thinking in isolation or were other people involved? If you are a naturally creative without the help of others, you won't be interested in this blog. But if at some point you found that other people were important for making suggestions, refining your thinking or helping clarify the problem you were trying to solve, then you might understand what I mean when I say that ideas have a social life. Ideas become what they are because we interact.

If you could engineer a social network that was designed to optimise your creativity, what would it look like? Who would you draw ideas from? How would you capture and build on their ideas? In what ways would you involve the people around you - and the people around those people - in your thinking? How would you deliberately expose yourself to new and diverse insights? How would you know when you were too exposed to new and diverse insights, and at risk of creative implosion? In what ways could you identify and connect with the people that you don't yet know you need to know?

These are questions that my colleague Andy and I have started to grapple with. We identified a mutual interest in the convergence between innovation sandpits, creativity and creative problem-solving, networks and social networking. (These last two are different things, but that will be a topic for another post.) Developing ideas with Andy is a great privilege. He provides a trampoline for my thinking: launching new ideas in a structured way. Between us, we want to apply network theory and its principles to creativity, and creativity theory and its principles to networks and networking

We don't know the answers to the questions outlined above, or indeed whether they can be answered. But we have a hunch that it will be fun trying to come up with answers. And that in order to probe for answers to the question 'in what ways might I design my ideal creative network?' we need other people to help us clarify, develop, invent, validate and build on the idea. In other words, the idea of designing your ideal creative network needs to have its own social life.

In this blog Andy and I plan to reflect on and develop our thinking about the social life of ideas. But the blog has a much more important role that that. In it we also propose to track the progress of our own experimentation with ways to design and build our creative networks. What does that process look and feel like? How did we approach people? What worked? What didn't work? How did the process change as we went along? In what ways did we analyse our networks and how can we show their evolution over time?

By forcing myself to reflect on and write about the process of building a creative network, I hope to learn a small amount about this process. By reading comments from you and others, I imagine that I'll learn a large amount beyond that. Your thinking and reaction to what we write will, I hope, give this idea a social life of its own.