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.