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. 

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.