Networking the West with Liz Ryan

The Strength of Weak Ties

By Liz Ryan, 3-14-07

I got a call out of the blue from a friend of mine in Chicago. I think of her as an “my old friend from Chicago,” but the truth is that I didn’t meet her until I’d already moved to Boulder in 2001. We got to know one another at networking events when I’d return to Chicago from time to time. In my mind, our kids know one another and we’ve been to one another’s houses, but of course that’s impossible. We only know each other from those networking events, and the phone, and email. But today, she called me up and helped me with a huge issue I was working on. I am helping her with a big project of hers, too. Yet, if I’d made a list of the top ten - or twenty - people who could have helped me out today, she wouldn’t have been on the list. I wouldn’t have thought to list her. She’s on a different list, one that I’d have trouble calling to mind: something like “Other People I Know.” We all have a list like that.

When I was in grad school, one of my professors was a guru in the area of social interaction. Her course was Organizational Communication, but her real passion was social networking - although no one was using that term back in ‘92. She was interviewed on the radio all the time, on topics like dating services (there was no online dating service in those days) and the way hairdressers and cab drivers have all the best advice. Her theme was “The Strength of Weak Ties.”

I read the papers, I did the coursework, and I understood the logic. Those weak ties can turn out to be high-tension cable when you least expect it. But still, every time I have an experience like the person calling from Chicago to solve my problem, I am startled. “What made you call me today, to solve my problem?” is the question on my lips. But she didn’t call to solve my problem, of course. She wanted my advice on something. No problem there. It just so happened that, today, I could also use her advice in a big way.

So if we recognize and agree that people we don’t talk to often, people we might only know slightly, and people we barely know at all - hairdressers and cabdrivers and dental-office receptionists and preschool moms and baristas - might be important ties for us, is there a way to operationalize that? Is there a way to behave differently, to add every one of those weak-tie contacts into ACT!, to somehow get more proactive about wringing value from those relationships that surround us? I don’t think so. I think there’s a bit of magic involved in the weak-ties phenomenon, and if you mess with it or try to control the magic, it disappears.

Lots of people realize that they have too many contacts to manage one-on-one, and begin to produce regular blasts that look suspiciously like email newsletters. I will read a person’s once-a-year photocopied holiday news, but once a year is plenty. I don’t need to read your monthly mailings, and I don’t feel like a true part of your network by reading them or by receiving them. If we talk, we are contacts. If we act like friends, we are friends. I would be very happy to be friends, but if we don’t maintain the friendship, then we’re not friends. It’s a simple thing.

I was reminded, via this call out of the blue today, that past interactions have everything to do with relationships going into the future. My friend in Chicago said “I know we don’t talk often, but I think of you all the time and value your advice so much. Remember when you helped me with X?” I could barely remember that conversation. But in a dim way, I know that I have helped this woman and she has helped me. If we hadn’t done that before, if we’d only said a few words to one another and left it at that, we wouldn’t have had the conversation we did, today.

So weak ties exist and they are great. They come in handy when we least expect it. They can save the day. We can’t bottle them, or at least, we bottle them at our peril. But we can gently rest on them. They may be stronger than we think. We can put out good energy and help people when we have the chance. Weak ties may rule the world, if we really knew how the mechanism works. But isn’t that the unified theory of everything that the physicists are looking for? 

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