Social Chemistry summary

Which is more important – the quality or quantity of your connections?

Quality is obviously important. Your closest relationships are where you enjoy trust and intimacy, where you turn for support and advice. But, as the anthropologist Robin Dunbar has found, the average person only has the time and cognitive energy to maintain highly intimate relationships with two to five people. The maximum number of stable – read friendly – relationships we can maintain hovers at 150.

Which of these A-list celebrities is most likely to be a convenor: George Clooney, Viola Davis, Emma Stone, or Brad Pitt?

It’s a trick question: they all are.

Ferran Adrià is regarded by foodies as one of the world’s greatest living chefs. During his tenure at restaurant El Bulli, he played with form and texture to create stunning new dishes. But while Adrià has the reputation of a lone genius, the chef is quick to credit his team and his network for his success. El Bulli’s kitchen was based around collaboration, and Adrià looked to friends in fields as diverse as physics and architecture for inspiration. Adrià is a classic broker.

Convenors’ networks occur naturally among people who share an interest or identity, like university alumni, or tech workers. Brokers pull off something more challenging. They create connections across groups of people, in configurations where different perspectives and expertise are exchanged.

Most people can count an average of 600 people in their networks. But for expansionists, that number’s much higher. Expansionists are much more likely to fall into the class that network scientists dub superconnectors, people with a network of 6,000 or more.

For many people, that sounds like a staggering number of connections, even in this era of social media. But 6,000 isn’t even the upper limit. Former US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt had over 22,500 names in his address book. Pretty impressive, considering FDR died more than 60 years before Facebook was invented.

Whether you’re a convenor, broker, or expansionist, your networking style should come naturally to you. But that style isn’t set in stone. There’s nothing to stop a convenor from brokering a connection between two acquaintances from different backgrounds. Or an expansionist from cultivating strong ties.

In fact, if you want to level up your networking game, you need to hybridize your networking, adopting the best tactics from other networking styles.

Conventional advice about networking tends to focus on your connections – plural. But what about each individual connection? After all, without them, you’d have no network. Just as it’s critical to manage and leverage your connections, it’s also important to effectively form, maintain, and grow the one-on-one relationships that make up your network.

Creating connections can be daunting. But it’s not impossible.

Ever heard of the “six degrees of separation” theory? It posits that everyone in the world is, theoretically, only six connections away from every other person in the world. And it has its basis in an actual experiment run in 1967 by a researcher called Stanley Milgram. He assigned 300 people in the US a packet. Each packet was designated for the same target, a stockbroker working in Boston. Participants could only pass the packet on to someone they knew on a first-name basis. In the end, the packet only had to be passed, on average, through 5.2 intermediaries before it reached the stockbroker.

Milgram’s experiment was titled “The Small World Problem.” And from its results, it’s easy to conclude the world is indeed smaller than you might think. Another key takeaway? Your network is more far-reaching than you might think.