CM 179: Marissa King On Feeling Good About Networking
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If you think about your relationships, for many people, those are the things that are most precious in their life. And purposely commodifying that or trying to be intentional about it oftentimes creates a lot of moral disease. And so that's one reason that people often have this ambivalent or particularly resistant type of reaction to the word networking.

Welcome to Curious Minds at Work. I'm your host, Gail Allen. This episode is about networking. For most of us, networking is a topic that brings up a lot of strong feelings, feelings that usually aren't all that positive. We know we should do it, but just thinking about it makes us anxious and uncomfortable. In fact, research shows many of us associate it with something dirty. On top of that, we feel guilty for not devoting more time to it.

That's why I wanted to interview Marissa King for this episode. She's a professor of organizational behavior at Yale School of Management, and she's written a book about the topic called Social Chemistry, Decoding the Elements of Human Connection. Marissa's take on networking is refreshing. She emphasizes the relational aspect. She also gives us tools to gauge what kind of networker we are.

We walk away feeling less icky about networking, and we also feel more inspired to give it the same care and attention that we would our personal relationships. On that note, Marisa, welcome to the podcast. It's a pleasure to be here. You've made a career out of studying the patterns associated with how we connect with others. What does it mean to study these patterns, and what have you hoped to learn?

My hope is by understanding some of the common patterns of our networks, the way they work, the structures that exist and how they arise, that we can make better choices about our lives, our work lives, and our health and happiness. Vernon Jordan Jr., business executive, civil rights activist, presidential advisor, he's someone whose networking skills you describe in your book.

Jordan began his career in a very unlikely job in the sense that when he went for his first internship out of college to work with a continental insurance company in Atlanta, he was told that he was ineligible for that role due to his race.

And as a result, he scrambled to find another alternative. And the job that he landed in many ways is a perfect example of a job that someone wouldn't normally take. He ended up being a chauffeur for the mayor of Atlanta at the time.

And while that job was an unlikely choice for a college grad seeking a job, in many ways it allowed him to begin to establish the network that would propel him throughout his career. He has served in the administration most famously of Bill Clinton, but he's widely known as an advisor to presidents. He's been a leader in the civil rights movement. And in many ways, he is a bridge between Wall Street and politics.

And that unlikely role and position really just started to grow. And that's one of the most powerful things about networks is they have the power to produce outsize, unanticipated results. And he has also famously said that he hasn't really looked for a job or applied for a job since he worked for the Chicago Transit Authority.

And his life has been in many ways one of fundamentally understanding how social structure works, how those social traces impact who's talking to whom and what that does for innovation, creativity.

What he's done over the course of his career is really bring together people who wouldn't normally talk together. First as a civil rights leader, and then by bridging between Wall Street and politics, he has been able to have a profound career that not only impacted his own success, but also has had positive gains for the public as well.

Despite being an extraordinary networker, what we would think of as one of the archetypes of networking, it's also been said that he sat on more corporate boards than anyone else. And in many ways, the shortest path to anyone on Wall Street was through Vernon Jordan. Despite having that extraordinary network, he often will reflect about being lonely. Sometimes he refers to it as just being a private individual. And his story really encompasses the story of networks.

In many ways, people oftentimes misleadingly think that it's the size of your network that matters, that you need to be gregarious, you need to be extroverted, you need to be a power broker. And he may or may not be those things, but he himself perceives himself to be

private, oftentimes lonely, but he understands how social structure works. And that's allowed him amazing success, not only in his personal life, but also to help create connections that have led to positive business and economic developments. In your book, you focus on three social network patterns. You explain that they're the patterns that most of us fall into. What are they?

More than three decades of research in the social sciences have identified three social signatures that characterize most people's network. One type of network is an expansionist, and it's oftentimes what people would think of Vernon Jordan as being, in having an extraordinarily large network. And these are the people we often think of as quintessential networkers.

A second common type is a broker and brokers networks are unique in that they brokers connect worlds that normally wouldn't talk to each other. For instance, in the world of Vernon Jordan, people in politics normally talk to people in politics and people in business

primarily talk to people in business. But you get really incredible benefits in terms of innovation and creativity through conversations among groups that normally wouldn't talk together since we know that innovation comes through recombination. And that's the hallmark of brokers' social signatures.

The third type of network are conveners. And conveners, friends tend to be friends with one another. Their networks tend to be also characterized by denser ties in the sense that they tend to prefer having more depth to their relationship rather than having a large number of relationships. And the strength of convening networks is they have really strong trust and reputational benefits.

And to be clear, none of these are necessarily mutually exclusive. You can be a broker and you can be an expansionist. I would say that that is probably the best characterization of Vernon Jordan's network.

But most people can typically be characterized by one of these three different types. And there are certain properties about how networks work that make that possible. For instance, everyone, no matter who they are, has a fixed amount of time. And because they have a fixed amount of time, they have to allocate that time to different types of relationships.

So that's one constraint that leads to these network signatures that have really been shown to be important for a wide range of outcomes, ranging from mental health and happiness to work outcomes over the past three decades. What's the distinction between our networks and our connections, say on social media?

I think of networks as being enduring traces. They're the traces that are left behind by a series of social interactions. Then they're really our social signature. By looking at someone's network and the way it's structured, you can get a sense of who they are, where they tend to spend their time, what types of institutions structure their day-to-day life. So our social networks in the sense that I'm talking about today are really more enduring traces

of social interaction versus if we think about just social media, they're typically one-off interactions that don't often have a strong correspondence to the types of networks that I'm talking about.

When people hear the word network, at least when it's used as the verb of, you know, I've got to go network with someone, it's really kind of considered a dirty word for many people. Why are some people better at this than others? And in some ways, what makes us so resistant?

I agree. I oftentimes reiterate over and over, I study networks, not networking. I study networks, not networking. And part of things like that reflects my own moral qualms in some instances about the term networking.

And networks, these enduring traces of interaction differ from oftentimes what we think of networking because oftentimes when people think about networking, they're thinking about instrumental purposeful relationships.

And general research has shown that a large number of people and surveys that have looked at professionals whose entire job really revolves around building relationships, even among that said, close to two-thirds report either being ambivalent or actively resistant to this idea of networking.

And research has examined or identified three different reasons why this is frequently true. And the first one, which you mentioned, Gil, is this idea that networking is dirty. And this has been borne out in really interesting research that was done by Francesca Gino and colleagues at Harvard when they examined the way that people respond to different types of prompts. And

In the study, they asked people to recall different types of social interaction. In one instance, it would be having social interactions that were just by happenstance. So you can imagine walking down a street and bumping into someone and finding out about a job lead.

versus what I just referred to as being instrumental types of relationships. And then those are, that's typically what we're thinking of when we're thinking about, for instance, a networking event. We are going to an event or you're trying to meet someone with an idea or a goal in mind.

So we can think about these two dimensions of personal relationships versus professional relationships and also relationships that are spontaneous versus instrumental. What they found is that there's one particular type of category that seems problematic. They engaged in a word completion exercise. For instance, they would present someone with the letters W, blank, S, H.

And what they found is that people who are in this instrumental professional category, so this is the going to the networking event, looking for a job category. People are much more likely to recall the word wash, for instance, a cleansing word.

Then the word wish, which is another possibility for this word completion exercise. People in this category were also more likely to prefer cleansing products, soap, disinfectant versus preferring more benign products.

types of consumer products like post-it notes. This instrumental professional type of social relationship, which is oftentimes what we're thinking about when we're talking about networking, does truly evoke, as you mentioned, this feeling of feeling dirty. And there's a lot of work in moral psychology that has shown that this idea of feeling dirty makes us literally want to wash away our sins. So it's tapping into a fundamental moral discrepancy that makes a lot of sense.

If you think about your relationships, for many people, those are the things that are most precious in their life. And purposely commodifying that or trying to be intentional about it oftentimes creates a lot of moral disease. And so that's one reason that people often have this ambivalent or particularly resistant type of reaction to the word networking.

The other two reasons that seem to be quite common are that people simply feel like they don't know how to do it. They weren't given the playbook. And this oftentimes, again, has this underlying idea that there's this...

it's something that can't be learned. Some people are just born to work a room. Some people feel like they just wanna walk out of a cocktail party before even walking in, which is what I do. And one of the things that we know from a lot of research is that if you take this idea of a growth mindset, so this is from Carol Dweck's work,

and you apply it to social interaction. What we know from a wide variety of work is that social interaction can be learned just like anything else. And one of the tips or tools that I like to use to help people understand how this works

is that if you imagine walking into a cocktail party and you try to imagine what you're going to do, for people who have this feeling of, I just simply don't know how to do it, this creates a lot of anxiety. But we can start to dissect this and make it into simpler steps by understanding actually how social interaction and networks work.

The first thing is you walk in and we realize that people actually don't just form a wall of people, which oftentimes feels like you're walking in just to a wall of people. But actually, people tend to naturally clump in groups. So then the question becomes, which group would you go to first? Gail, do you have any preferences about which group you would go to first? The group I'd probably be most attracted to is a group that's having kind of a pretty intense conversation.

And, you know, they're really engaged with each other. There's some laughter, but there's also some kind of some interesting sharing of different experiences that they've had. That would be the kind of the group I'd be drawn to if I could find them there.

That's great. And I love that. Who wouldn't want to interact with a group that is engaged in a really, particularly we're drawn, I think, oftentimes towards people who are laughing. So that's a fundamental welcoming, accepting social signal.

In reality, particularly for people who, and it also suggests that you feel quite comfortable in these types of social settings. What we see that people often default to instead is to try to one, find a group in which they already know someone. And there was great work that was done by Mike Morris at Columbia that is called something, the title is something clever along the lines of do people mix at mixers?

And the answer is no. And what they found using wearable social sensors, which mapped the frequency of interactions and a networking event, is they found that despite the

the vast majority of people reporting that their goal in going to this event was to meet new people, that they were disproportionately likely to interact with people that they already knew. Marisa, I think it's so interesting when you described that. It tells me a lot about myself, and I'm sure I'll learn even more as we continue speaking and talking about these patterns.

One of the things that usually makes me a little disappointed when I go to a networking event is if there's someone there who knows me and I know them. And the assumption is that we'll hang out together at these events. I always enjoy them even more if I know no one is there because I know I'm going to get to meet somebody new and I get real excited about that.

where if I know that there's someone there that I know and they're expecting me to kind of stick with them throughout the event, it always feels constraining to me. So I'm sure I'll learn more about what that says about me and which pattern I fall into.

It does. I mean, it's very revealing. And I think the flip side of that is also true. And it's helpful for people to hear and understand what it's like on the flip side, because it's such a common default strategy. And it's one that I employ myself, right? I become a clinger, right? And as humans, we're naturally drawn towards familiarity for all sorts of evolutionary reasons that someone who's new is...

oftentimes perceived as a potential threat. And so there's something deeply comforting about the familiar, even if it's someone you don't like that much, right? It still seems easier than the outside choice oftentimes of meeting someone new.

You know, you've talked to us about expansionist. We've sort of stayed at a high level and we're going to dig a little deeper to them in a couple minutes. But expansionist, broker, convener, which one or which two are strongest for you? And how did you know? What are some in your book you give us some ways to tell where we gravitate? But for folks listening, is there sort of a rule of thumb way to determine where your strongest proclivities lie?

Absolutely. Networks don't just arise out of nowhere, and these types don't arise out of nowhere, that there are different behavioral and personality dispositions underlying each of them. And if we think about expansionists, for example, expansionists have just a natural ability to work a room well. They're oftentimes great listeners. They feel quite comfortable in unfamiliar social situations. But one of the things that I find perhaps more surprising

surprising is that expansionists also tend to be givers. In studies that have looked at the relationship between different network types and different types of giving behavior, they don't only give, but they actually have a particular type of giving, that they're more willing, for instance, to donate blood and give to collectivities rather than, for instance, helping a friend that they already know and need. These combined tendencies of

being willing to give in not a one-to-one, but in a one-to-many interaction allows their network to grow. But it also is reinforced by their natural tendency to be quite effective in one-on-one interaction. So they tend to just naturally mimic others more often. They tend to listen better. And if we compare that, for instance, to brokers as an example, brokers tend to often straddle social worlds. And when people are

frequently ask about which of the personality characteristics that they think matters most for what type of social network someone has, the default answer is usually that people expect that expansionist and extraversion go together quite well. But when we

And I've looked at decades and decades of research. It turns out that the strongest personality trait for predicting what someone's network looks like is not actually extroversion, but it's something that's referred in social psychology as to the tendency to be a high self-monitor. And put simply, that's just a fancy way of saying that someone tends to be a chameleon, like a chameleon in their behavior and can easily move between different social groups.

They're good at reading a room. They're good at reading different cultures. And that's really the hallmark of brokerage strength. And conveners, on the other hand, tend to have a quite different social signature. So conveners, if you remember, their friends tend to be friends with

one another. Their networks are really viewed with trust and reciprocity, and they tend to engage in behaviors that support that. For instance, they tend to self-disclose quite a bit in relationship. And there's a lot of research that suggests that self-disclosure, allowing others to see more about oneself, helps deepen and strengthen relationships. So each of these different types are associated with different types of behaviors and tendencies underneath them.

Hey, listeners, you're smart, you're busy, and you're always looking to improve. That's why I created the 123 Newsletter. One workplace topic, two related insights, and three actions you can take as soon as you finish reading. If that sounds good to you, head to gailallen.net and join the thousands of people already subscribing. Now back to my interview with Marissa King.

So let's do that deeper dive then. Let's talk more about conveners. One of the examples you give is Anna Wintour. You could talk a little bit about her, but you captured it as you talked about trust. You write about Ronald Burt, a professor at the University of Chicago, a leader in social networks research. He argues that, quote,

Tell us about this and especially how it relates to someone like Anna Wintour and how it plays out for conveners.

In the study that you referenced, Ron Burt looked at a whole host of individual characteristics that someone might think would matter for being a convener. All the types of things that we think about would impact social relationships, their age, their education, how long they've been at a company, what their background is, what their family was. And what he found is far more than all of that. What predicted how likely someone is to be trusted is the extent to which their relationship

friends essentially were friends with one another so their network signature and if you think about this notion of why convening is so important and how it produces these trust benefits we can think back to work that was done in evolutionary psychology and a lot of this work has been done by robin dunbar and what we've found over time is that

Humans spend a lot of time monitoring others in their group to see the extent to which they're conforming with norms.

In one of the studies that he's done that I found just shocking the first time I heard it, they looked at what people talked about in conversation. And it turned out in their study that people spend close to 60% of conversational time essentially gossiping. They're talking about someone else who's not present. And while oftentimes gossip has this negative connotation, from an evolutionary standpoint, it was really essential because it allows us to understand who has our back.

And in situations where there's a lot of uncertainty, whether that's from the situation at hand or a person naturally tends to feel uncertain in social relationships, having these dense networks, which are really effective for transmitting gossip, allowing you to essentially know who has your back,

is really helpful for establishing trusting relationships. And that can be seen quite nicely in Anna Wintour's network. And there was a study that was done by Elizabeth Curran-Helkett and her colleagues, and I love this study because they took actually photos from the red carpet to see which celebrities were interacting with what other celebrities.

and tried to understand could they differentiate between, for instance, what makes an A-list celebrity versus a C-list celebrity. And they did this by mapping social networks. And what they found is that Anna Wintour really is at the heart of all social networks, but her network is almost completely closed in the sense that all her friends tend to be friends with one another in one of these isolated cliques.

And this really is what differentiated A-list from B-list from C-list celebrities. And what is so important about that network is one, it has these trust reputation benefits that we've talking about, but it also allows people to remain and convey high levels of esteem and status.

And we can think about this like Anna Wintour is one example, but anyone who's been to high school probably also relates to this in the sense that these are properties that are widely associated with clicks. The second one I wanted to do a deeper dive on are brokers. And one of the people that you talk about is Yo-Yo Ma and his work with the Silk Road.

Yeah, the Silk Road is such an amazing idea, both in the historical reference, but also in thinking about their approach to creativity. And it

really conveys this notion that is essential in work on innovation. If we think about innovation, innovation oftentimes comes through recombination, almost usually, always comes through recombination. One of the examples I like to give that really exemplifies this in a concrete way is that if you look at an early example of the printing press, which really revolutionized

both our cultural landscape, but in many ways it was a historical disjuncture in our way of being and communicating. If you look at the example of the printing press, despite being a profoundly disruptive innovation, it really is actually just a coin punch in a wine press combined. And that notion that innovation really comes through recombination is exemplified in brokers' networks.

Most people have this tendency in their networks that they tend to talk to people who are like themselves, this property known as homophily. And there's all sorts of reasons it exists, but it's one of the most defining traits of most people's networks.

But where brokers are so unique, like Yo-Yo Ma, is they take people in groups that normally wouldn't talk to each other, these dense cliques that normally wouldn't communicate, and they put them in touch with one another. And the Silk Road is a great example of this, and then it is often

bringing together musicians, there's a constantly changing cast of characters in the sense that it's not a stable group of musicians, but instead they're rotating people in and out playing instruments that you would not normally imagine ever coming into contact with one another.

And through that, they're allowed, they're able to continually innovate and not fall into tendencies that would otherwise plague these types of interactions like group thing. And the Silk Road is just a phenomenal example of that creativity that emerges through these unusual combinations. I really love how you talk about the fact that there are these spaces between groups, these structural holes, and it's the broker who fills them.

Yeah, it's such a nice example. And again, that's credit to Ron Burt and his work. He's oftentimes, I think, when we are trying to understand any social phenomenon or landscape, we're looking at what exists, right? You can imagine a set of patterns and looking, trying to discern how do these things relate to one another. But the magic of brokerage networks is that the power actually really comes from where there's a disconnection.

Power seems to play a role with, of course, all of these, but in particular with the broker network. Why is that? Why does that tend to come up a lot with this particular pattern? And how does it sometimes come across to folks as the person is kind of a jerk?

Yeah, the broker is in an unusual spot because if they're standing between these two different groups, that they're bridging two different social worlds, they have a choice about do they want to bring them together or do they want to keep them apart? And the choice to do that has different benefits in the sense that if you keep them apart, oftentimes the broker themselves can benefit in the sense of if you imagine a negotiation and you're keeping

two disconnected parties apart, the broker benefits. A good example of this is real estate agents.

There's another way of thinking about this is you can think about the extent to which brokers are actively bringing others together. And it's when those others are brought together that there are benefits for the group as a whole. It requires, one, an awareness of that someone is in that position and then a self-reflection on, okay, given that power that naturally exists or is inherent in that brokerage role, how do you want to use it?

The last one, expansionists, these folks are the super connectors. Tell us a little bit about them and in particular, what makes them who they are and maybe what makes them different from the other two. Networks have a peculiar property in general in that most of us know a couple hundred people, but networks follow a distribution that has something known as a long tail. So while most of us know several hundred people, there are a very small number of people who know magnitudes of order more.

And those people at that tail are expansionists. And expansionists, as a result, have extraordinary reach. And they have also the profound ability to also not just have reach, but to have influence as well. Oftentimes, these are the people who are thinking about extraordinary network that people are oftentimes thinking about expansionists. And there are certainly enormous benefits that come with that position as well.

You write about the fact that when it comes to age and work stage, researchers have learned some things about our network patterns, that they don't tend to be static, but at some points in our lives, sometimes they can become, of course, fixed. Tell us about that, what those patterns are, and maybe what we can learn from that.

One of the things I think is important to realize just at the outset is that there's no one right network, but also there are networks aren't fixed. And the key is to try to figure out what is your goal or what are you trying to achieve or where do you need more support? Or are you making a life transition in which your network also needs to change and then trying to adapt your network to meet the situations and find the most support?

And what did his study typical career trajectories has found that over the course of one's career, that the type of network that is most effective depends on career stage. Early on in someone's career, an expansionist type network is particularly beneficial. And if we think about why that's true, one of the reasons is early on in your career,

Just by chance, the more people you meet because of your lower status and less power, the more likely it is that whoever you're meeting is going to have access to more information than you do, potentially have more power than you do, or be able to support you in different ways.

And having this large network is really, really critical early on in one's career. And one of the examples that I love of this, aside from Vernon Jordan, essentially falling into this role as a chauffeur of the mayor of Atlanta, another example of this is Heidi Roizen, who is, there's a Harvard Business School case written about her networking prowess. And she's one of the most successful women and has one of the strongest networks in Silicon Valley.

And curiously, one of the first jobs that Heidi took out of Stanford Business School was actually to write a corporate newsletter. And while this may seem like a strange choice, in many ways it was an excellent strategy. Because in writing the corporate newsletter, she was able to talk with a huge number of people throughout the company, and oftentimes people she wouldn't otherwise have the chance to interact with.

And that type of mentality about thinking about growing one's network early is exactly consistent with research about what is the best network signature early on in one's career. But as one's career evolves, your cells start to gain more status. You have access to more information. So having a large network starts to become redundant, just probabilistically the likelihood that you're going to

bump into or meet someone who has something that might be valuable to you diminishes. And in the middle of one's career, having a more brokerage network is absolutely essential. And this begins as one rises, people are listening to you more, trusting you more,

that having innovative and creative ideas is particularly beneficial. And in the middle of one's career, this broker signature is really helpful. And the hardest transition I believe to make is actually from mid-career

towards more executive level and the final stage usually of one's career if they're moving on an upward trajectory, which is the shift from being a broker mid-career to actually being a convener. And why that is so important is because to effectively lead and be an extraordinary manager, you need to be involved in lots of different social worlds. And while it's possible, for instance, to broker among companies,

three different social worlds or four different social worlds, it eventually becomes really unwieldy. And at that final stage of one's career, having an inner circle of this dense convening network and having brokers extending that you can tap into is really the most advantageous social structure. And it also helps deal with one of the

somewhat surprising issues, which is this idea of chronic loneliness among CEOs, which the more you rise in a hierarchy, it actually is true that it's lonely at the top. So the shifting towards a more convening-like structure in the final stage of one's career has numerous benefits. If I'm operating in a workplace and I am trying to get better at my job, maybe move up myself, what kind of a boss do I want and why does it matter?

Oh, that's interesting. So it depends a little bit about the type of work that you're doing. One effective strategy for people who have a nascent network is to try to actually choose a boss whose network that they can build on. So essentially trying to find a network partner that's a nice complement to your existing network.

In general, I think also one of the things that we know is that if you work in an industry where trust and buy-in are really important, having a boss being a convener is quite important. So the type of network that is going to be most advantageous to you from thinking about who you want to work with in many ways is going to depend on what your own existing network looks like.

One of the things that you help us think about is that there are times when we realize that we have this network, but we are not cultivating it or strengthening it over time in the ways that we could or that we should. And there are a number of things we can do to strengthen the relationship. But one of the most important things that you call out is listening.

And I think it's one of those things that we hear so much, we sort of think, yeah, yeah, I know how to do that. But you really help us think about it in a very deep and helpful way. We've spent a lot of time thinking about someone's overall network structure, but it also profoundly matters the interactions in a moment. And of all the skills that I think are most important,

important, arguably listening is the most important of them. But it's also one of the things that is most difficult to cultivate. And exactly as you said, if you ask people, are you a good listener? Almost everyone says yes. But if you've ever worked in an office, you know that this is definitely not true.

And so one of the things that I often ask people to reflect on or to engage in is to, in a conversation, particularly in a purposeful conversation and sitting with a partner, to just simply engage in a simple question. So how are you and how are you doing today?

and let someone talk for 90 seconds about just how they are without a verbal affirmation, without asking questions, and just to observe what that feels like to them as someone who's listening. Usually the person who's being listened to finds this as an extremely cathartic experience

It's extraordinarily rare truly to be listened to. One of the examples I think is really emblematic of this is in studies that have looked at interactions with healthcare providers, usually they only let the patient talk for 17 seconds before interrupting. Beyond giving this gift to the person to just be able to simply feel heard, as a listener, it's also helpful to notice what are your tendencies. Typically, people have a tendency that they may want to interrupt.

And they may think that they're being helpful by asking a clarifying question. Another tendency is also to want to jump in with your me too story. And all of these are behaviors that can be helpful in conversation, but oftentimes people actually need more space. And so by starting to recognize what your own tendencies are and giving people a little bit more space, you can quickly become a much more effective listener.

You know, I was thinking as well about teams and when you're putting a team together, how important is it to, if possible, be able to get different network social patterns of folks on a team?

It gets back to thinking about what are the different properties of networks and what are you trying to achieve in a given project or for a given scenario. To the extent that you need these trust and reputational benefits or actually that you want to be fast and reduce coordination costs, then...

Seeding a network with conveners is really beneficial conveners themselves because of this natural tendency in some ways almost in need for them to have what we think of as structural balance. But having everyone in the group connected to everyone else seating teams with conveners can really help speed this process along because of their natural propensity to do this.

So for instance, when you're trying to either reduce coordination costs, in part that happens because of this higher level of trust, having a team that's made up of conveners is really beneficial. But again, if you want a team that has more innovation, you really need to think more like...

a broker in the sense of putting together in that team people who are coming from diverse backgrounds in the sense that if you want innovation, you need people who are not normally going to talk to each other. But in order for that to continue, you also need to have a lot of movement in and out of the team. One of the drawbacks of a

a brokerage network is this tendency of there is a natural tendency of friends to want to become friends with one another or for people to evolve towards a more closed convening light network to support teams that are trying to be innovative you need to continually refresh these opportunities for brokerage by bringing people in and out and in thinking about composing a team when i'm speaking with clients one of the things i really emphasize is that it's not also

the type of network of the people in the room, but there can be huge value in thinking about what networks do people bring to the table? So it's not just that team, but thinking beyond that team as having an extraordinary pool of resources that they can draw on and being active about drawing on the broader network that exists beyond the team as well.

Given the world that we're living in right now, where a lot of people are working remotely more than usual and feeling more isolated, who of these network patterns would you say are maybe thriving based on that? Maybe it actually, they can live within that and actually thrive in some ways. And who are some of those network patterns that are, it's really detrimental for them?

I have actually just started a research project along these lines. And so I want to say it's preliminary, but I had this exact question. And walking into this without knowing, because we're all in an unprecedented situation, I had imagined walking in that conveners would be caring better. There's a lot of work that looks at mental health and well-being that shows that the more social support you have and the more closed one's network,

the better that is for helping guard against loneliness, for instance. And so walking in, that's what I had anticipated. And what I recently did with my collaborators that we had data on close to 500 people's networks a year ago. And then in June, we again studied, engaged in the same study with the same group of people to try to see who's been faring better. And in general, unsurprisingly, people are feeling more lonely. But what

One of the things that I was really surprised by is that it turns out that conveners have actually fared more poorly. And it's not what I would have expected, but as we tried to dig in and make sense of why this is true,

I think what explains the finding is that in many ways that there's a fear of missing out. Brokers' friends and their friends aren't also interacting with one another, and it's not a situation that they feel most comfortable in. But conveners are used to having everyone all together frequently interacting, and that's just not possible now. So this network that would normally provide protective benefits against loneliness actually seems to be a liability right now.

You know, I have to ask about this because it's something that I think comes to some people's minds. I remember growing up at a time with Six Degrees of Separation and Kevin Bacon and people thinking about, you know, Kevin Bacon is the actor who, as people started to think about it, is so connected to so many other actors, or at least was at the time. And so this idea of Six Degrees of Separation and what you do in terms of studying people's social networks

What's interesting to know about that? Any new insights on that or just in general, what can you share? One of the things that I love about social networks is it allows us to understand who we are in the world, but it also allows us to understand at a broader level how the world fits together. And the notion of six degrees of separation in as many ways is emblematic of that in the sense that that

originally came from experiments that Stanley Milgram did decades ago. And what we found in most recent research, there was a lot of it done by Duncan Watts, is found that it's still true that the world remains small in the sense that on average,

six degrees of separation still remains, it hasn't gotten much smaller despite the huge technological changes that have happened since Milgram's experiment. Are there any predictions that that could change or is the assumption that this will pretty much hold true? I think it will stay. And the reason I think that it will remain is because underlying that fact

is that there are certain network properties that allow this to be true. Most people interact in these closed social networks, that there are a few people bridging between these closed social circles. And then there are a small number of conveners that kind of connect us all.

And in many ways, the six degrees of separation is a social fact that remains true because if you dig deeper into that, there are these network signatures of conveners, brokers, and expansionists, and the way they fit together to form a whole is what produces that result.

What are you most curious about today? The thing I'm most curious about is how we can use our networks in order to make the world a better place and the extent to which we can actually change them. And the context that I'm most interested in trying to understand this in is really, we've seen this huge epidemic of loneliness, large increases in mental health conditions. We've seen increases in addiction. And one of the things that

seems across the board to be a root cause that's running through all of those are loneliness. And one of the things I'm most curious and most passionate about is trying to figure out, are there things that we can do either at the individual level or as a society to help create positive change? Can you say a little bit about that in terms of social networks and addiction and mental health and the ways that those work together?

primarily most of my work has been trying to understand why we're seeing these epidemic increases versus

First, my earliest work was on the autism epidemic and trying to understand why we saw such a large increase in cases of autism and then moving on to mental health medication use more generally. And then I've been studying addiction and treatment for addiction. And the majority of my work is trying to understand how that that's been diagnosed and treated for identifying ways of intervening in the treatment process to help individuals get more access to treatment.

And there seem to be some common patterns for understanding how we can target individual physicians or healthcare providers to improve outcomes. And I think the question becomes then, are these same types of interventions equally effective in targeting patients and the general public themselves? So people who aren't even getting into treatment at the moment. And where do the networks come into play?

So the networks come into play in a couple of different ways. So you can think about on the physician side, that where someone sits in a physician's network has shown to have a huge impact on the way that they treat patients. And part of this is due to, in the medical profession,

The rate at which new knowledge is produced increases so quickly that people have a hard time keeping up. And so instead of necessarily looking for external treatment protocols that they oftentimes are learning from their peers. And this peer based learning has a profound effect on the way physicians are treating patients. But then on the flip side,

It's not apparent, right? If you're a patient trying to find a doctor who's well positioned within this network, it's almost impossible. And so trying to figure out how to increase access by leveraging people's individual networks is really important.

in the same way that there are network disparities in business, there are also network disparities in access to health. So just as networks are not as effective, for instance, for helping women and minorities find a job, the same is true on the healthcare side, that accessing effective services

healthcare is in part determined by the network someone has. So trying to create more equality and access to healthcare in many ways also requires trying to create more equality in social network. - Is there anything I haven't asked Marisa that you'd wanna speak to?

I think the only thing that we haven't talked about is that I think it is important for people to keep in mind is that oftentimes when someone is considering their network, the mentality they have is how can I meet new people or how can I change my network in order to be more effective? And what we know from a wide variety of research is that there's

almost always extraordinary untapped potential in your existing network. And it's much more effective to focus on your existing relationships and maintaining and developing those relationships than any other investment you can make in your network. So enjoy the people that you're with and don't take them for granted. Thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure to speak with you. Oh, it's great talking with you. And thank you for taking the time to read the book and speak with me. It was a lot of fun.

Curious Minds at Work is made possible through a partnership with the Innovator Circle, an executive coaching and training firm for startups. Thank you to producer and editor Rob Machabelli for leading the amazing behind-the-scenes team that makes it all happen. Each episode, we give a shout out to someone who's feeding our curiosity. Today, it's Heather Cox Richardson, a history professor at Boston College. Since 2019, Heather's been writing Letters from an American, a daily newsletter that focuses on current events in light of history.

If you've ever wanted to understand how the politics of today is informed by the past, you'll be captivated by her column.