How networks really work.

Influence at the edge.

One of the most common questions I get about Second Act is about the networks chapter. Networks matter for everyone, but they are really important for late bloomers. Finding the right network is essential to success.

But I think we talk about networks in the wrong way. Rather than looking to get lots of connections and move to the centre of a network, we might be better off networking with people at the edge of different networks, and thinking more about influence than connections. One thing I show in the book is that this is the real explanation of how Margaret Thatcher became Conservative leader—it wasn’t Airey Neave’s underhand tactics, but his unusually influential position at the edge of several networks. It also explains how Grandma Moses became a famous painter, how Samuel Johnson wrote a dictionary, and how Antonie van Leeuwenhoek went from cloth merchant to renowned scientist.

Here are two extracts from Second Act that summarise some of this information. Second Act will be out in hardback in the USA on September 10th. This Tuesday! It will also be available in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. (You can already get it on audio and Kindle in those places. And it’s already available in the UK.)

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Being at the edge of things

To succeed, where should you be in a network — close to the centre or on the edge? To succeed in many fields in the UK, the best bet is to go to London and become part of the milieu. Networking is an important part of becoming a creative person, whether artist or scientist, engineer or pastry chef. It is not just that being in the network will influence your ideas, but it will provide feedback about what work is important. We are all capable of producing something creative at home — it is not until that work is tested in the complex real-world environment that we know if it is really original or interesting. Networks coordinate information. As the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says, ‘Creativity cannot bring forth anything new unless it can enlist the support of peers.’

Csikszentmihalyi realized the importance of recognition to creative work during a long-term study of art students. He and his collaborators realized that ‘10 years after graduation, the students we thought had the greatest creative potential were no more likely to have continued in an artistic career than their peers whose performance in school had suggested a lack of creative potential’. What they thought of as creative potential wasn’t a very reliable indicator. ‘For artistic creativity to exist,’ Csikszentmihalyi says, ‘one must have an appropriate audience.’ It is not enough to be right: you must also be influential.

Creativity is the result of an interaction. ‘If you cannot persuade the world you had a creative idea,’ says Csikszentmihalyi, ‘how do we know you actually had it?’ This effect is so strong that one study has found that the artists who start their career by exhibiting work in a gallery in the top 20 per cent of rankings have a far more successful career than those who don’t. Nearly 60 per cent of those artists remained high-prestige throughout their career; only 0.2 per cent of them ended up exhibiting in a bottom 40 per cent gallery. The quality of your work has a lot to do with the quality of your network. This study suggests that the route to success is at the centre: peripheral artists do not make it to the centre of the network.

In fact, there are advantages to both. Being in the core brings credibility support for your work. The closer you are to the best galleries, the more successful your paintings are. However, being on the edge of the network means you have connections to other types of networks, and can mix different influences. The people at the centre of a network are very similar to each other; being on the margin gives you a differentiating perspective.

The price of being peripheral is that you often lack recognition: that is, peripheral members of networks might be creative, but they are also likely to be late bloomers. As Randall Collins says, ‘a peripheral position condemns one to coming too late into the sophisticated center of the action; the most successful rebels are those who most quickly capitalize on the opportunities for new combinations that are visible at the center.’ But the effect of working with people who are not from your discipline can be profound. DNA was discovered by a biologist, James Watson, and a physicist, Francis Crick, working together; Rosalind Franklin, whose work they relied on, was a chemist. Walt Disney was never the best animator: he collaborated with others to make his ideas work. These peripheral collaborations reinforced initiative and self-direction.

Often the best place to be in a network is neither the limit nor the centre, but somewhere in between. Albert Einstein was building on the work of several other physicists, recombining the ideas of thinkers like Ernst Mach, Max Planck, Hendrick Lorentz, Henri Poincaré — as one sociologist said, those others were ‘too familiar with, and too committed to, what had come before to see how Einstein’s new combination could be something greater than the sum of its parts’. Einstein was sufficiently detached to make the insight. He was familiar with the ideas but still willing to reinvent them. Had he been right at the core, he might have been too attached to the prevailing consensus.

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Influence matters more than connections

In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell identified people he called Connectors: people who enjoy knowing people and connecting them with other people, places or ideas. What seems like a chore to most of us is no problem for the Connector. They keep in touch with many, many more people than the average person. This means that, wherever they go, if they find something or someone interesting, they can tell someone in their network about it.

This concept is based on an experiment conducted by Stanley Milgram. Milgram sent letters to a random sample of people in Kansas and Nebraska. The letters explained that the recipients were part of an experiment and they were asked to send the letter to a named divinity student in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or a stockbroker in neighbouring Boston. No addresses were given. So the sample had to either forward the letters directly if they happened to know either person or to send them to someone else who might know. A third of the letters arrived at their destination, none having been through more than ten people.

This demonstrates the famous six degrees of separation rule. The rule works through weak ties. The people at the start of the chain do not know the people at the end. Those ties are weaker than the ties between close friends or family. As we saw earlier, to use your network effectively, you must leverage these weak ties.

But not all weak ties are equal. A recent follow-up study replicated Milgram’s original experiment, with 24,000 emails instead of letters. Only 3,084 emails reached the target. That’s a significantly lower success rate. The experiment didn’t fail because of lack of connections. Only 1 per cent of those who didn’t forward the email said they couldn’t think of anyone to send it to. More likely, they were not interested, couldn’t be bothered, were too busy, forgot, the email went to spam ... all the usual things that get in the way.

While this experiment somewhat confirms the six degrees of separation idea it also illustrates that it’s hard to make your network work for you. It takes persistence. Knowing who to connect with is not the same as having the time, energy or inclination to make the connection. You need to find the right people and ask them the right thing at the right time. They need to want to help and be influential in the right way.

It is probably true that we are all connected by six degrees of separation — but not everyone that we are connected to is going to do us a favour. It’s a small world, but a busy one. The people you know might connect you to opportunities, but it’s not guaranteed. And those opportunities might not be very significant.

In the email experiment that tried to replicate Milgram’s findings, Connectors were significantly less important. Whereas many of Milgram’s letters passed through a small number of ‘hubs’ — hyper-connected people, similar to Gladwell’s Connectors — less than 5 per cent of the emails did. Think of the Connectors you know. They give you far more recommendations than you take. If you went to every restaurant, watched every show, met every person, and visited every place recommended to you, you would find yourself doing little else. Connectors are real, but they often lack influence. And they are no longer the hubs of connectivity they once were. We are all taking more recommendations from strangers on the internet, whose reliability on the particular topic we are interested in at that moment is usually quite easy to find out through ratings, followings or sampling.

What can make a difference is a small increase in the likelihood of being able to reach the eventual target. If I ask you to get an email to a member of a remote Indigenous people who do not speak English, you probably won’t know where to start. If I ask you to connect to someone demographically more similar to you, it will be much easier to think of someone to forward the email to. Watts found that one of his targets received a much higher proportion of emails than the others. This target was a professor — and the majority of people participating in the study were college educated. It is possible that it just seemed much easier for a college graduate to think of someone to email when the target is a professor than when it is a Norwegian army veteran or an Estonian archival inspector. Connectors might be at their most useful when they are more similar to the final target. It is not connections we should be interested in, but influence. You need to find Connectors who have the right degree of influence over the people you want to be put in touch with.

Social scientists Nicholas Christakis and James H. Fowler have found that while networks do have six degrees of separation, they have only three degrees of influence. Friends influence friends. They also influence friends of friends. And they can influence friends of friends of friends. You have some influence over your sibling. They might pass on something to a friend, based on your reliability. That friend might then pass it on. But the link back to you has become weaker. The extent to which this information is trusted has diminished. Christakis and Fowler found that as information moves along a network it becomes more unreliable, somewhat as it does in children’s whispering games. It is also the case that your network is much more stable within three degrees. Your friends and family don’t change that much. As you move beyond that, people come and go. The churn is higher. You lose contact, people die, or move, or change jobs, and thus your network changes. Unstable connections have much less influence. It is thought that we evolved in groups of three degrees of connection and that it is difficult for most people to get beyond that.

So, although weak connections are more likely to be useful, they are less likely to be able to reliably influence people who are four degrees or more of separation away. That’s the paradox of networking. And it’s why, even though you are technically six degrees away from the major hubs of wealth and power in the world, you never get invited to their parties. Your degrees of separation are all there, but you lack the appropriate influence.

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This is an extract from Second Act, which will be out in hardback in the USA on September 10th. This Tuesday! It will also be available in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. (You can already get it on audio and Kindle in those places.) It’s already available in the UK.