“Acquaintances, in sort, represent a source of social power, and the more acquaintances you have the more powerful you are.” Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point
If you work in a profession where you need to close business – as a salesperson, recruitment agent or lawyer, for example – you are probably reading this thinking that you already know why you network. It’s to find a client, or meet someone who might one day introduce you to a client. You will have a good idea of why you network, who you network with and what the benefits are.
If you’re networking in this way, that’s great and you’re definitely a step up from someone who doesn’t network at all, but you’re only getting a fraction of the benefits that you could be getting. For some reason, it seems very clear to us that we need to meet new people in order to get business, but we often don’t realise all the other, less direct, benefits that we could be achieving if we changed our networking style slightly.
These indirect benefits are the reason that you should be networking even if you’re not in a profession in which it is usual to network. In business today, we are used to working in a calculated, rational way. We make plans, set goals and break down our strategic vision into concrete step by step paths that will take us to our ultimate objectives. This is great and I am all for planning, but networking is not something that works like this.
Antifragile – Taleb
Something that we are coming to have a better understanding of is the idea of a complex system. Since the work of the great Mandelbrot in the 1960s, the areas of chaos theory and complexity have come to be more widely studied. My favourite recent book on the subject is Antifragile by the banker Nassim Taleb. Complexity theory best explains my understanding of the effects of networking. By making more and more connections and sending out your actions through these channels, there will be associated reactions. You can better shape the results of networking by choosing which of these to act on, than by aiming for a specific outcome since, like the butterfly flapping its wings, you cannot control the outcome.
To take a simple example, imagine that you are in need of a graphic designer, at a good price because the work that you need done is not yet revenue generating. If you have a small network (and you are not a designer yourself), you will need to get lucky – perhaps someone’s sister is just starting out, or perhaps a friend has recently used a designer that he can recommend. But if you have a network of hundreds or thousands of people, the numbers are large enough that you don’t need to be lucky – someone you know will be able to help you.
Zoe Cunningham
@zoefcunningham
Tech Talkfest 