The world today is becoming more and more socially connected and networked. To utilise these newly formed networks and build stronger social ties it's important to understand these realities.
There was an idea, floated by Frigyes Karinthy, one of the most popular Hungarian writers, about "six degrees of separation". One degree of separation is connection between two friends. Two degrees of separation is when you are connected to someone who is friend with your friend. So, the six-degree separation idea was that one can connect with almost everyone in this world with six degrees of separation. Frigyes Karinthy explained that despite great physical distances between the globe's individuals, the growing density of human networks made the actual social distance far smaller.
That was in the late 1930s. If the current society is gauged through this idea's lens, only 3-4 degrees of separation can be found in social ties around us. And in denser and large family size societies and communities, this might be even much less. The world wide web (www) is a massive network of webpages, each connecting to few others. Today, Facebook has approximately 1.59 billion active users daily, larger than the population of China - if Facebook decides to be a country, it will be the most populated one!
But are these networks only about entertainment or information?
Absolutely not! Networks have always a very important role in opportunity identification. In his seminal work, social scientist Mark Granovetter discussed the strength of weak ties. Weak ties are more like acquaintances, not very close friends and not people you converse daily. The advantage of weak ties over strong ties is that they do not need much effort to maintain. The weakness - a weak tie does not always lead to reciprocity - one can ask for favour but there is a chance that there might be no response.
According to Granovetter, compared to having a network full of strong ties, it helps to have a network composed with strong and weak ties - weak ties help one connect to other networks.
Many entrepreneurship scholars argue that in order for a successful business to start, there needs to be a coming together of three things - idea, information on market opportunity, and skill and personality traits of the entrepreneur. Skills and personality traits can be developed, but the unique knowledge of the opportunity is something that cannot be trained or learned. In fact, that information on the opportunity or market gap cannot be public knowledge - if it is, then a lot of people can utilise that information, reducing the chances of a single business to profit.
Similar conditions apply to good ideas. It is very hard to develop a good idea on one's own, though there are some thinking tools that can help. As pointed out by Steven Johnson, in his book Where Good Ideas Come From, there are few eureka moments at present times. It's more about two persons having hunches, and then these two hunches are coming together. Now imagine how hard it would be to get information from a small network as compared to a large network. A large network also increases the chances of meeting that other half of the hunch one had in their head!
Networks can come in handy for individual opportunity identification as well. Once while attending a competition grand finale, the author ended up sitting beside a senior from the undergraduate university and started discussing what the common interests were. It turned out that the senior alumnus was planning to set up a machine learning and AI company, and the author was training people on analytics. That was in February 2018, and now the author is working part time as an adviser to the company, and the engagement is helping each other to grow and explore a multitude of opportunities.
Definitely there was a matter of luck involved, but there a big role is played by networks. First, they belonged to the same alumni network of alma matter. Second, the author had weak ties to the organisers of the competition, similar to the senior alumnus he met, and these weak ties helped them to be invited and be in the same event. Sitting in the same table was a matter of luck. One will find many such similar stories around them.
There is a common saying - "It doesn't matter what you know, who you know matters the most". It shows the act of networking in a very negative light. Of course, there are incidences of favoritism. But networks work far beyond that. The type of network that works in anyone's favour in the long run suggests that not only knowing people matters, but also what one knows also matters a lot. If one is not knowledgeable enough or if s/he does not have value to communicate, then the weak ties aren't effective.
The attention span of an average person has gone down, and people are increasingly busy. So, in these situations, if someone wants to make an impact on someone in order to create a network tie, s/he definitely needs to communicate that the right value.
There are some pieces of advice to networking. People often give themselves excuses such as "but I am not that talkative" and "I don't know how to connect...". The harsh reality is that one needs to be willing to make an extra effort to go out of his/her comfort zone to connect with people. Bangladeshi professionals and even students may avail many global opportunities if they build their communication skills targeted to networking. Comfort zones are beautiful, but unfortunately nothing grows in them. The first step to creating an effective network will be to push oneself to be in different events - talks, workshops, meetups, competitions etc. The second step is talking to people who are outside of the core group of friends. There are many good books written on this subject, and a classic one is - How to Make Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. Another advice will be - genuinely listen to people and try to understand their perspectives, give constructive feedback or appreciation, and have something interesting to say. In order to have interesting things to say, read broadly, newspapers, books, renowned magazines such as HBR, The Economist, even blogs such as The Medium; while forming one's own opinion about things.
Another good step is to do one's homework before networking and social events. Many events have themes and relevant topics. So do a basic research on them. When a person is trying to network with a specific renowned person in any event, it is important to do a research on her work, and have something interesting to tell her as well. Networks are ubiquitous at this digital age and everyone can use it to their advantage.
KM Saqiful Alam is a PhD student at National University of Singapore and an Analytics Adviser for Intelligent Machines Ltd.
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