While its origins might be more technical, the term networking has stretched into the human realm, and with the advent (and overuse) of the term Social Networking, has raised our sensitivities about its meaning. In its most neutral sense, a network is a collection of connected resources that share and exchange and economize together. If you think about the network of people around you, hopefully it’s a vision of something supportive, a chain of people who sustain and inspire you and connect you to a community.
Networking has some less than positive connotations. Someone who networks too much can be perceived as superficial, a collector of business cards, a name-dropper. Picture the person shaking your hand at a cocktail party, looking over your shoulder to see if there’s anyone more important or more connected that they should be talking to instead of you. That’s a networker, in the most pejorative sense.
But the network of people around you is an important resource. This pool of who you know, and who they know – and all the accumulation of collective knowledge of the people within your reach – can make a difference in your ability to do the things you dream of doing.
Dr. Zella King is a researcher who studies social networks, and wonders about how to maximize their value and impact. She says that networking is not about schmoozing, it’s about how you collect people and connect with and harness their brain-power.
During a short workshop called Design Your Ideal Creative Network, delivered at CREA, the European Creativity Conference, she cited a recent blog post by Daniel Pink about research conducted by NYU and Cornell University. The study shows that people tend to produce faster and more creative solutions when they’re solving problems for other people than they do when working on their own challenges. That’s one reason, King suggests, that it pays to be deliberate about how you treat your network. The people you know might be more creative about approaching your problems than you are.
Think about it. When you decide to ask for help with a problem or creative challenge, the first place you’re likely to go is your inner circle of colleagues and friends. But if you talk to the same people about the same things – and usually we do – you’re likely to get the same responses. King suggests going beyond the people who are easy to talk to, expanding your network by asking, “Who else should I talk to?” And after that, “Who else might I talk to?” By cultivating these weaker ties – the mere acquaintances, people whom you see less frequently or people you hardly know – you’re more likely stumble upon other perspectives and questions that stimulate lateral thinking and possibly lead to fresh, novel solutions.
This is where social networking sites like Linked-In, Facebook, Ning, Bēhance, Twitter and Yammer can fuel the innovation process. The smart social networkers aren’t just tweeting about what they had for breakfast, they’re looking for links and posing questions and asking the people in their network to connect them to potential creative resources. This kind of open innovation and crowd-sourcing is changing the way companies innovate by changing who they talk to about their biggest challenges, and how.
By changing the way you use your network, you’ll change the conversation in a way that’s more likely to lead to unusual connections and solutions. “There is unsqueezed potential in your network,” King says. “By exploring the weaker ties, you might find more creative ideas.”
Intelligently harnessing your social network to stimulate creativity is one of KnowInnovation’s themes for the year. If you would like to help us explore the topic, please leave a comment, or get in touch.
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Know Further: Follow Zella King’s new blog, The Social Life of Ideas or look at her video about analyzing creative networks. Here’s an extremely thorough summary of top social networking sites and who to connect to within them. Get a better view of your own networks using socilab. If you’re in the mood to read a “how to” book, try The Ten Commitments of Networking.