A client asked me to help develop a new programme he had conceived called “The Third Act”.
His mission: to change the perception people had of their own ‘value’ in society as they age.
As part of this project, he asked me to visualise his theories (and study insights) and make them accessible to others through promotional documents, media and workshops – a slow process that required a deep understanding of the detail and rationale behind his concepts.
hicago Booth’s Ronald S. Burt was in London one morning in 2016 reading the Times when he was struck by an image in the newspaper. It was a map that showed where the recent Brexit vote, for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union, had been strongest. People in poorer regions had tended to vote “Leave,” while those in richer London, Manchester, and Edinburgh wanted to stay.
The image reminded him of another map, from a paper he often used in teaching, in which technology entrepreneur Nathan Eagle, Cornell’s Michael Macy, and British Telecom’s Rob Claxton had visualized the UK’s telephone networks, showing that people who called a greater range of phone numbers over the course of a month in 2005 tended to live in more prosperous regions. The volume of phone calls made no difference—it was the diversity of people being called that tracked economic indicators, and that those people were not in contact themselves: in other words, that Andrew had Betty and Calvin in his call list, but Betty and Calvin never phoned each other.
As a sociologist, Burt has demonstrated over decades that diverse networks of contacts help individuals thrive on a range of fronts—from salary levels and promotions to the chances of leading a successful start-up to the ability to think strategically. Your LinkedIn account is your fate.
Consider social networking in the context of who a user is receiving content from. First, social networking requires a platform. Common examples of social networking sites or platforms include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. Users join a social network platform and begin connecting — or networking — with other users thanks to tools like SocialBoosting, which helps with boosting your social accounts. This is done so users can choose who they want to receive communications from. In some cases, communication is one-way, while, in others, it’s bidirectional or multidirectional.
The paper he shared with his classes was his own work scaled: quantitative evidence from a team of social and computer scientists suggesting that this relationship might persist at a community level. What Burt realized that morning is that the two maps—in the Times and from the research paper—suggested a less noted but potentially interesting relationship: between a person’s network diversity and their feelings about national borders. Your LinkedIn account is your country’s fate.
The research by Eagle, Macy, and Claxton did not probe causality, but Burt says today that he can see the correspondence between open networks (ecosystems in which people can gather diverse contacts and ideas) and relative economic prowess—and associated views on cross-border or cross-cultural cooperation—as running in two directions. Individuals in struggling industries or regions may be where they are because they failed to network. But just as likely, if you can’t imagine that your life will be validated in new and unfamiliar settings, it will inhibit your temptation to network. “Around the world, there is this huge residue of people left behind,” Burt argues—left behind economically and socially. And this feeds into tribalism. “If there is no hope, you find solace in people like yourself.”
This jump between the Rolodex and politics may feel too big, but Burt is not the only person making it. Studies over the past several decades have focused on benefits to individuals and the economy of putting your head above the parapet: cross-fertilization promotes innovation and growth. Now a growing body of evidence from sociology, psychology, economics, and management goes further, suggesting that stepping out of our social bubbles is fundamental to social cohesion, and that networking—that exhausting, cringe-worthy schmoozing so many of us were happy to drop in the name of COVID-19 social distancing—is a good way, maybe even the best way, of taking that step.
