Social Glass

Andrew McAfee makes an insightful point about the value of social networking within the enterprise. He discusses the strength of weak ties and shows how casual relationships broaden the diversity of knowledge available to a knowledge worker. Strong ties result from “long-term, frequent, and sustained interactions”, whereas weak ties arise “from infrequent and more casual” interactions.

Given that knowledge workers “A”, “B” and “C” work for a given company, McAfee goes on to show that:

This might be a good thing in many ways, but it’s bad news if A needs a piece of knowledge that she can’t find inside her own friendship circle. Because of the overlap, B’s circle is likely to be redundant with A’s, and so unhelpful to her. In other words, her tie to B does her little good in her search for knowledge. If A and C have a weak tie, however, many of C’s friends are likely to be strangers to A, and so are good resources as she looks to inform herself.

I’m a visual learner and have drawn a simple diagram to illustrate this point. It shows that knowledge workers A and B, who share a strong tie and have a substantial overlap in their social networks, have access to a non-redundant group of knowledge workers through a weak tie between A and C. This relationship broadens the scope of information access for all groups, and this is very important for companies that rely on their knowledge workers to innovate.