Light and Fluffy Mumbo Jumbo Learning

This is sort of a follow up to yesterday’s post on ROI. I have heard it before many times “The ‘social’ part of all of this new movement is really too much.” “Actually, what good is all this. Can it be proven?” “This is a fad that will pass or will burst like Internet 1.0.”

Could all of this be overvalued? Possibly I must admit. Life changing remenents from Internte 1.0, however, still exist and has been the framework for part of what modern society is like today. So shall this be, in the least (I personally believe it will be more rather than less).

One of my favorites to read, Andrew McAfee, recently posted information that really rung true for me. One question I had was “Do all these loose connections between people really add up to better information, more learning, better business execution?” From his thoughts I have to answer, “Yes.” It comes in the form of “The Strength of Weak Ties.”

The strong ties we have with each can produce powerful ideas, concepts, products, etc. But strong ties generally won’t help us much when we need to get out of what we all know into something that we don’t know. For example, let’s say we all know about E-Learning and we can talk a lot about it, becoming more and more proficient in this area. Think of a magazine focusing there, brining in experts. We all learn from each other and pat each other on the back. But what if we need new information that is outside of our knowledge or path of future knowledge? What do we do then? That is where our weak connections come in.

Those weak connections allow us to bridge the community gap. If I have a lot of weak connections I am able to step into another community, glean some information and be the better for it. These weak ties foster innovation and learning.

From Andrew’s Post:

A tidy summary of SWT’s conclusion is that strong ties are unlikely to be bridges between networks, while weak ties are good bridges. Bridges help solve problems, gather information, and import unfamiliar ideas. They help get work done quicker and better. The ideal network for a knowledge worker probably consists of a core of strong ties and a large periphery of weak ones. Because weak ties by definition don’t require a lot of effort to maintain, there’s no reason not to form a lot of them (as long as they don’t come at the expense of strong ties).

Subsequent research has explored whether Granovetter’s hypotheses and conclusions apply within companies, and they appear to be quite robust. My former HBS colleague Morton Hansen, for example, found that weak ties helped product development groups accomplish projects faster. Hansen, Marie Louise Mors and Bjorn Lovas further showed that weak ties helped by reducing information search costs. And Daniel Levin and Rob Cross found that the benefits of weak ties were amplified if knowledge seekers trusted that information sources were competent in their fields.

We develop a greater potential for learning when we create more weak ties.

How are you creating weak ties? What kinds of tools are you using to do this?