Tag: network

Kondo-ing Your LinkedIn Network

Marie Kondo is having a moment (to be fair, her moment may have already passed but I wouldn’t know, I am usually late to the cultural party) and both she and a joyless (in fact depressing) connection request on LinkedIn got me to thinking about doing a KonMari “de-clutter” of my LinkedIn network.

So, I have decided to start a new tradition this year: spring cleaning of my LinkedIn account. From this year onwards, every year in May, I will purge LinkedIn of 10% of my connections. As of this writing, that means about 110 links are going to be on the chopping block. We’ll see if each following year I’m netting an increase or a decrease. I am guessing that it will be a net decrease in connections from here on out.

Don’t get me wrong, I find a lot of value in LinkedIn. I use it 2 – 3 times per week searching for someone or researching a company. The service is indispensable when I am hiring for a position, and potential clients have found me there when I could not be reached in another manner. Overall, LinkedIn is a net positive for me, so then why actively reduce the number of my connections there?

Biases Against Disconnection
Before I answer, let me point out that the LinkedIn deck is stacked against the removal of connections. Notice how easy it is to ask for and get a connection on the service? You’re even given buttons to reply with stock phrases such as “thanks” as if the saved two seconds worth of typing is a value. The frictionless-ness of connection is one of the reasons there’s a spam epidemic on the platform. My rule is never to accept a connection request for unsolicited services. I will accept connections from unknown people if they are in a market or company I’m interested in. This requires a certain amount of diligence because so many connection requests come in looking legitimate. Disconnecting later on means searching for a contact and then unlinking them which is an extra effort. The effort is nowhere near as easy as connecting, and the system is set up that way on purpose. Taken all together, this means that we all probably have far more connections than are useful. All those dead-end links languishing in the “contact list closet” is merely hoarding. De-cluttering will increase the efficiency of the network.

The logic for keeping a connection is that someday, you might need that link, so you let it stay. This is a bit like saying you’re going to eventually use those college textbooks sitting in a box in your garage. Consider this: a useless connection the very definition of a waste of time. LinkedIn’s sole purpose is business networking (although some might argue its purpose is to promote feel-good platitudes on our timelines)—it’s specifically built to help people start and maintain business connections that can be mutually beneficial. Any link, therefore, promotes itself as a utility—it is by its very nature a willingness to connect in turn, to be helpful. So if you are not connecting, not willing to join, or (as we shall see) promoting a false sense of connection, you are as far as the platform is concerned, “friction.”

No Tokimeku
Which brings me to what happened last week. I asked for an introduction to a company from one of my connections. If you research a company on LinkedIn, you can sort your accepted relationships to see how well you are connected to people who work at the company you’re interested in. If you’re not directly connected, you can look at second order connections to see how difficult it may be to score an introduction. For me, if it goes to third or fourth connections to get there, I give up using LinkedIn for an introduction—it’s just too many jumps. So here I was trying to get an introduction to a company and, luckily, I had a direct contact which showed connections to multiple senior executives. This contact was not a person I knew at all, he was a random inbound request I had accepted expressly on the chance that someday I might want access to his relationships. My need for an intro meant our time had arrived.

Introductions ≠ Recommendations
My contact emailed me back after several days telling me that, actually, he really didn’t know anyone at my target company, and besides, he wasn’t comfortable making a recommendation for someone (that would be me) he didn’t know. This gave me pause. Why on earth was this guy on LinkedIn in the first place? Despite what his profile showed, he clearly had no deep connection to the company and the executives there. He also had been the one to reach out to me for a link. Did he think we were connected for a reason other than networking? Was he looking forward to clicking on a button to wish me a happy work anniversary? Secondarily, I never asked for a recommendation which meant he thought that all introductions were tantamount to an endorsement (they aren’t). In short, our connection had no value either way. Now consider the time wasted on my side as well as the delusion created by the platform that showed a reliable connection that was, in fact, nonexistent. This is worse than an old sweater taking up space in a closet; it’s like me thinking that moth-eaten thing is something I can really wear repeatedly, and I wear it. There are connections we know are dead ends, and then there are those that at a quick glance, “spark no joy.” They all must go.

Block Away
Did you know you can actively block someone on LinkedIn? When you block a person, you cease to exist on the platform for them, as they do for you. This is done via settings in your profile, and it is a handy and underused feature. Block away, I say. Remember, you’re kicking a blocked profile out of your network. If they search for you, it’s as if you’re not on the platform. Conversely you can’t see their connections either, but you’re doing the blocking so why do you care? Blocking is a more drastic step than simply disconnecting someone, but sometimes it is necessary. My basic rule is: if I don’t want to do business with you under any circumstances in the “real world” why am I allowing the possibility of a connection on LinkedIn? In fact, what am I tacitly endorsing by keeping those connections in my network? What does a link to someone I do not want to do business with actually say about me? These connections are 100% joyless, so out they go too.

Clear out the Clutter
I know for some delinking large portions of their network is equivalent to a favorite chair being taken to Goodwill, but trust me, in the long-run the renewal will be worth it. I’ve written before in my blog (here) about the fallacy of Dunbar’s Number and network compression effects. The simple fact is, those people in your existing network that have “high betweenness centrality” are known to you, and you won’t be severing those links. Your personal network will reroute around any holes you create by disconnecting. This means you aren’t likely to be losing anything at all when you undertake a spring cleaning. I’m willing to bet the contrary: an active culling of connections will make my network more efficient, and that will make my work more efficient in turn. Give it a try: Kondo your network.

Network Compression

Human beings are (among other things) compression machines. Every day we are confronted by massive amounts of information, for which we only can deal with a small fraction. Humans take those fractions, snippets of data over time, and construct a seamless mental narrative. We decompress these snippets so effortlessly that the gaps in our information stream never seem to appear.

Take the simple act of blinking. The average person blinks 15-20 times per minute. Many of us were taught that this autonomic act is there to help us spread lubricants across our eyes to keep them from drying out. However, the frequency of blinking is far more than is required for moist eyes. The math shows our eyes are closed due to blinking for about 10% of our entire day. Think about that: in the last hour you did not see anything for about 6 minutes, and I’ll bet you never noticed.

Science is starting to show that we use the blink as a mental “rest,” turning off sight so that we can process the information mentally. Visually, our brains are constantly discarding data not deemed necessary for survival. Something moving across the visual field immediately gets our attention, but we gloss over the detail in a static image. A repeated touch, smell or sound can happen enough for it to no longer be novel, and we quickly learn to ignore it. You may have noticed how overstimulation of any sense can be overwhelming to the point where we shut down it down—an effort to reduce its cognitive load. In each of these instances and hundreds more, we are absorbing high bandwidth data and filtering it down to something that can be used to reconstruct a mental model of our surroundings. Show this human algorithm to a computer scientist, and they will tell you that that is data compression (actually they’d say it is “lossy compression,” but that’s another topic altogether). The thing about humanity is we are compressing all the time; it is a central fact of our survival. We even do it with friends.

There is a somewhat famous number in social networking theory called “Dunbar’s Number.” Dunbar’s Number was hypothesized in the 1990s by anthropologist Robin Dunbar who spent a lot of time watching monkeys team up in groups. As a result of his studies, Dunbar speculated that the practical limit on the number of stable relationships any one of us can have is about 150 people. Put another way, our brains can only maintain relationships with 150 friends. Now go back and look at how many “friends” you have on FaceBook! Note that Dunbar is not talking about mere acquaintances, but actual friends—a cohesive group.

Based only on my own experience, the effort required to keep up with 150 close friends seems exhausting. Do I know 150 people who might be friends? Sure. Can I construct, only in my mind, a network of 150 people I care about enough to be engaged with over time? Yes. Yet, how do I do this without it becoming a constant (and tiring!) daily activity? The key is network compression. I do not need to know the details every day of every one of those 150 friends, I only need to engage with a fraction of that number. From that fraction, I can easily reconstruct whole portions of my more substantial network.

Think about it. Almost every one of us has a couple of critical friends who are super “tapped in”—they’re the first person we reach out to when we want to figure out what’s happening. We contact that key friend and that “node” in our network helps us reconstruct that portion the group of friends they, in turn, are connected to (a term used by network theorists is that our key friend has “high betweenness centrality,” but that’s another topic too). The fact is, (and having looked at the literature I can’t find anyone else saying this or I’d cite it) our compressed network topology is not 150, it’s probably more like 20 or 30 or even less. That group is a “compression” of a much larger group—I’d guess we all have an uncompressed number far more extensive than 150. In this way we’re always 2-3 degrees of separation from our whole network — this is much less of a cognitive load. The problem is that over time that network becomes a highly filtered input into our worldview. It becomes possible over time for us to have lots of friends and actually know less about what is really happening around us.

Which brings us back to why you should care to spend time with those you might not otherwise want to. You see, over time your network has evolved to compress even the data it shares amongst itself. Do you have a friend who can finish your sentences before you do? How about get-togethers where you are sharing old war stories? Can you accurately guess where one of your close friends will come in on a debate? Do your friends know how to push your buttons, or know when to call just when you need it? Are there some things “you just don’t talk about?” These are all the behavioral outputs of compression. Over time, we get less and less uncompressed data the more time we spend exclusively in our network. In effect, our worldview becomes increasingly curated (compressed) by a social network purpose-built to reduce bandwidth while reinforcing pleasure and survival. Over time, we learn less and less about the “truth”—only learning the truth we have built a network to see. This is self-reinforcing because our network feeds back upon itself. Wonder why internet memes work so well? They circulate and amplify in social networks designed to “see” them.

Friends are great, I am not advocating getting rid of them. I am, however, a big advocate of going to the edge of my network and learning something different. It is worth the cognitive load that comes with getting uncompressed data. In this context, “cognitive load” is the uncomfortable feeling we all get when introducing ourselves, or making a new friend. Try it. Be random. As your Lyft driver how business is going and then listen. Buy someone you know “only a little bit” lunch and get to know them a bit better. Invite a new face into a regular weekly meeting. Volunteer somewhere. Join a book club. You don’t have to do this all the time, but make network discomfort a part of your routine by going to the edge. You might be surprised at what you’ve been missing.