Are you cultivating the right kind of network?

What do Barak Obama, Bill Gates and Cristiano Ronaldo have in common? They all head the league tables for the most number of followers on various social media platforms (Twitter - 130m, LinkedIn - 28m and Instagram - 315m). We live in the age of the network, where it is possible for individuals to communicate with populations the size of the USA. The internet began as a mesh of web pages and servers, but it has become a network of people. As Manuel Castells wrote in 1996, living in a networked society, where physical spaces are replaced by a digital ‘space of flows’, has profound implications: ‘the dominant tendency is toward a horizon of networked, ahistorical space of flows, aiming at imposing its logic over scattered, segmented places, increasingly unrelated to each other, less and less able to share cultural codes’. You might share a house with someone, but the physical proximity cannot influence their behaviour if they are beguiled by globally-networked activities, like gaming.  

Ideas and knowledge have always disseminated globally, but for hundreds for years this was only along established trade and migration routes. Transmission was always at the mercy of the elements. Digital networks enable almost infinite numbers of people to work together instantaneously and simultaneously on common problems. Through networks we can transcend the physical, geographical and temporal constraints placed upon us. Networks make us masters of a parallel virtual universe.

Humans have quickly adjusted to the realities of a networked existence. As the numbers of followers above show, people now derive status and self-esteem from the size and reach of their networks. Every day we also see the immeasurable benefits networks bring, from rapid vaccine development to finding your next employee. The ability to harness positive network effects has become something of a holy grail for digital businesses, where success leads to astronomical valuations.

But recent research by biologists suggests that in our obsession with building ever greater networks, we may also be in danger of losing something fundamental: the ability to create.

What do these creatures have in common: snow leopards,  northern copperhead snakes and Himalayan monal pheasants? They all descend from mountain habitats. For many years, the rich flora and fauna of tropical regions led scientists to conclude that temperature was the key to biodiversity. Now we know that elevation matters more. As Alexander von Humboldt observed on his 1799 expedition to the Andes, the higher the land, the greater the number of species. For mammals, elevation is more than twice as powerful as the effect of temperature change. The biodiversity of mountain regions is astonishing. Although they cover only 27% of our land mass, they support more than 85% of the world’s species of amphibians, birds, and mammals. Only 3% of Europe is mountainous, but 181 of the species in the EU’s Habitats Directive are exclusively or almost exclusively linked to mountains. 130 are mainly found in mountains and another 38 occur in mountains. Isolated mountains are usually teeming with rare species.

There are lots of roles mountains play, from the geology of soil to their impact on climate. The most important is the way they ‘cradle’ diversity. Various ecosystems develop within their protective barrier and, because these systems have nowhere to expand to, they end up becoming ever more complex and diverse, reproducing rapidly and becoming entwined with neighbour systems. This is how new species are created, a kind of accelerated evolution with greater chances of mutation. Imagine if there were no mountains and these vibrant ecosystems were globally networked. With no barriers, they would spread out geographically but they would lose their vitality and potential for creative fusion, lessening biodiversity.   

New ideas and businesses are created in the same way as species. They do not require vast global networks, but quality interactions between nodes. If you want your business to succeed, what you don’t need on day one is access to 100m followers on Twitter. You need a much smaller network with vibrant interactions within it.  You want your staff, advisors and potential customers working together to find create something new and powerful. The energy of the internal nodes must pulse vigorously over a relatively short distance, or it will lose its potency.

This presents a particular challenge in the current era of remote working. A major new study, of 61,182 US Microsoft employees over the first half of 2020, shows a marked decline in the every day collaboration of remote workers. Although still fully networked in ‘the space of flows’, their collaborative efforts became  ‘more static and siloed, with fewer bridges between disparate parts’. People remained connected with the same number of ties, but there were drops in numbers of groups and cross-group ties, and time spent with cross-groups and bridging activities. Networks didn’t grow. Asynchronous communication increased but synchronous communication, the lifeblood of creative fusion, decreased. Perhaps Some the ‘cultural codes’ that come from geographical proximity are important after all.

Networks matter, but how you use them matters most. People need to be working together. Closely, collaboratively and creatively. The signs are that this is most easily achieved by putting employees within the cradle of diversity that your office offers. If this is not possible, you need to find a way to create artificial barriers, digital mountains, to keep people within your business’s creative ecosystem.

If you can confine a vigorous virtual ‘space of flows’ within a physical place, you will unleash your network’s creative potential. And if you end up spawning a new species of snow leopard or snake, run away..! 

UP AND TO THE RIGHT.

Further reading: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01196-4