Cut your friends, increase your effectiveness

It is commonplace to complain about the Internet overwhelming us with information ... now Nick Booth suggests that it may do the same with relationships, and we need to be a bit ruthless in who we want to know. In Web 2.0 or Why My Head Hurts he writes:

We have this image of other superhumans managing hundreds of fruitful relationships in dozens of countries, which is of course a myth. In my opinion those who heed common sense may well find the most productive ways to exploit the potential of web 2.0.

Nick then goes on to suggest that however fancy the technology, we have some built in limitations:

Research from the early 1990’s found a correlation between the size of a human neocortex and how many others we can succesfully relate to. Evolutionary Psychologist Professor Robin Dunbar of Liverpool University and others predicted that human’s would be able to maintain about 150 acquaintances – and this figure matched research on the size of neolithic villages (‘primitive’ comunities tend to split once they reach a figure of 150 members) and more modern personal networks.

There are substantial dangers in ignoring this, says Nick, focussing on the issue for nonprofits:

In a web 2.0 world voluntary organisations risk wasting huge amounts of precious effort on unproductive relationships with people who can now effortlessly associate themselves with your cause (press here if you want to join our ‘club’).

The real challenge is to build relationships which allow a virtuous circle of support and energy. This not only creates a huge pool of talent to tap, it also motivates those working immediately inside the organisation.

Nick gives some examples of choosing friends with care, making them work for as place in your circuit, and weeding for higher yield. People will thank you for it, because they will get one of your 150 attention slots. Of course you will often need to go beyond the 150 - and that's where it is important to know people in your 150 prepared to share their network.

Imagine a situation where you know similar organisations with equally potent networks of supporters. When you need to tap into a wider network for help these groups will be far more powerful than a database listing the email addresses of thousands of indifferent people.

There's the rub. Will other people open up their networks? Or will they carry on with their own empire-building?

Over at the NCVO ICT foresight blog, Megan Griffiths, after quoting Nick, takes some comfort from suggestions that the technology and associated information may be changing our motivations towards greater collaboration. Megan writes:

Back to the brain, and I was recently reading a piece on how technology is changing the manager’s brainin which Susan Greenfield argues that “the massive growth of electronicmedia is fundamentally altering our brains and central nervous systems” and that “as people’s brains evolve, their motivations andaspirations will shift accordingly. Our standards of satisfaction andfulfilment may be very different in the future”.

Adding ....Of particular interest to our social networking strand is this excerpt:

“Weassume that people want to work for other people - but that may not bethe case in the future. At the moment a lot of our pleasure is derivedfrom status, but I think soon that will be challenged - people justwon’t be motivated in that way. It’s just another arms race and I thinkwe’ll evolve to a point where people aren’t so status-obsessed.”

Thiscould spell the end for traditional, monolithic corporations, she says.As the various rationale for forming large companies - for example, toreduce the cost of gathering in materials - become less important,smaller, more virtual units will emerge that are independent but workthrough a variety of networks of other organisations, she insists.

All this is by way of contribution to discussion about social networking and nonprofits, set in process by NCVO and also under discussion at this blog. What's evident from the discussion so far is the benefit of having a group of people - brought together by Megan - prepared to offer insights into social networking drawn from their personal experience and their sifting of information on their personal radar. The Web gives us thousands of references on social networking ... we make sense of all that information through the filtering and enhancement offered by people we know, or gradually get to know through those exchanges.