Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy - Marissa King - The Science of Social Networks - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 217]

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Starting point is 00:02:41 investment decisions. Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions and the securities discussed in this podcast. My guest this week is Marissa King, a professor of organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management. I was fascinated by Marissa's work after coming across her book, Social Chemistry, decoding the elements of human connection earlier this year. Our conversation covers the three.

Starting point is 00:03:05 types of social networking styles, the surprising impact of COVID on social networks, and what her research tells us about building high-performing teams. This episode covers many topics I haven't explored before that I find fascinating. I hope you enjoy my great conversation with Marissa King. Our mission with these episodes is to provide access to the best ideas and people in business and investing. We will soon be significantly expanding the scope of this effort. To make it possible, at Colossus, we're expanding the team in hiring two critical early roles. The first position will be our lead mobile software developer. This person will lead the development of our mobile applications, which will change how people learn together. The second position will be our lead designer. Because the

Starting point is 00:03:47 existing team lacks UX and U.I design experience, this person will have a blank slate to creatively design new applications from the ground up. To learn more about both roles, visit join colossus.com forward slash careers. Now, on to the show. So Marissa, thank you so much for doing this with me today. I came across your book from a past guest, Priya Parker, loved it, read it in a day or two, and I've really been looking forward to talking to you. Before we get into the subject of that book, which is, I think, very broad and will apply to just about everybody listening, I'd actually love for you to begin by giving us the origin story of your career and the topics that you've spent a lot of your time researching and studying, because I think they sort of form the soil that then

Starting point is 00:04:30 allows the rest of the conversation to happen. Most of my career, trying to investigate and understand and why we see things that look like large-scale social epidemics that are actually very individual in origin. So if you begin by thinking about the autism epidemic, which is where I started to thinking about mental health medication, use, anxiety, depression, and more recently substance abuse disorders, I spent a lot of time documenting, like why do we see these large-scale things that look like epidemics, even though we know that they're not contagious? What underlies all of those phenomenon is that our individual level behaviors aggregate aggregate through social networks and then cascade to create large-scale societal shifts.

Starting point is 00:05:10 And what happened over time is I began to see signature after signature of the same social signature across a wide range of context. And what I realized is what's common to all of these or what's one commonality is just a lack of social connection. Eventually I got sick of pointing out, here's the problem, here's another problem, here's another problem. It was lots of policy solutions, but I also wanted to offer at the individual level, what's something that we all can do in our day-to-day life to help, whether you're struggling with mental health issues or trying to help support someone struggling with addiction.

Starting point is 00:05:40 Can you say a little bit more about maybe we'll dig into a few of these examples. What was it about autism that was initially appealing and maybe put some numbers or some evidence around what the actual trend has been? That seems like a particularly important one. Maybe walk us through that one as a case study for some of these ideas. We shift back 15 or 20 years and think about what was happening during that time is you thought this is a rapid escalation in the prevalence of autism, which is a very individual level disorder. So you're seeing really almost exponential growth in the number of kids in particular who are being

Starting point is 00:06:13 diagnosed. But what was also surprising about this finding is there was a huge amount of variance geographically and where you're seeing cases. So in some neighborhoods and communities, you would see this rapid escalation. And then in others, nothing really was happening. And as you start to think about that, there's lots of things that could help explain this. It could have been an environmental toxicine. There are lots of things that could be happening at the local level.

Starting point is 00:06:37 But what I knew from someone who studies health and contagion and diseases is that there's also something that's very peculiar about the social signature, the rate of growth. So if you look at the same thing, if you see product and marketing going viral, it had the exact same signature. And so what I was interested in is what was happening on the ground. And much of what actually was happening was simply increase in awareness or greater understanding of the ability to identify that was actually happening from parents talking to other parents. And that word of mouth contagion was really critical for explaining why you see this rapid increase in prevalence. And if you look over time, you'll see that exact same social signature and lots of different things that seem like they're being contagious, but it's actually just the social networks or social dynamics

Starting point is 00:07:23 that are allowing for greater identification that are really driving that phenomenon. That's fascinating. Just to play that back to make sure I have it right, it's not likely that the actual instances of something like autism are strangely geographically concentrated, but rather just the awareness of autism as a thing to be considered or potentially applied to somebody as a diagnosis or something is based on this social function. Am I framing that right? Exactly. In our work, we found that that social function, accounted for about 30% of the increase in prevalence. So there's certainly other things that are going on that are actually increasing

Starting point is 00:07:59 like through prevalence in the population, but a big part of what was actually identification and desigmatization. And what about for something like mental health and substance abuse, again, both like the social awareness lens, but also the actual underlying prevalence. Has the prevalence of those things risen or is it just our language and awareness of it that makes it look as though the prevalence is higher today than 50 years ago or something. It's both, particularly once you start to move into thinking about things like anxiety or depression or substance use of disorders, certainly the underlying prevalence is increasing.

Starting point is 00:08:33 But at the same time, that you're also seeing a designization so people are more willing to talk about it, which is also fueling the societal level of recognition. And importantly, our ability to treat it, what I became interested in over time is both of these processes. So I deeply care about identification and access to treatment. But at the same time, there's this peculiar question of like, why are we seeing this true increase in underlying prevalence across these conditions that are in some ways related, but also in some ways not related?

Starting point is 00:09:02 And to address that was at the heart of really why I started to focus on individual networks and how can we think about what we're doing at the individual level help address this true underlying prevalence, the true increase, not just the identification piece. Was there a specific moment in your early research that was like a eureka or aha moment for this understanding? There was predates like thinking about autism. It perhaps seemed tangential. But when I was in college, I was assigned as part of a class to go to the WTO protest in Seattle. So we were just told to go to a protest and like really had no idea what I was in for.

Starting point is 00:09:38 And what I saw there was this individual showing up. The environmentalist was huge butterflies. You had union leaders. You had people from all different walks of life. And they came together in this moment of profound collective transformation. How do you get these movements, whether it's a social movement like the protests and the WTO? I've also studied the anti-slavery movement.

Starting point is 00:10:01 All of those have a very similar pattern when we think about collective dynamics. And that moment where I'm like, oh, there's something that happens when groups of individuals come together that produce something that's totally different. different than those individuals in isolation. Could you describe maybe the broad framework nature of that pattern? What is most commonly shared across all these disparate kinds of growth of an idea? How would you generalize that pattern? What we know from close to three decades of research in the social sciences is you can

Starting point is 00:10:33 break down social networks. What's common to all of these is they propagate on social networks. So we can think about our networks, just the traces of interaction that connect us all. And those creases can actually be boiled down into three fundamental elements. So I call these in my book Broker's expansionist and conveners when you're applying them to the individual. But by starting to understand those three very basic fundamental pieces, it's really what makes the world small. So if you think about in the 1950s, Stanley Milgram was doing experiments where he mailed letters to people to try to see like how small is the world. And that study led to this phenomenon of we're all connected by six degrees of separation.

Starting point is 00:11:11 And that idea has been shown to be true over time. If you look back to Milgram's experiments early on to more recent research in the 2000s, we're all still connected by the same six degrees of separation. That's fundamentally unchanged. But why we're all connected by six degrees of separation and what allows this propagation and wide-scale takeoffs in social changes is if you understand these three basic pieces and how they fit together, those pieces have to be in place for anything really to have these large-scale cascades or transformations.

Starting point is 00:11:42 It's a great excuse to talk about the unique aspects of the three categories. And not only the role they play, but the types of people that make up these three different. So you already listed them. So conveners, brokers and expansionists are the three categories. You tell me, which do you think is the most appropriate to start with? And maybe we can dive a little bit into each. We can start with expansionists because that's oftentimes when people have in mind. When they're thinking about networks, they're often thinking about networking.

Starting point is 00:12:06 And that's not all there is to networks. But expansionists simply just have extraordinarily large networks. So if we think about most people know on average around 650 to 900 people, but expansionists know it's magnitudes of order more. So oftentimes it's helpful to apply this to your own life. So to figure out if you're an expansionist, you can ask yourself, like, how many people do you know name Alan? How many people do you know name Emily? And if it's two or more, you're likely in this expansionist category. What's really important about expansion is if they have a lot of power, they have a lot of influence, and they have a lot of reach.

Starting point is 00:12:37 they have this ability to really create change. Importantly, I'm thinking about from the context of networks, what they also do is they create a lot of randomness. You kind of need this randomness to get connection across groups because most people aren't expansionist. Most of us actually fall into other different network types. So if we think about a second type, conveners, a convening network structure is very different. Their friends tend to know one another.

Starting point is 00:13:05 If you imagine having a barbecue or a birthday party, like, would everyone there know each other? If they do, then you're likely a convener. Worked at the same job for a lot of time. And that creates a lot of trust and reputational benefits. The downside is their echo chambers. These groups are often self-insular. They're not talking to one another. So if we start to think about like, how do these pieces fit together?

Starting point is 00:13:26 Because you need all of them to create large-scale social change. The benefit of that convening like structures, you can get ideas to catch on. If you're trying to create behavioral change, even if I'm trying to, I don't know, start going to gym more often. Having that type of behavioral reinforcement allows people to really adopt behavioral change to adopt new ideas. But they tend to be insular. So having this expansionist as part of this system is really critical. And then the third type of brokers. And broker's hallmarker signature is really they connect social worlds that normally wouldn't come together.

Starting point is 00:14:00 And because of that, they tend to be more innovative. they tend to be more creative. And that ability to bridge is also really critical. So if we go back to thinking about the WTO protests, the ability to have the environmental groups talking to unions, it was really, really critical. And it's brokers who connect those worlds. And that has benefits for them,

Starting point is 00:14:20 but it also has benefits for society. And so you really need all three of those pieces because the way they fed together in many ways are this magic puzzle that allows things to take off. Is there a good acid test? You mentioned the acid test of Alan and Emily, the party, if everyone knows each other. Is there a similar acid test for brokers? I'm a broker.

Starting point is 00:14:38 I should self-disclose. It's an interesting group. And one of the things that is really the finding of a broker is that you can ask yourself, are you good at making impromptu speeches on things you know nothing about? So if you answer yes to that question, you may be a broker. And the reason that that's true is that property is actually allows you to talk to different groups very fluently, which allows that connection to happen. This is also a diagnostic for a person.

Starting point is 00:15:02 personality characteristic known as high self-monitoring, which is really like how chameleon-like are you? And it's funny, when people think about their own networks, if you ask people like, what personality trait wouldn't matter most, people are usually like, oh, extroversion and introversion should be the most important. But it actually turns out this chameleon-like property of high self-monitor is by far the biggest predictor of what type of network you'll have. How would you describe a low self-monitor for brokers, a high self-monitor? Low self-monitor would be someone who's the same. They believe, like, you have a fundamental sense of self, that you should be the same in every. situation that you don't really change. I like these three categories. Now, I'm curious as you were

Starting point is 00:15:36 coming up with these ideas, what was on the cutting room floor and what were the empirics behind these things? Like, give us a sense of sort of the research angle on why these three categories, maybe some other category you considered but left out. I'm just always fascinated by who you arrived at three categories that make a lot of sense. We'll dive into them a bit more. But yeah, I'd love to hear the sort of research behind it. Really, I'm a network scientist. So when I look at the world, I see connections between people. Like, if I'm sitting in a restaurant and trying to figure out what's going on, I'm like looking at who's talking to who and mapping those connections. And we have the ability to do that with real world social interactions. And this has become increasingly

Starting point is 00:16:12 possible, particularly with trace data. So you can take email network exchanges and map those networks. You can put wearable sensors on people and map those face interactions. And we've been able to do this for decades, but our ability to do it more effectively has increased over time with increased data availability, but essentially we can create maps. And these maps really are to tell you what your social life has been like leading up to this moment, but also where you're likely to be headed. And based on just natural constraints of how human interaction work, there's actually a pretty fixed number of characteristics that you can use to characterize these maps. And in part, if you think about what are some of the most important characteristics, we all, no matter who you are,

Starting point is 00:16:53 have a fixed amount of time. That means that if you're thinking about this from an investment standpoint, you can either allocate that a fixed amount of time that everybody has into a smaller number of relationships that are deeper in nature, or you can have lots and lots of connections, but those are necessarily going to be thinner types of connections. And so we all can only be in one place. It really defines a lot of what our networks look like. And so these tradeoffs between space and time and how we invest them, create these three fixed sets by which we can characterize most people's networks,

Starting point is 00:17:23 which in the world I see are really just maps. It's really cool to think about the data that now exists on social networks, inferred networks via physical location, et cetera. What in your empirical work in those data sets were some of the surprising or most memorable moments of discovery? Oh, and that's surprising things is how reliable people are in the sense that you can, with an amazing level with which you can predict the likelihood that something is going to happen by just knowing these simple forms.

Starting point is 00:17:57 You can predict everything from who's likely to engage in fraud and malfeasance to who's likely to be promoted. There's something extraordinarily powerful about this way of seeing the world. It's like we have these spaces that have incredible predictive ability, but yet no one knows what they look like. We all have networks, but it's so rare that we know what they actually look like, even though they have this extraordinary power. And I think the other piece that I get really blows my mind, right, is that we can think about

Starting point is 00:18:28 this constellations as having important projectors of our life, but also the extent to which they literally get under our skin. So when you're in certain types of networked interactions, you can actually measure cortisol levels, which are a marker of stress and see the change based on the type of interacting your eyes. It has a physical effect on your body. So that connection between this like micro level physicality to these like larger scale predictive outcomes of like where your career's going. There's something to me just kind of like magical about the whole thing. If you're a network scientist and network science is sort of a field,

Starting point is 00:19:00 what are the major like subcategories of that field that you think are most important? So you've talked a lot about importance of interaction and the types of interaction. Maybe that's the major subcategory or one. What are the other sort of like, you know, you're teaching a course on this. Like what would be the other chapter titles of learning network science? I usually break it down into these different levels of interaction. So some people are very interesting.

Starting point is 00:19:23 interested in the micro levels of interaction. So in a moment to moment basis, what effect does these interactions have on your cognitive capacity, your physical response? So that's one group of people. Some people are interested in very much on like, what does your individual network? What does your network type? What implications does that have for your mental health, your physical health, your longevity, your professional success? And then there's a whole other group of people or a way of seeing this who are really interested in what's happening in organization. So thinking about how do you design organizations, how do you design work in a way to more effectively harness these informal interactions? The final group are the people who are interested in these large-scale

Starting point is 00:20:02 transformations. And I think what's really cool is trying to think about connecting across them. And because of just the way that science works, people usually stick in their own little corner of the world. I think the thing that's really powerful is thinking about how this works across all these different levels. I'd love to pick a couple ideas or points from each of the categories. And maybe before we go into the organizational and almost like societal level change to spend a few more minutes on the individual, you're on ramp into this space being things like autism, mental health, substance abuse that in many ways the book, Social Chemistry is almost like something to give back to suggest ways people might avoid some of those outcomes through better

Starting point is 00:20:43 social connections. I'd love to talk a little bit about that. Things that you've seen in your research that suggest better potential outcomes based on behaviors that we choose. And I don't know if the right way to do this is by the three types. Should an expansionist do more or less of this? But you tell me, what kind of have you learned about what makes for something that people could actually sink their teeth into and go do to improve the nature of their social connections? I think one of the pieces that really drew me to this, as you mentioned, was thinking about, all right, what's common to all these struggles? And really at the heart of that was thinking about this just loneliness that so many people struggle with.

Starting point is 00:21:19 And that sense of loneliness and social isolation is something that we have all had, unfortunately, the opportunity to experience during the pandemic. Everyone now has some ability to empathize with what the consequences of a lack of social connection are. What I try to draw attention to my work, just a first-order way of thinking is that a lot of people are actually very, very resistant to the idea of thinking intentionally about their own relationships. And this makes a lot of sense. Our relationships are in many ways. One of the things that we hold most sacred. So for a lot of people, there's this just natural

Starting point is 00:21:53 aversion to thinking intentionally about their relationships. There's great work actually by Tiziana Kacharo, who's at Rotman and Francesca Gino at Harvard and their colleagues, which actually shows that even just this idea, if I ask you to recall a professional networking event, right? And literally it makes you want to watch their hands and think of cleansing words shows just how strong this moral aversion, this idea of networking is. And networking really is just this intentionality combined with this emphasis on meeting new people. We all have networks already. And like what I try to do in my work is show people that it's actually really, really critical to think intentionally about our relationships, not in a way necessarily that we're

Starting point is 00:22:33 like trying to get something out of them, but both for ourselves in terms of emotional support. if that's what you're struggling with and particularly thinking about loneliness or that type of mental health struggles or if it is in a professional context of whether it's growth and development, that ability and willingness really to think honestly and reflect on our relationships is something that many, many people aren't willing to do. But the truth is that there's actually extraordinary value in your existing better relationships. The most concrete suggestion I have is actually to invest in and reaffirm your existing relationships. Reach out to someone you haven't talked to in two or three years. We know that that's actually the most effective thing you can do

Starting point is 00:23:12 in terms of harnessing your network. So by thinking in that way and starting to shift your perspective, it's not really beneficial for you, but it's also beneficial to everyone that you're connected to. Maybe we could tick down the three types and hear like the most common pitfalls because investing in the existing network sounds like a very anti-expansionist concept. So maybe the pitfall of being an expansionist is not spending enough time with the people you have made a good connection with or something. So maybe for each, you know, have you found something that they should think about doing more of or less of? I like your phrase of it's about the network, not networking. The thing that matters here is the health of the network itself. So investing in that is probably the best outcome.

Starting point is 00:23:48 So what are the ways do you think those three types could best better invest in their own network? So expansion is, as you mentioned, like the drawback to that type of network is this extraordinarily large network. Is there the people actually who are arguably most at risk for loneliness? There's a story storyteller, chef Gordon, who is one of the most famous managers in Hollywood, he found his deathbed. He thinks he's going to die. And the only person who shows up is his paid assistant, loneliness among the famous. But there's actual real truth to that. And even if we think about the business contacts, we know from lots of research that actually rates of loneliness increase significantly as you move off the organizational hierarchy. Those CEOs have like extraordinarily high levels of loneliness.

Starting point is 00:24:29 thinking about that issue, like one of the best transitions that you can actually make is to think about more like a convener. So conveners have more social support in their network. And arguably for CEOs and people in the C-suite, that transition to think about like, how can I develop an inner circle of people that are truly trusted and are willing to offer me social support is one of the most important transitions you can make. And to do that, it's actually just simply investing more time in a smaller set of relationships. And there in particular, I think it's far easier actually to call on people that you know and trust already, but you may not have seen in some time. Because that trust is already there. And you need to be investing actually more in your existing relationships instead of trying to think about new ones. In particular, one of the easiest ways to do that actually is thinking about how you can give to others. Take on a new mentor, take on a sponsor, help someone else out.

Starting point is 00:25:23 And by helping them out, you're really reaffirming and developing that trust, but also reinvigorating a sense of purpose. I assume that conveners sort of have the opposite problem because you mentioned earlier that they're insular. So is the prescription there maybe like sort of the opposite? Like get out and meet more people. How do you think about conveners? It could be meet new people. But it will drawback to that is this tendency towards group being, or just being in a bubble. And we all have a tendency to affiliate with people, whether it's of the same race or the same gender or people who look like us or think like us.

Starting point is 00:25:55 This is a natural tendency, right? It's known as homophily or the birds of a flood there flock together. So we all do this. But the problem becomes if you have this dense, right network, it becomes amplified. What conveners really want to think about is how can I actually interject more diversity in thought or diversity in representation into this type of network? And one of the ways of best building that is actually just to be curious. If you're meeting someone new, rather than focusing on similarity, which is something we all default to,

Starting point is 00:26:24 think about like, can I be curious and perhaps find an uncommon common commonality that could be a bridge to us, which it will inject more diversity into that type of network. Well, the first two are so good, I have to ask, of course, about brokers too. You said you're a broker yourself, so you'll know this one especially well. Advantages are obvious. You're driven by curiosity. You're prone to connect disparate groups together already. What's the dark side or the downsides of being a broker that could be intentionally improved, let's say? They're often greeted with suspicion. Ron Burt was the famous Network Sociologist says are at risk for reputational assassination.

Starting point is 00:26:58 Because you're between two different worlds, like, are you with this? Are you not with this? That chameleum personality trait can often be perceived as being Machiavellian. And the antidote to that is actually, we know that people who are perceived as empathic brokers don't face this same downfall. If you are in that position, one, it's important just to be cognizant about how you're coming across. And the other piece we know is if you're in that position, you have a choice, essentially.

Starting point is 00:27:24 do you keep people apart to benefit yourself or do you bring people together? There's a lot of research that is actually in that idea about thinking about bringing people together, that their creates benefits, not just the individual worker themselves, but to their organization or community. So two pieces for brokers really are to think, try to be more empathic, engage with each side more and imagine essentially from a perspective taking what are their interests, what are they thinking in this one different world? And then should I just connect these two people that I'm sitting in the middle instead of keeping them apart. One other threesome that you talk about in the book is this idea of people being in the category of secure, anxious, or avoidant. To say a little bit about why that's an

Starting point is 00:28:03 important framework and how it maps on to the rest of what we talked about. In some ways, we've been talking about, how do you change your network? And some of the things we've been talking about focused on changing your behavior. Another really easy way to change your network is like just to change where you're spending your time. That's actually what defines a lot of our network. But what's interesting about thinking about anxious or avoidant are really attachment styles. And these attachment styles are formed very early in your life. So before you're age one, you've developed an attachment style. And that attachment style actually has a strong predictive effect on what your network is likely to look like in adulthood.

Starting point is 00:28:36 So as early as age one in many ways, we're being groomed into certain ways and dispositions from a network perspective. Walk through those different types. So if it's happening that young, what is different between the secure, anxious and avoidance? what are those map onto? So this work goes back to early relationships with caregivers. How this was often early discovered going on was if you essentially left a child in a room and their caregiver walked away, what would be the child's response? The subset of people are securely attached. So they have faith really, right, that their caregiver is going to care for them, that they're going to come back, that they're not really threatened in any way by developing a strong

Starting point is 00:29:15 attachment to that caregiver. And then the thing about anxious or avoidant types, they're types of insecure attachment. So there's someone who's anxiously attached who's like very, very worried and concerned and fearful about developing relationships in general. And avoidant types, it's a reaction to that. Also, that same type of fear. Just leave me alone. I'm okay by myself because there's that fear of actually if you need someone that they're not going to show up for you. Is there meaningful mapping of those attachment types onto the broker-convener expansionist categories that you've observed? Or is that too hard to draw those connections? Attachment styles in many ways are going to be most predictive of how likely someone is to be a convener.

Starting point is 00:29:58 With mapping, a secure attachment style is going to translate more into a convening like network, which really has these benefits of social support. We've got some nice, like, language and groundwork laid about how networks work and the different types of networks, map that on to changes in the world. So we've seen in the last decade the rise of incredibly high velocity social networks and messaging capabilities. We're doing this on Zoom. You're in Idaho. I'm in Connecticut and this is possible and it feels very human. One of the things I've observed during COVID, I don't know which category I'm. I'm probably an expansionist. I know a lot of people. The ability for me to meet more people and feel like I know them a little bit has exploded.

Starting point is 00:30:36 It's just stunning. So I'm just curious how you think about the velocity and the fidelity of interaction and how that changes your view of the world or what it makes you think about. I think you're definitely in the minority there. And I want to come back to that because I actually think it's an interesting way of thinking about how responses may have changed depending on your network type. But if we think about this in general, on average, what's happened during the pandemic. In a study, I compare people's networks a year before let down and then in the midst of it. And what we saw overall is that networks have shrunk by close to 15%, which is around 200 people. So the thing about like that outer layer of our network was really interesting is that that

Starting point is 00:31:18 shrinkage is due almost entirely to a reduction in the size of men's networks. So men's networks have shrunk by close to 30% or 400 people. And women's networks have hardly shrank at all. Wow. Yeah. If you start to dig into that, I mean, one of the first things that that mean, we know for so many different angles that women have far less time, actually during the pandemic, particularly working women who have children. This isn't because women are investing more time in their

Starting point is 00:31:43 relationships. It's actually that they're investing that time quite differently. So men and women just generally tend to both maintain networks differently and they also tend to approach them differently. And those gender differences actually explain women's resilience during this time when women have actually really struggling on so many other fronts. Say a bit more about, I should have asked earlier about the difference between men and women like at a high level, what are the most common differences to their approach to networking? And I want to come back to COVID specifically because that's a fascinating finding. Women and men in general, they tend to develop different types of networks. Also, the returns to different network,

Starting point is 00:32:18 they're quite different. So for instance, women tend to keep their work lives and personal lives separate more. And that separation actually leads them to have. So women tend to be brokers in the sense that they're keeping these separate. So women tend to be brokers. And the benefit of that for women is that they tend to have more work-life balance. The ironic twist of this is actually the returns from a professional standpoint to women from brokerage actually are quite lower than men. Brokering is perceived to be in conflict with the common stereotype of women that they tend to be more communal. In many ways, it's a stereotype backlash that leads to negative consequences for female brokers outside of work-life balance. So men's tendency then, especially in

Starting point is 00:33:03 work and the bleeding of the work network into sort of the personal that COVID, I guess you're just not with the people. So it's just different has created this shrinkage, this massive shrinkage. Do I have that roughly right? Yeah, that's right. In part why that's true is that men tend to maintain their network by doing things together. So men may, I don't know what men do. They go to bar together. They play soccer together. They do whatever men do together. But they tend to maintain ties through shared activities. But during COVID, that's impossible or it's much more difficult versus women actually tend to maintain relationships through conversation. The ability to have conversation has been unimpeded during the pandemic that women's networks and their ability to maintain their social

Starting point is 00:33:42 ties hasn't diminished as much as men. I'll put a plug out there for finding a great place to hike. That's how I do mine. Maybe that's the excuse because everyone's comfortable hiking and nothing else. So a daily hike with a random person plug for that for sure. I'd love to talk now about organizational and what you've learned about, I don't know what the right word is here, like pruning or improving the way that a system and organization is set up. And again, this may be changing quickly based on the mode or method of interaction. But when you study organizations specifically, what changes here? So what is new about what you've learned relative to the more individual level that we've talked about so far? One of the things that's really interesting is we start to shift and think about

Starting point is 00:34:23 organizations, it's surprisingly aware how much organizations invest in trying to understand the social capital within their organizations. So we think about networks as a resource that social capital. We spend a ton of time thinking about human capital, but we really don't think as carefully about social capital. And one of the things that I find most discouraging when it comes to this is it seems like because there's not that much thought being devoted to what's happening in organizations that we tend to just follow trends. So if we were talking, three years ago, the idea of thinking about, like, all right, how do we manage informal relationships and organizations? So many companies were focused on like, oh, let's just build open office

Starting point is 00:35:01 spaces. And sure, there are financial savings to that, but underline that idea really was like, we just have people bump into each other. We're going to have more creativity and innovation. The flip side of this now, like organizations have completely gone on another management trend with, I think we can all just work together virtually and that's just going to work out fine too. And so you see these huge bubbles following of management bads and trends to manage informal relationships, which actually are extraordinary value. But you can't really treat it like that. I mean, even in this most simplistic form, we've seen there are actually three types of very different network that most people have.

Starting point is 00:35:35 In organizations, just aren't attuned to how to leverage that and how to support, within organizations, I think about how do I support someone who's a convener? How do I make the most of that? or if I'm trying to seat a team where I need more trust, how do I do that using these basic network form? It's sort of a mind-blowing idea because one of the most popular ideas out there, I guess, in business right now is the Netflix barraiser concept that you want to focus intently on having the highest quality possible people together and having just a crazy high standard for who you let into the organization. Once the bar is clear, oh, good stuff happens.

Starting point is 00:36:10 I've never heard anyone really talk intentionally about you get 100 great people together, but now they all interact and it's the sum total of those interactions that lead to like the outcome. So I've never thought about it. But like what is interesting here? What does the research suggest are best practices, things to consider? Great people is one thing. But interactions is maybe everything. So what have you learned about those interactions. As you were just describing this trend towards like the Netflix bar razor rate. Like I think of that as just selection. But then we have to think about what's going on in the network. And there's a ton of research. Too many cooks spoil the broth type of phenomenon. And that actually, you don't want a lot of superstars on the same team. Actually, just got off a call from talking to someone who's the head of an emergency department who's describing this exact same problem. He's like, if I put too many fast people in the ED,

Starting point is 00:36:57 the whole department slows down because they start to get bored. This idea that if you just put all the superstars together, you're going to have a great team or a great organization. It's just simply misguided because you need to think about, as you said, what's the optimal sum of those parts with great research also, that was done at Google by Julia Rosaski, which tried to ask the same question. What leads to the highest performing teams at Google? You can't create a team by just putting together the people with the highest individual

Starting point is 00:37:25 performance, you actually have to think very carefully about the collective dynamics and processes that are going on within those teams. So let's imagine a perfect team. If a perfect team is not 10-star, all-star performers, fine for a piece of the pie. I'm sure there is no perfect team, but as we approach perfect teams, what sorts of things do we observe? I don't know sports very well, but I had this idea of, I was going to be like, you can give me any individuals. And if you put this one secret process, which I'll get to a moment together, I can make a superstar team. And then I started thinking about like the bad news bears or

Starting point is 00:37:56 whatever that whole stories. I'm like, oh, actually I wouldn't push it that part. Like, you do need competent individuals, right? But the idea of a team, like what you're trying to do on a team is you actually trying to put together a diverse group of individuals who each have unique balanced ability. That's why you create teams in the first place. But in order for those individuals to work well together, you need something that's psychological safety or the ability to feel like you can speak up without fear of reprisal. And why that's so critical is if you want to harness that knowledge, if you want to harness that diversity, you have to allow people to be willing to put it out without fear

Starting point is 00:38:31 of shame and understand that we're all trying to learn together. And that collective mindset of like, just throw anything out that your expertise is valued is really, really key. What do you think organizations, generally speaking, do the worst when building and sort of maintaining their teams? Like, what are the most common pitfalls? One is that we don't empower people enough. A team will be put together, but that's reporting to a manager.

Starting point is 00:38:57 And that hierarchy within the team, there's far too much difference given to who's ever leading it, whether the manager or the formal leader. And that really just negates the purpose of having a team in the first place, which is you actually want that unit working to. together is cohesively as a whole. The most simple basic process is equality in turn taking, that everyone needs to be speaking about the same amount of time. And when that's happening, right, you have a high functioning team. But it's extraordinarily rare that you actually have equality in turn taking. There's like all sorts of reasons that conversations go very lopsided.

Starting point is 00:39:30 I think that's one piece. And the second piece is I think too often organizations or divisions let teams go on far longer than they should. And what that is essentially doing is that's creating a convening like structure. And then you're just ending up with group think. If that team really needs to stay together, then have people rotating in and out. You need to have people like as temporary members or do something to shake it up. But otherwise, things just get really, really stale far too fast. Is there anything you've learned about the role of conversation specifically?

Starting point is 00:40:05 So if you think about network structure and you've got nodes and edges, I guess you could text, you could call. There's a limited number of modes of interaction and conversation seems like a really key one. What have you learned about just conversation generally? There's an enormous power, first off, just a human voice. And so one of the things that's been interesting during the pandemic is, again, talking about these management, fats, infections. So everyone just all of a sudden went to video conferencing.

Starting point is 00:40:30 And I think the idea is we're going to have more the ability to renumber cues. And we actually know from lots of research that actually our ability to do that on video is really poor. It depends on what you're trying to maximize. Like we can do faster task performance with video on. But if you care about things like social connection or empathy, actually the research, my colleague Michael Cross shows that it's far better actually just to have voice only because we're much better at listening.

Starting point is 00:40:54 And listening, if I had like one magic superpower to give it to anyone, it would be a good listener. And so anything you can do in conversation that moves towards being a better. listener is going to make you a more effective manager and it's also going to make you a more effective human. But listening is super hard. We all think we're really good listeners, but most people are actually really really terrified. What do you think makes for a good listener and what gets in the way of being one? The first thing that it gets in the way of it that we were just talking about is actually distraction. There's great work showing how easily we're distracted. An example of this is there

Starting point is 00:41:28 is a study looking at like people notice clown cycling by on a unicycle. And you would think like, Of course I would notice. Like, how could you miss that? Whether or not they were using a cell phone or not had a huge effect. And it's some extraordinary percentage of people, like two thirds of people didn't even notice this gone on a unit cycle just by having their cell phone out. We're just distracted all the time. And there's so many channels of destruction that we can miss things that it's called inattentional blindness. So that's a part of it is just simply being distracted and not being present.

Starting point is 00:41:57 The second is even when we're present, sometimes we're trying to be good listeners to try to just figure out like, what do you do? doing when you're actually thinking or listening. A simple exercise is just as someone like, how's your day going or how are you doing today? And try to give them this 30 to 60 seconds uninterrupted and notice what you do. A lot of people will think about like, oh, I want to jump in with a story of my own. So you might have a story of like a unicycling clown. That's one tendency, which you think you're being helpful. Like, yeah, me too.

Starting point is 00:42:26 But actually that derail's conversation. And then also people often want to give affirmation. Like, uh-huh, yeah. Like they're giving verbal signals. because they're focused on really active listening techniques. But in that focus on the active listening technique, you're actually not listening or trying to be a good listener. Yeah, it's such a fascinating skill.

Starting point is 00:42:45 The distraction piece, I remember this guy, Eric Maddox, who was very involved in the finding Osama Bin Laden via active listening to this network of people around Bin Laden. And he sort of like flipped the script on how we treated these people from being aggressive to being very compassionate and just listening to them talk about their families. and eventually he's credited with finding where bin Laden was hiding.

Starting point is 00:43:06 And it was all active listening. And his number one thing was distraction. The amount of crap that you're thinking about as somebody else is talking, most commonly being what am I going to say next? It's stunning, right? Like if we just shut off our own minds, life would get so much better. That is incredibly powerful. And it makes so much sense.

Starting point is 00:43:25 Your question initially is like, what's the most important from a conversational perspective? But it's actually the inaction and conversation. It's like the hole that's missing in conversation. It's the most powerful thing. It's weird how you can do the most by doing nothing in many ways. So I love the idea of talk is the phrase you use. An equal talk almostly is like the composition of the team. By definition, if you've got a good diverse team, diversity being key,

Starting point is 00:43:49 you're naturally going to talk roughly an equal amount because you're going to bring something unique to the table. Is there anything else that you've seen organizations do other than trend following, right? open workspace and versus remote, that you just think is timeless good policy for running an effective organization with a strong network? I think the biggest piece is actually to be attentive to the network in a conscious way. If you think about what's happened, even during COVID, we've tried to default that having human interaction in some ways mimic the way it was before. So if you think about things that people are doing right now, right, they may have like random coffee chat on Zoom or they may have,

Starting point is 00:44:30 I think I had one last night or the night, which I'm definitely not going to, which is like a departmental come together on Zoom. I don't know what people do on it. It's really ineffective. But the point is that we think that you can just bring people together and create some sort of social interaction or social connection. Truth is, if you want to create real relationships, there needs to be some purpose or intentionality behind that. The likelihood that a random pairing coffee chat is going to actually lead to enduring relationship is actually really, really small. I hope I'm going to attend this departmental thing tonight or whenever it was is pretty much zero. But what would be different? What's different is if you create a common purpose for people to come together to have a conversation about things that they might not otherwise, they then can endure.

Starting point is 00:45:14 So a much more effective strategy than, for instance, having a company, I don't know, Christmas party. We know that actually for many people that that's actually isolating and exclusionary. So particularly for people in the numerical minority, whether that's women or African Americans, anyone who's in a numerical minority is likely to actually feel excluded from that because they don't feel that they can engage in the same types of ingratiating relationship-building conversations that would normally happen. So the idea then is to think about how can you create a common basis for conversation where we can all come together and talk about things that we have in common that aren't pretty surface level. So a far better idea would be have someone come,

Starting point is 00:45:56 give a very short lecture on Egyptian art history. Something that no one knows anything about, so we're all in the same playing field, but have that conversation go deep enough that it creates meaningful conversation that can likely endure. And so that's an example, a very long-winded example of saying, how many people who do this best are intentional about it? In those intentional interactions, they create safety where people feel that they can speak up and reveal aspects of themselves that they choose to.

Starting point is 00:46:26 but they also create structure. That's a combination of safety and structure to informal interactions that allow everyone to feel like they can participate rather than just, oh, let's just put people in a room and see what happens, which some people certainly thrive in, but there are a whole lot of people who don't. Have you learned anything about touch? We talked about conversation. I'm very close with my doctor.

Starting point is 00:46:45 He's a close friend as well, for obvious reasons. He's been hyper, hyper conservative during COVID. He's now been vaccinated twice and wearing masks and washed our hands immediately afterwards. We shook hands for the first time. It was just like so nice. And it just made me realize like, holy crap, this is something that is really missing. And it's another mode of the edges of the interaction between nodes and the network. Is there anything interesting there?

Starting point is 00:47:09 Even as you said that, just about shaking hands, there was a deep sense of longing. It's your first sense to develop. It's arguably one of your most sensitive senses. So you can convey through touch certain emotions like compassion or empathy that is really hard to convey otherwise. If you think about the very first thing that happens when a child is born, it's that skin-to-skin contact. And the same thing is true in depth. You hear about some of the most touching stories. For me, I spent a lot of time working in the healthcare industry about what happened in those last moments when people, particularly in the beginning of the pandemic where people were dying

Starting point is 00:47:42 alone, nurses reached out and held someone's hand, despite the risk it was to themselves. It's so, so essential. And so the idea that we've already lost in many ways during this past year, this sense. But my concern is, is that hyper sensitivity to physical cities and physical boundaries may make this endures for a longer period of time, which would be just devastating. Yeah, it's kind of a crazy thing to consider hugging a grandparent or something that's been vaccinated or something like this. Like, it's just kind of shockingly emotional moments, which reveal the bizarreness of this pandemic. I mean, it's totally wild. I think with all of these things, whether it's, I sure, just our social interactions in general. My hope is that the past year has made us realize just how

Starting point is 00:48:29 important they are, that hopefully will be more attentive to them moving forward. So if there's anyone silver lining, it's like, hopefully we'll hug our grandparents a little bit more. I'd love to turn to the final category that you referenced earlier. So kind of from the individual to the organizational, to the societal. You started with the WTO story. And I've always been fascinated by mass movements, bizarrely also by cults. as sort of like a perverse version of a mass movement. Talk us through what you've learned there about things that transcend individuals and organizations and become something much bigger and how technology in the modern world

Starting point is 00:49:05 may have changed that or amplified that. For me, too, it's where there's so much power. It's like, how does society work? And to understand that, as a network scientist is, right, I argue, like, you have to understand how the networks are working. One of the pieces that's been disheartening are somewhat, worrisome to me, particularly thinking about what's happened during the pandemic, is we know that when people are interacting online, that this tendency towards insularity in talking to people who are

Starting point is 00:49:33 already think like us, look like us, that becomes hyper exacerbated online. So online in many ways, we're all living in echo chambers. And if you think about the added layer of that, when we don't have the ability to bump into people we wouldn't normally talk to, that's essentially creating just polarization. And so if we think about a lot of the large-scale social issues that we're facing right of the time, whether that's issues around race polarization or political polarization, this way that our social lives are structured and have been structured over the past year, but then increasingly so is hyper exacerbated this. If we want to start to think about like, how do we fix this problem? We have to figure out, how do we start to have conversations and

Starting point is 00:50:15 come together, how to bring groups together that normally wouldn't talk to each other? One of the places this is most likely happen, actually, is at work, which makes the workplace particularly powerful. So we know that our interactions at work are far more diverse than our other domains of life. So if you compare it to diversity of interactions within schools, within neighborhoods, within voluntary organizations, by far our interactions are most diverse at work. And what's cool is at work also, you can create social structure. So I can't in my neighborhood, like I don't get to choose who my neighbors are. I don't get to choose who has moved in, but at work through either formal project assignment or a plane with space, I can actually create opportunities for people who normally wouldn't

Starting point is 00:50:57 come together to talk. And it's not necessarily that I'm saying like the workplace is the panacea for solving these large-scale social problems. But the idea is the same. How do you get people to come together to have meaningful conversations who normally wouldn't talk to each other? And a key piece of that, right, is just thinking about the human aspect. So we talked a lot about listening or even just the power of voice and empathy. It's hard to. to do that online because you miss the human element. To overcome anything that has to do with polarization, we have to think about first, how do you bring people together? But then how do you do it in a humanizing way? What have you seen about, whether it's cults or some other huge mass

Starting point is 00:51:33 movement that drives those things forward? If we've moved to the very highest level of organization of huge groups of people, these like patterns that you've studied, the propagation of ideas through a network, what are the key ingredients for something to cross that tipping point of cultural relevancy where sort of everyone's heard about it? There has to be a common vision or a common goal, but it has to be defined in a way that it allows for individual difference. Imagine right that you're trying to get the environmental movement to catalyze. We may both be interested in this, but for very different reasons. You love to hike, so you may be interested in preservation.

Starting point is 00:52:14 of nature versus I care deeply. I don't know about reducing energy cost and doing that in a long way that's sustainable from a business, whatever those are. The first thing is that everyone needs to come together and understand like we're on the same page for the same goal, but we may also have very different reasons for that being true and figuring out how to create essentially a tent that's big enough that allows that common purpose to drive us, but also to understand that they're going to be points of different among individuals about like why that is important to that.

Starting point is 00:52:44 it seems like that's probably true for successful businesses too. The job of the leaders is to set this common roadmap or vision, but allow space for autonomy. Exactly. As a network person, like we were talking about the example of the environmental. I mean, right? Like, imagine us all in our different convening like circles, our close communities, but we have to figure out a way for those communities to talk together and then ultimately work together for a higher purpose. And the exact same thing is true within an organization. We just call those little cults or clicks. We call them divisions. right, or departments. And the same is true to figure out, like, how do you get the optimal rate of collaboration between those units is necessary to support this higher level vision

Starting point is 00:53:25 without just creating too much chaos or spending too much time interacting? What's that exact point of perfection? I'm a big fan of respecting nature and biology because they're such well-worn things. They've evolved over a long period of time. Some of my favorite points are just return to what makes us human. I'd love for you to talk a little bit about the biological underpinnings of Dunbar's number, because I think everyone knows Dunbar. Maybe you mentioned what it is for those that don't. I thought the biology of this was totally fascinating and it's kind of a fun place to wrap up our conversation around this all being rooted in our humanity. What a beautiful place to end because there's the thing that gets me. This kind of feels like magic. Like how is this possible? On a human level,

Starting point is 00:54:09 But we know that the size of our networks is in many ways constrained by our cognitive ability. So there are actually fundamental physical things that relate to biological and evolutionary constraints on how large anyone individual's network can get, which is encapsulated in this famous number of 150, which is Dunbar's number. And it's the size of organizational units, the size of army companies. It's the size. And it's really constrained by the sides of our brain, our capacity to mentalize. But what's also powerful and so fascinating about how networks work, if we go back to thinking about

Starting point is 00:54:42 creating a movement and why the world is small, it's because everything can be distilled into these three basic principles are fundamental parts of networks and how they fit together. So you can see the same structure that creates small worlds in human networks. You'll see the same in neural networks. You can see it in ant colonies. You can see it in electricity networks. In some ways, if we think about the Higgs boson, a physics god particle, in many ways, you can think about that social systems have these same signatures that are not just our own social,

Starting point is 00:55:12 human social signature, but it's also true in the biological world as well. What does that mean? It sounds like very fractal or something that turtles all the way down, as you always hear people say, there's just some natural mode of interaction. Like when you think about when you're faced with the fact that an ant colony and a neural network and a social network all behave the same way, what do you do with that? For me, it's like a combination of just awe. But then it's like, oh, but we can play with this. Like, there's a reason it's important for these things to fit together the way they do. It's because it allows for system optimization.

Starting point is 00:55:45 If we can think about what we can learn, whether it's from ant colonies or from neural networks, that has huge implications for how we can think about optimizing human systems. Just to click on that because it's so fascinating, one level deeper. Maybe those two examples seems like you might know a bit about ant colonies and neural networks. What is shared in common? Like, is it the way information is spread through these things? Is it some sort of ratios? There's a golden mean in here or somewhere.

Starting point is 00:56:08 Like, what is it about the way these things are structured that is shared in common? In many ways, you can all distill it. Like, they have essentially parts that look like convening structure. So dense hubs where things can transmit really fast. But they also have brokerage links between these clicks that link them together. But then the expansion is part that they have these long tails of connection. And that's where the spontaneity comes from. And so if you take the broker and convener piece,

Starting point is 00:56:35 What's important there is there's kind of a fundamental underlying structure that allows for things to move quickly, but also catch on in small hubs. But then it's like, that's the structure. But the expansionist create this randomness or chaos that kind of makes the whole thing work. Wow. I mean, it sounds like evolution too. It sounds like the principles of, I can't remember what it is, experiment, amplify, whatever it is that Darwin talked about. Like, it all sounds like the same thing, like trying to learn. Pretty remarkable. Well, this has been just an incredible conversation. I think your work and your book is so thought-provoking and totally left my brain buzzing when I read it. I suggest everyone check it out.

Starting point is 00:57:12 I ask the same closing question every week of everybody, and so I'll ask you as well. My question is, what is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you? Give me a hug. There you go. Perfect. Perfect capper and something that we all look forward to. Well, Marissa, thank you so much for your time. This is so much fun.

Starting point is 00:57:29 I really appreciate it. If you enjoyed this episode, check out join colossus.com. There you'll find every episode of this podcast complete with transcripts, show notes, and resources to keep learning. You can also sign up for our newsletter, Colossus Weekly, where we condense episodes to the big ideas, quotations, and more, as well as share the best content we find on the internet every week.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy - Marissa King - The Science of Social Networks - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 217]

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