Network-working

Networking is a career concept that invites and may evoke cringe — visions of transactional glad-handing and superficial self-interest in and amongst name tags, cocktails or breakfast pastries. Nevertheless, the notion that it’s all about who you know seems to prove out. Modern digital networks tend to build from known interactions and connections. LinkedIn, for example, is a generally complete reflection of real-world professional connections and the start-to-present CV of each of those people (including you). However, the combination of the accuracy of each user’s digital record, the willingness of users to become new connections, and a given means of communicating with each connection at any time, suggests immense, underutilized data value, that’s created as the network itself transforms and expands.*

Working world networks are perpetually reshuffling. The individual connections move and change, increasing the likelihood of new, unexpected, or unknown intersections, overlaps, and alignments. Professional serendipity is inevitable, and its unique value is potent. What’s missing are the timely suggestions to act — reach out and exploring something unanticipated and perhaps valuable. This is because the new data that shifts a connection and triggers new serendipitous potential isn’t readily brought to our attention. Yet with all of the other necessary data specifics accurately mapped and openly available (the Who, What, When, and Where), it stands to reason that innovative efforts to provide the awareness of and justification for communicating, connecting, re-connecting (the Why) would be worthwhile to create.

We demonstrate the need or desire to find and engage with specific types of connections through other avenues. Twitter is often a platform megaphone for those “hoping to connect with X types of startup founders in Y sector” and many private listservs are replete with one-to-many “looking for X candidates in Y location” broadsides. The demand is often time-sensitive and resource-limited. Why not tap into at least an additional means of surfacing high potential, high relevance contacts from existing networks if not technology enabled to anticipate certain connections’ relevant potential before you need to ask via AI-ML data classification and interpretation analysis running in the background?

There are interesting companies and projects building in and around this space, including those deploying multi-agent systems to unlock the value of being more, and more genuinely, connected. While I’ve used LinkedIn as an example, multi-modal analysis of other professional networks, email providers’ Contacts databases, or potentially messaging apps in various combinations could unlock similar value in via relevant or customized models. Boardy is a cool example, which deploys NLP via telephony voice assistant to intake specifics of what a given user is working on and runs those specifics against an internal network to surface unique contact recommendations. An ambitious project is The Network Of Time, which seeks to visualize, through organic submission, the largest network of people who appear together in photos that currently exist which can be connected through peoples' recurring appearances in different photos.

I hope that there are and will be many more entrepreneurs taking cracks at turning missed connections into newly connected (or re-connected) sparks of potential communication and collaboration. We’re all better when we’re more together.

—

*Note: LinkedIn’s means of communicating element is not InMail but an email address. Nearly 90% of LinkedIn profiles provide an email to 1st degree connections, most often their current work email or active personal Gmail.