CHAPTER 2:
BEHIND THE CURTAIN—HOW SOCIAL FLOWS WORK
Social Flows have a number of key characteristics and it is helpful to understand these characteristics before we move into practice. Even though some of you will be deeply knowledgeable about many of these areas already, it might be helpful to check our terms in any case. The following concepts are some of our key assumptions in perceiving and cultivating social flows.
Networks
The word “network” has permeated our language. Decades ago most professionals talked about things like structure, hierarchy, functions, departments, and business units. Everything had to be given a specific place, and order gave people the sense of a designed piece, of an “optimum” design that needed only routine maintenance once a state of equilibrium had been attained.
Now we talk much more often about relationships and describe our world as a network: a network of corporations that constitute a supply network, a network of professionals, a social network. The word “network” has connotations of many relationships, of quickly adapting to new dynamics, of richness and complexity, of exchanging information which benefits all, of “the sum is more than the collection of parts.” Finally, the word “network” suggests that “as part of our context and wider environment, we can go further than we can go alone.” A network is something we are part of: it extends beyond the boundaries of our own organization and is in constant flux.
The idea of networks and flows gives us the opportunity to “design” them. Well, the word design would imply an engineering mindset. In practice it is more like cultivating a garden, a new variety of flowers or fruit. It is about dealing with life instead of matter.
Flow Interactions Seen as a Network
To understand social flows so we can cultivate them, it helps to look at some basic network science first. Social interactions, relationships, and transactions between people can be modeled as a network. The nodes of the network are individuals, the relationships between them are depicted as connections between nodes.
Social Network: a network of social interactions and relationships: “An axiom of the social network approach to understanding social interaction is that social phenomena should be primarily conceived and investigated through the properties of relations between and within units, instead of the properties of these units themselves.” [Wikipedia]
AsAlbert-László Barabási and others have shown, the natural development of this kind of social network will result in a particular topology, because it can continue to extend infinitely. Many nodes have a relatively small number of relationships, while a few nodes have many relationships. Some people are extremely well connected, one would say. The exciting part of this discovery is that the well-connected people play a vital role in making the network accessible and navigable.
Trust Beyond Dunbar’s Number
A human can only intimately know and trust a very limited number of people.Dunbar’s number is often cited as a natural limit. According to that theory, we build and maintain mental models of others. These models help us to understand and predict someone’s emotions, desires, and drives, and help us to estimate how far we can trust the other. The theory says that a human can keep approximately 150 individuals and their relationships (Dunbar’s number) in mind, which is very limited compared to the size of society. As trust is one of the core ingredients of relationships, and therefore of social flows, this limit could have been crippling.
But we found a bypass for it so we can deal with billions of relationships. Trust-by-proxy, in combination with well-connected people, is the means to overcome that limit to a large extent.
Trust-by-proxy means that you trust someone else’s judgment and character. For example, Kris is someone you know very well, someone you respect and trust, someone whose judgment has proven to be reliable on the topic at hand. Most likely close friends of Kris will have the same type of character and morals as Kris, or they would not be friends. As a default, it is relatively safe to trust friends of Kris on face value, as if they were Kris. And maybe even a friend of a friend of Kris. Of course this has limits and fails some of the time, yet it helps connect people every day. The opposite is true as well: you will be biased against the friends of someone you dislike and distrust.
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We have more sensory equipment to assess trust than you might imagine. You need only a fraction of a second wh
