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How big is your network? How well connected are you to the information you need? How much time do you spend trawling for information or a contact? How many clicks do you need to do to find out the information or person that you need? The questions can go on, but  are the answers to these more or less than 6 on average? Well, you are 6 hops away from anyone in the world so you would hope that within your organisation you were less than 6 clicks from the person you need, but this often isn't the case. Why?

6 Degrees of Separation and the Human Web

Are mathematical / sociology concepts that elude to the premise that every person in the world can be connected to any other person through a chain of acquaintances through only a few intermediaries, on average 6. The theory dates back to 1929 when Frigyes Karinthy studied theories for optimal city / traffic design and has morphed via Michael Gurevich, Manfred Kochen, Stanley Milgram who used various techniques including Monte Carlo analysis to workout the structure of social networks, acquaintanceship networks and peoples connectedness.

In 1967, Milgram devised a way to test the theory, which he called "the small-world problem". He randomly selected people in mid-West  America to send packages to a stranger located in Massachusetts, US. The senders knew the recipient's name, occupation, and general location. They were instructed to send the package to a person they knew on a first-name basis who they thought was most likely, out of their network, to know the target personally. That person would do the same, and so on, until the package was personally delivered to its target recipient. Although the participants expected the chain to include at least a hundred intermediaries, it only took (on average) between five and seven intermediaries to get each package delivered. The theory was popularised in the online game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon where the goal is to link any actor to Kevin Bacon through no more than six connections, where two actors are connected if they have appeared in a movie together. As an example here are three random friends of mine with their profession, current location and name. If you fancy testing this theory give it a go:

 

Send an email to any one in your network who you think might know the target personally. That person does the same, and so on, until the an email is delivered to one of my three willing friends. Add comments to let me know how you get on...

Knowledge Management

So how many hops are you from people in your organisation? How can the power behind this theory be harnessed and utilised? This obviously linked very closely to  search and that is synonymous with meta-data to me; so the more labels and  tags that can be given to information and people will make the networks smaller and the number of hops fewer. Based on Duncan Watts and Steve Strogatz research in 1998 if your network is grid like, or silo based i.e. by business unit, skill set or geography then your number of hops will be large (the mathematics works out as diameter of the network to get the information ~ number of nodes). However if you can introduce random links which can connect disparate or long distances then the number of hops will be reduced drastically (the mathematics works out as diameter of the network to get the information ~ natural logarithm (number of nodes)).

So, I think the key way to utilise these concepts within organisations is to make the most of people do. Not huge steps but just utilising the inherent knowledge of people:

• encourage and promote the long links;
• utilise the randomness of people (i.e. informal knowledge sharing, random sub networks - like people who play football together or use the same coffee machine)
• greater knowledge of others skills;
• promote networks of people and information,
• have a single portal or interface,
• have a comprehensive search solution to make the most of the above.

All comments welcome,

John

twitter.com/brookmyre