by David Burkus
When Ruef tabulated the results, he found that those teams whose business ideas came from discussions with weak ties were more innovative as judged by both measures. The fact that they sought more patent and trademark applications meant their ideas were likely more original and hence called for intellectual property protection. And their business idea was stronger across the categories of innovation, meaning the business model itself was more innovative than those businesses started by teams relying on strong ties. “Weak ties allow for more experimentation in combining ideas from disparate sources and impose fewer demands for social conformity than do strong ties,” Ruef said.20
Taken together, Ruef’s findings are consistent with the strength of weak ties phenomenon first discovered by Granovetter. Just as the weak ties of job hunters are more likely to provide novel information about job opportunities, the weak ties of entrepreneurs are more likely to provide a novel perspective or discovery that can yield an idea for a new business. Similarly, while job hunters relying on strong ties have to endure the steep challenge, while unemployed, of convincing potential employers to make an offer, entrepreneurs relying on strong ties have to endure the difficult path of differentiating their business from the crowd. “Our results suggest that entrepreneurs can avoid the pitfalls of conformity by diversifying their networks,” Ruef wrote of his findings.21
The research clearly supports the idea that in order to develop the most diverse information and create the most opportunity, we need to move beyond our strong ties and gain the fresh perspectives of our weaker connections. But not all weak ties are created equally. Strong ties may be more motivated to help us by bonds of familiarity and trust, but there is one form of weak ties with almost as much goodwill toward us while still offering new information: weak ties that used to be stronger. Even in Granovetter’s original study, he noticed the role that former colleagues and long-lost friends played in helping individuals. “Chance meetings or mutual friends operated to reactivate such ties,” Granovetter noted. “It is remarkable that people receive crucial information from individuals whose very existence they have forgotten.”22 Over time, other researchers would come up with a shorter name for such a weak tie that used to be stronger. They would label it a dormant tie, and their research would prove just how valuable these weak connections are.
The researchers Daniel Levin, Jorge Walter, and Keith Murnighan have been studying the power of dormant ties for almost a decade. Specifically, they have been surveying business executives, encouraging them to deliberately reactivate old connections and then observing the results. And the results have been quite powerful. In one experiment, the trio asked a group of 224 executives from four executive MBA classes to reconnect with two people to whom they had not spoken for at least three years, but who they thought would have advice that would help them on a major work project.23 Specifically, the executives were to contact one person with whom they had shared a strong relationship before they fell out of touch, and also one individual with whom they had a weak tie relationship. In addition, the executives selected two current contacts (one strong, one weak) from whom they had already sought advice during the course of their project. The researchers then asked executives to assess all four contacts’ advice in terms of value (actionable knowledge), novelty, trust, and the extent to which they had a shared perspective.
As you can imagine, many of these executives were not excited about the idea of cold-calling old colleagues and asking for advice. However, as the researchers and the executives themselves discovered, these old colleagues ended up becoming a tremendous resource. In short, the advice from the dormant ties was more likely to be valuable than the advice from current connections. Likewise, the dormant ties were more likely to provide unexpected insights and more novel advice than current ties. “In spite of their initial hesitation,” Levin, Walter, and Murnighan wrote, “almost all of the executives in our studies report that they have received tremendous value from reconnecting their dormant relationships.”24
The researchers weren’t satisfied yet, however. It was still possible that one of the reasons dormant ties provided so much value was simply that they were top of mind when the executives were asked to think of old colleagues whose information would be useful. Most of us have more dormant ties than current ones, after all, so the probability is pretty high that the most useful counsel on a project would come from the larger pool of old colleagues. So the researchers tested a separate group of over 100 executives drawn from the same programs and gave them a different task. Instead of just selecting two dormant ties, these executives were asked to make a list of ten possible people to reconnect with and then rank them based on perceived usefulness. The executives were then told to reconnect with their top choice and with another person on the list chosen at random. After both conversations, the researchers measured the value of the advice in the same way as in the first study. “We originally thought that usefulness would drop off as people went down their list,” the researchers wrote. “But the data did not show that.”25 Instead, the value of the advice tended to be consistent no matter what the executives’ preconceived notions were. This suggests that the benefits of dormant ties have more to do with the dormancy of the ties themselves than with the perceived expertise.
The research on dormant ties reveals three main reasons for their strength. First, like weak ties, dormant ties can hold a wealth of new, different, and unexpected insights. Just because we have lost touch with someone doesn’t mean that person has become extinct. Instead, our dormant ties are still around and interacting with other social circles and having new experiences. Second, reaching out to dormant ties specifically for advice is efficient; the contact with them is often much quicker than conversations with current colleagues who might be collaborating on multiple projects. And third, because many dormant ties, unlike weak ties, were once stronger relationships, their trust and motivation to help are much stronger than is true for current weak ties.
While dormant ties have been proven to be a great source of new insights and also to be a stronger form of weak ties, the truth is that not all dormant ties are equal. We all have someone we have lost touch with for a very specific reason. Levin, Walter, and Murnighan found that predicting which dormant ties would have the most valuable insights was so difficult that it inspired them to look even further into which dormant ties tend to be the most valuable.
In a follow-up study, the researchers repeated their method of surveying over 100 executives and asking them to reconnect with old contacts.26 As in the previous experiment, they asked the executives to recall ten old contacts and to rank them by preference. Also as before, the executives were then asked to reach out to their most preferred contact and one other contact randomly chosen from their list of ten. However, unlike the previous study, this one included a survey of the executives before contact was made. The researchers asked the executives how briefly they had known their old contacts, how frequently or infrequently they had communicated with them before the relationship went dormant, and also how each old contact’s status or organizational rank compared to the executive’s own. All of the executives were also asked for their expectations about the trustworthiness and willingness to help of each of their contacts.
Then, after the executives reconnected either in person or via phone, the researchers followed up and asked a series of questions about the value of the advice received, as well as the novelty of the ideas and the levels of trust and shared perspective experienced. Surprisingly, when examining the results, the researchers found that executives consistently rated the advice from their more infrequent connections as more novel and useful . . . but also that the executives generally preferred to reconnect with people they saw as being more familiar. In other words, when reactivating dormant ties, the weaker dormant ties gave much better advice when reactivated, but those were also the exact type of dormant ties that most executives preferred to avoid. “Our executives displayed a strong bias to choose potential reconne
ctions that turned out not to be the most valuable,” the researchers wrote.27 Despite this bias, preference didn’t show much of an effect on the assessment of the conversation itself—almost all of the executives said they enjoyed and benefited from all conversations regardless of prior preference.
These findings suggest that, even among dormant ties, weaker connections are a more novel, valuable, and useful resource, which means Granovetter’s strength of weak ties phenomenon applies even among old colleagues. Taken altogether, the strength of weaker ties runs counter to a lot of our preferences and even some conventional networking beliefs.
Like the executives in the study, most of us prefer to keep our conversations and advice-seeking inside a small, trusted circle of colleagues, despite solid evidence that the novelty of the information that this tight cluster can provide is severely limited. Even when forced to reconnect with dormant ties, we may tend to stay safe and to reconnect with those individuals with whom we are more familiar and who are less likely to provide the benefit of new intel.
At the other end of the networking spectrum, much of the conventional networking advice is focused on reaching out and meeting brand-new people. While that is a noble goal in and of itself, and new connections are likely to provide novel and valuable information and opportunities, the research from Levin, Walter, and Murnighan encourages us to consider old, dormant ties in our network before spending so much energy investing in new relationships. After all, dormant ties are almost as likely to give us great counsel, and they will do so much more efficiently, since reactivating an old connection is much faster than building a brand-new relationship from scratch.
New Ideas from Old Connections
It was this exact situation—the challenge of building new relationships and the ease of reactivating old ones—that Scott Harrison faced when he decided to start a new nonprofit organization. And it was the novelty that his dormant ties provided that led Harrison to revolutionize the way in which the nonprofit world operates. Before Harrison was the founder and face of charity: water, he was a young teenager rebelling against his upbringing and building a life as a nightclub promoter in New York City. After growing up in New Jersey in a household with a strong Christian ethos, Harrison fled to the big city to study at New York University. By his own admission, he wasn’t exactly the ideal student, but he did learn how to throw a great party.
After graduation, Harrison found work as a promoter in New York’s nightclub scene. He would organize parties for clubs, fashion magazines, and alcohol brands. And he was good at it. Eventually, corporate brands began sponsoring not just his parties but Harrison himself. He was paid to go out in public and drink certain brands of alcohol and wear certain brands of clothing. And he had also mastered the art of nonchalantly facing a logo or label toward any nearby cameras. His success and fame brought him a great deal of contacts. At one point he had 15,000 names in his address book. This wealth of connections and his ability to throw great parties earned Harrison a lot of money, but it also left him pretty miserable. “I had a Rolex, a grand piano, an apartment, a Labrador retriever,” Harrison reflected, “and I came face to face with what a scumbag I was.”28
Desperate to make a deep and personal change, Harrison decided to pursue a life of service. He blindly reached out to a variety of humanitarian organizations but was turned down by every group except one—presumably, his party animal back story was too hard to hide.
So with no other options, Harrison joined the crew of a Mercy Ships expedition to Liberia. The ship was a floating hospital where medical professionals volunteered their time to bring free medicine and surgical procedures to the world’s poorest communities. “The chief medical officer was a surgeon who left Los Angeles to volunteer for two weeks—23 years ago,” Harrison recalled.29
For his part, Harrison had convinced the staff of the organization that he was a photojournalist, and so his job became to use a camera lens to document the extreme poverty and dramatic transformations he witnessed. For the first time, Harrison saw just how severe the problem was. He met families who lived on less money per year than what he used to sell bottles of vodka for. “I was utterly astonished at the poverty that came into focus through my camera lens. Often through tears, I documented life and human suffering I’d thought unimaginable,” Harrison said.30 Initially, he had signed on for an eight-month expedition. He stayed with Mercy Ships for two years. “There was really no going back after my third day.”31
During those two years, Harrison also saw the primary cause of a lot of suffering and left motivated to find a solution. “Of all of the issues I had seen facing the poor, water seemed to be the root cause,” Harrison said.32 “It was responsible for 80 percent of all disease. Water and lack of sanitation were responsible for 80 percent of all sickness on the planet, and there are a billion people without it.” He was resolved to find a way to solve this problem—to bring clean water to every person who needed it. A big enough goal by itself, it was made almost insurmountable by his lack of connections to anyone involved in combating the water crisis. Harrison had learned from being seriously rebuffed when he tried to blindly reach out to humanitarian organizations in the past. Now, instead of forcing his way in and working to make new connections, he decided to reactivate his dormant ties. “It dawned on me what an opportunity it would be if my previous contacts could be corralled to make a difference,” Harrison said.33
He went back to his old nightclub and fashion colleagues, most of whom he hadn’t spoken to since sailing for Liberia two years prior. He started small at first, but then gathered momentum. Given where his dormant ties were, his first project was actually a party, his own thirty-first birthday party. He leveraged his old colleagues to book a nightclub so trendy that it hadn’t yet opened to the public and invited almost his entire contact list. “As people walked into the nightclub, they walked past images of people drinking dirty water. Then those images turned to images of drillers, and then they turned to people drinking clean water,” Harrison explained. “I asked everybody to pay on the way in and 100 percent of the money would go to our first projects in Uganda.”34 Seven hundred people attended the party.
After the party, things started to move quickly, but not in the direction of traditional philanthropy. Harrison followed up with his contacts, whom he knew would be concerned about how the donated money was spent. “I was with people who weren’t giving to charities. So I was forced to try to create a business model that would resonate with them,” he explained.35 To do this, Harrison had pictures taken of the wells that were dug and emailed them out to everyone who attended the party. The response was incredible. “Half of them couldn’t even remember being at the party but they were blown away by the pictures and the difference they had made,” he said.36 In effect, Harrison had found a new community of people interested in and willing to contribute to charity, but to whom the traditional models didn’t appeal.
From that party onward, charity: water committed to a new model, one where 100 percent of individual donations would be directly used to provide access to clean water. In addition, everyone who donated would be kept informed on the group’s progress and the end results of their donations. To do this, Harrison and his growing team established two bank accounts from the beginning: one for donations from a small group of trusted donors who had committed to paying the overhead, and the other for the majority of donations from individuals who, like his dormant ties from the fashion and nightclub world, wanted to know their money was going right to the project. While a few foundations and trusts work this way, almost all were established through a gift from one or two major donors—billionaires who decided to give away some of their wealth by starting a foundation. The idea of someone who was not a billionaire starting from scratch and building a nonprofit organization that functioned similar to a charitable trust was unheard of. The rest of the philanthropic world just didn’t work that way. “Nobody had ever done our model before,” Harrison recalled.37 And perhaps he wouldn�
�t have done it either had he tried to network and make new contacts in that world. Instead, it was his weak ties that led him to a very different idea about how to run a charity.
His old contacts also helped him think differently about raising awareness. From the beginning, charity: water put a special emphasis on storytelling and great design, the same elements it takes to run a profitable fashion brand or to put together a remarkable event. “I think the second thing we did was take over New York City parks,” Harrison said.38 And by “take over” he really does mean take over—his team made it almost impossible for any passing New Yorkers to avoid the issue of the water crisis. They took a series of striking photos that captured the needs and efforts of impoverished communities that needed access to clean water and plastered these images onto large tanks of dirty pond water, forcing passersby to imagine what it would be like if they faced the same daily challenge of finding clean drinking water. The exhibit worked, drawing out tens of thousands of people and raising tens of thousands of dollars for the cause.
It also led a lot of people to look up charity: water online and encouraged them to join what would become their most important fund-raiser. Inspired by Harrison’s initial birthday fund-raiser, charity: water began encouraging others to give up presents on their birthdays and ask for contributions to help drill wells instead.39 Participants set up a webpage announcing the venture and sent out invites to family, friends, and colleagues and also (you guessed it) to weak and dormant ties. The birthday donations have raised a lot of money for clean water but, perhaps more importantly, have also raised even more awareness. As friends told friends who told other friends, word spread quickly. It wasn’t long before well-known businesspeople and celebrities were setting up pages of their own and spreading the word to their vast followings. Skateboard legend Tony Hawk raised over $20,000 for his forty-fourth birthday. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey has given up his birthday three times and raised almost $200,000.40
