Friend of a Friend . . ._Understanding the Hidden Networks That Can Transform Your Life and Your Career

by David Burkus

  Her idea to turn the experience into a game, however, was not so common. In fact, it was an idea that might have occurred only to her.

  For almost a decade before her accident, McGonigal had been studying the psychology of games and designing video games that make the world a better place.4 When she started her career, McGonigal was working as a game designer in New York City on various commercial projects, but that life wasn’t fully living up to her expectations. She had a twin sister who had moved to California to study psychology at Stanford and who helped convince her to move out west. McGonigal enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley in a PhD program in performance studies. The degree plan was flexible enough that she could mold it to her interests, which involved a blend of psychology and her game design background.

  Armed with this new knowledge, and at the intersection of games and social science, McGonigal started working on projects that leveraged the passion and creativity of gaming with social problems.5 She created a six-week simulation called “World Without Oil” in which players have to find ways to outlast a fictional oil shortage. Then she worked with the World Bank to create “Evoke,” a game in which players have to develop ways to help eliminate poverty. “Evoke” would give birth to about fifty businesses and social organizations that would put the players’ ideas into practice in the real world. Throughout all her work, McGonigal laid out her case that games aren’t just an escape from life, but that they can truly improve human lives.

  Now, sitting in bed with a brain injury, McGonigal was challenged more than ever to prove her thesis. Could she design a game that would help her heal?

  She called her game “Jane the Concussion Slayer,” a nod to her favorite fictional heroine, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.6 She recruited allies like her sister and her husband to help her, and together they established challenges she could take on that would help her healing process and also help her avoid the “bad guys” that triggered her symptoms. At the end of each day, they tallied up a score of how well she did.

  In a surprisingly short period of time, the game had helped her get better. Many of her physical symptoms remained, but her mental symptoms started to dissipate. Her feelings of depression and anxiety lifted, and over time she started to both look and feel stronger. “Even when I still had the symptoms, even while I was in pain, I stopped suffering,” she said. “I felt more in control of my own destiny.”7

  After a few months of playing the game, McGonigal went public. She posted her experience online, along with a brief video explaining how to play. And she changed the game’s name. During her recovery, so many people had told her to “get better soon,” and in a brave response to them, she decided she didn’t just want to be better—she wanted to be “SuperBetter,” and thus the new name of the game was born.

  Soon, McGonigal was hearing from people all over the world who were playing their own version of “SuperBetter.” They were using the game not only to help battle chronic pain and depression but also to recover from the stress of losing a job or going through a painful romantic breakup. More than half a million people have now played “SuperBetter” as a way to get exactly that—super better. The game has also helped McGonigal with more than just the original concussion incident. When she and her husband were trying to have children, she played a version of the game again. And when those children, twins, were born ten weeks early, she and her husband used the game to get through two harrowing months in the NICU.8

  But McGonigal wasn’t satisfied with just lots of “SuperBetter” players and great case studies. She wanted to study “SuperBetter” itself to either prove that the game could be useful in the recovery process or modify it in order to make it so. She wanted to connect the worlds of video games and medicine to create games that could heal. Her mission took her to the University of Pennsylvania and the renowned scientist Dr. Martin Seligman. Seligman is the father of positive psychology, the study of achievement, flourishing, and life satisfaction (as opposed to much of psychology’s focus on mental illness). At the time, Seligman was studying the essential elements of a meaningful life, and McGonigal was studying his research. When they finally met, she got right to the point and explained how “SuperBetter” could help. She felt that what she was doing with “SuperBetter” and what Seligman had discovered with his research on what makes for a meaningful life were going in the same direction. “It’s a perfect match,” she told him.9

  Seligman didn’t push back; instead, he leaned in. He thought McGonigal’s research was indeed interesting and invited her to work alongside him. Soon they were collaborating with fellow Penn researcher Ann Marie Roepke on a randomized, controlled study of the “SuperBetter” method as a treatment for depression and anxiety. They found that playing the game helped to significantly reduce symptoms and increase happiness and satisfaction. That led McGonigal to work on a clinical trial at Ohio State University, with funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Her study found that “SuperBetter” improved mood and decreased suffering and anxiety during rehabilitation.

  McGonigal isn’t done yet. Beyond designing games, she views her role as a liaison between the gamer community and the world of scientific and medical research—a gap that she feels desperately needs to be spanned. And as we’ll soon discover, the secret to a lot of professional success and meaningful impact lies in spanning gaps.

  “There are more than 1,000 studies that have done a really good job of trying to figure out what are the features of different games that produce different benefits, but they’re all behind academic firewalls,” she explained. “We have 1.23 billion people on the planet who spend, on average, an hour a day playing video games. What percentage of them can access the papers?”10 Fewer than 1 percent, by her estimate.

  “I’m really trying to help make sure people have access to the really practical findings that can help them lead happier, healthier lives,” she said further. “SuperBetter” is just one tool in that effort. McGonigal sees how much more work she has to do. One of her more jovial goals, she jokes, is to see a game designer win the Nobel Prize for Medicine—though not her and not “SuperBetter.” (McGonigal says she would give it to the inventor of Tetris.) While she may not get a Nobel medallion anytime soon, McGonigal can be sure that she has helped almost as many lives as some of the Nobel winners of the past. Indeed, around 1 million people have now used “SuperBetter” to become super better.11 In addition, her work alongside medical and scientific researchers will help millions more.

  While the origins of Jane McGonigal’s story are unique, and her game is certainly an original creation, the explanation for the great impact of her work is not unique at all. She took advantage of a type of opportunity that is actually fairly common in networks: because her work spans a structural hole in the bigger social network that she operates inside of, she creates tremendous value for others. From the moment she left New York City to study at Berkeley, she was on a path that would blend insights from both social science and video game design and force the two communities to talk to one other. She generated enormous value for both communities by being that liaison. And by learning how she and others did it, you can too.

  Going for Broker

  As individuals tend to operate mostly inside of tight-knit communities or clusters, often spaces form between those clusters. Ronald Burt, a sociologist now at the University of Chicago, first theorized about the opportunities inside these gaps in the social structure, or, as he labeled them, “structural holes.” At first Burt didn’t refer to groups of contacts who all know each other as clusters. He chose to call them, perhaps more appropriately, a redundancy. When everyone knows everyone else in the local cluster, the contacts are redundant—individual contacts don’t provide any added benefit from others in the cluster. “People who spend a lot of time with the same other people often get to know one another,” Burt wrote.12 And when everyone in the local cluster knows or has access to the same information as everyone else, the contacts are likewis
e redundant. Inside of these clusters, as we have seen, information can move fast and collaboration happens easily, but the downside is that information tends to stay stuck inside the cluster and new information from outside rarely enters.

  In contrast, “a structural hole,” Burt wrote, “is a relationship of non-redundancy between two contacts. The hole is a buffer, like an insulator in an electric circuit.”13 This isn’t to say that those inside of clusters—those redundant connections—are typically unaware of other people. (Although as we’ll see in a future chapter, they can easily become oblivious to anyone outside the cluster.) More likely, they are aware of other groups but lack a connection to them. They are focused on the activities inside of their group and don’t attend to the need to bridge the gap between their group and others. As such, they lack both a way to gain new information and a way to share their information with others. Burt asserted, rather logically, that the gaps between clusters come with a large information advantage, and that those who span the gap are able to leverage that advantage. Indeed, the people who fill structural holes—the brokers, as they would later be labeled—end up with control over the flow of information and eventually with more power than those who just sit inside of a cluster. “People whose networks span structural holes have early access to diverse, often contradictory, information and interpretations, which gives them a competitive advantage in seeing good ideas,” Burt wrote.14

  This is exactly what happened over 200 years ago when a Native American named Sequoyah single-handedly brought language to the Cherokee Nation. Sequoyah was trained as a silversmith, a job that brought him into frequent contact with American settlers.15 He learned English and eventually learned to write his name as a signature on his silver work. He also served as a soldier in the US Army during the Creek War of 1813–1814. He didn’t serve long, but long enough to watch how letters sent to and from the battle lines were keeping soldiers in touch with their commanders, and of course with their loved ones. Sequoyah committed to bringing the gift of written communication to his own people, who at the time were so far removed from the concept that they attributed writing to a form of sorcery. It took him years of trial and error, and lots of borrowing of symbols from Greek, Roman, Cyrillic, and Arabic characters, but he eventually created an alphabet of symbols for each of the eighty-six syllables in the Cherokee language.

  When he presented his alphabet to the Cherokee Nation, they were initially skeptical and, by some reports, put Sequoyah on trial for witchcraft. But during the trial he demonstrated how easy it was to learn his system. Within weeks, thousands of Cherokee had adopted the alphabet. Sequoyah’s alphabet allowed for the creation of The Cherokee Phoenix, the first Native American newspaper—itself sort of a broker between two clusters, as it was published in both Cherokee and English. Sam Houston, the prominent Texas politician, reportedly said to Sequoyah, “Your invention of the alphabet is worth more to your people than two bags full of gold in the hands of every Cherokee.”16 The alphabet remains in use today and can be seen all over Tahlequah, Oklahoma, the capital of Cherokee Nation—where the alphabet is still used on street signs (alongside English) and taught in public schools. Sequoyah’s invention is one of only a few times in human history that a lone individual of a preliterate society developed an original writing system. And it never would have happened had Sequoyah not been a broker between the early American community and the Cherokee Nation.

  In the modern day, studies show, the brokers who span structural holes between clusters, even if they don’t invent new languages or create games that heal, go on to more productive and rewarding careers. In one study, Ronald Burt demonstrated that brokers between groups are often paid more, are promoted more often, and have the best chance of coming up with innovative new ideas. Burt surveyed 673 managers at a large electronics company who ran the supply chain for the entire firm. All managers were asked for an idea to improve the supply chain operation: “From your perspective, what is the one thing that you would change to improve [the company’s] supply chain management?”17 This simple question yielded 455 ideas. Managers were also asked if they had discussed their idea with anyone. Then they were asked to identify the persons with whom they generally discussed supply chain issues. They were also asked to describe how long they had known each of these contacts and how strong their connection to each one was. From the responses, Burt was able to draw a rough map of the informal network, outlining who talked with whom and who had more diverse connections than average.

  From there, Burt deferred to the judgment of top management. He asked two senior managers at the firm, both with significant experience in running a supply chain, to evaluate each idea based on how much value would be generated if it were implemented. Because he was working closely with the company, Burt also secured data on salaries, performance evaluations, promotions, and time in rank for each manager. When he took all this data and compared it to the network map, he saw that brokers—those who were discussing ideas with individuals from other clusters or groups of the organization—were significantly more likely to have valuable ideas for improvement. Or, as he wrote, “People who stand near the holes in a social structure are at higher risk of having good ideas.”18 Moreover, the brokers inside the firm’s network were more likely to be paid highly, to receive positive performance evaluations, and to be promoted. Clearly, those individuals who have both access to diverse information and the ability to combine that information to create new ideas provide value not just to the company but to themselves.

  Burt’s theory of structural holes has been validated time and again by other researchers from a variety of fields. But all of this research begs one important question: how do you build a career as a broker? Two decades after Burt first proposed his theory of structural holes, the researcher Adam Kleinbaum may have found an answer. Kleinbaum, a professor at Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, conducted a study inside a large information technology firm.19 Like Burt, Kleinbaum first began by recruiting employees and surveying their contacts. Unlike Burt, however, Kleinbaum didn’t just ask them to list a few contacts. Even better, he got access to employees’ emails.

  For several decades, network research relied on written surveys that asked subjects to list their acquaintances and report what type of relationship they had with each one. Indeed, this is how Burt’s own studies were often conducted. But this method got a strong upgrade when email became commonplace in organizations. Instead of relying on subjects’ memory, now researchers like Kleinbaum had access to high-quality data that tracked communication among the various contacts in almost real time.

  Kleinbaum collected three months’ worth of email communication from these volunteer employees, representing an astounding 30,262 people inside the firm. (While he didn’t reveal the name of the firm, the sheer size of the network explains why he chose the pseudonym “BigCo.”) Kleinbaum removed all the mass communications and blind carbon copies to focus on just the deliberate messages sent by and received from employees. From that data, he was able to construct a rough network map of the organization.

  Kleinbaum also collected human resource data from each of the volunteer employees in the sample. This included employees’ demographic data, like gender, but also their salary level and career path over a period of seventy-seven months, including their business unit, job function, and location. When he finally looked at the complete picture, Kleinbaum found something surprising. The individuals most likely to become brokers and to develop connections across structural holes were what he called “organizational misfits.” Instead of pursuing the slow and steady ladder-climbing career paths of most employees, these misfits had atypical career paths, bouncing around to different business units and filling different job functions. “The more diverse an actor’s career history across groups, the more likely that actor is to engage in improbable category-spanning communication,” he wrote.20

  The findings make sense intuitively. That is, if your career path takes you to various clu
sters inside an organization and you keep your relationships active, you are much more likely to have a diverse set of relationships than if you merely climb upward inside the same leg of the organizational chart. However, the findings run counter to much of our conventional wisdom about how to grow a career inside of a company or industry. We are told, and often tell others, to work hard, keep your head down, and just focus on climbing the ladder. But taken together, the research on structural holes suggests that jumping from ladder to ladder is a more effective strategy, and that lateral or even downward moves across an organization are more promising in the longer run because that is how new and diverse contacts are developed. In contrast, the traditional advice might actually bring diminishing returns as more and more new contacts turn out to be redundant.

  In addition to employees’ individual careers, organizations that push an “up or out” development path of climbing up the career ladder might be unknowingly causing harm to themselves. Focusing everyone on steady forward progress does little to create the structural holes that an organization needs to innovate and survive. And sometimes, when survival is threatened, taking steps to build and create new brokers for structural holes is the only tactic that can save an organization. That is what General Stanley McChrystal discovered when he found himself in Baghdad and in command of an operation with wide and deep structural holes and almost no way to fill them.

  Filling Structural Holes

  In 2003, General Stanley McChrystal took command of the US Joint Special Operations Task Force and quickly realized just how much the traditional tactics of warfare were failing in Iraq—and just how much the structure of the military was to blame. Leading an interservice team that included the Army Rangers, the Air Force’s Delta Force, and the Navy SEALs, McChrystal saw that the structure of the American armed forces left a lot of structural holes between the different branches. “Meaningful relationships between teams were nonexistent,” McChrystal reflected.21 Each team excelled at what they were trained for, but a hard-fought contest against Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) was not exactly what they had trained for. AQI was a fluid, ever-changing network of operatives, and the breakdowns in communication among the US military branches gave it huge opportunities. AQI thus exploited the structural holes in the armed forces, surviving and thriving against a much better resourced and trained opponent because of the gaps between each team. “To each unit, the piece of the war that really mattered was the piece inside their box on the org chart,” McChrystal wrote. “They were fighting their own fights in their own silos.”22