Imagine registering for a conference and being asked not only to enter your name
and address, pay the registration fee, but also choose where you're going
to sit at the gala dinner. I hadn't seen that before, but
apparently some conferences do ask for that because this is a screen
that I saw on a colleague's computer a few years ago when I
dropped by to say hello over lunch. She was registering for a conference and was
having to choose
which of these tables to seat at, at the dinner and it raises
a question that is ubiquitous for us. We have to decide who we affiliate with,
who we spend time with. It goes back to junior high days,
sitting at the cafeteria, but it's a question that all of us face in
one way or another pretty much every day. Let's just walk through
this as an example, and I want you to consider what you would do. If you were
registering for
this conference and you were facing this screen, you're coming in and
you have some tables to choose from. How are you going to decide? What are you even
going to base it on,
how are you going to think about it? Some people when asked this question,
look for their friends essentially, look for people they know and they want to
sit in a table with people they know. That's a very reasonable,
natural consideration. Some people think about I don't
want to sit at a table and then no one else comes and
sits behind me, so I want to sit at a full table,
basically, I don't want to be isolated. And that's again a human instinct and
understandable. What other considerations
might you bring to this? Some folks think who do I need
to work with at this conference, who might I have some
interest in talking to? It might not be a friend, it might be
someone of purely professional interest, let me go get a chance
to sit at the table, it may be the only chance
I have to talk to them. Also, reasonable. Some ambitious people think,
let me sit with people who I don't know or aren't like me, or I won't have a chance
to visit with in any other situation. That is relatively rare, but
I do hear that response sometimes. How would you do this? How would you decide? In
many ways, what we're going to
talk about in today's lecture is this kind of consideration. You're building
relationships all the time, not formal or
hierarchical relationships, but informal relationships, can we bring
some structure to how we do that? Can we bring some insight into
the consequences of how we do it? A lot of it will look like the decision
on what you do here at the registration. The one suggestion I would offer here and
we talk about this when we talk about this exercise with our daytime students,
is what about serendipity? What about what would happen if you
sat at the table with only one or two seats filled so
that you're rolling the dice, essentially, on the next seven or eight
people that come to sit at that table? What would the consequence of that be? It's
riskier,
it may not be comfortable, but what do we know about the people that
sit down after we sit at the table? What do we know about the people who,
when they see our name, they decide to sit at that table? It's risky, we don't know
for sure,
but we can be certain that on average, those people chose to sit there for
a reason, they wanted to sit next to us. It's interesting that when we're making
these calculations, we sometimes don't realize other people are making the
calculations about us, and it might be in our best interest to actually
expose ourself to that serendipity. To expose ourself to the possibility that
someone else is going to sit down and offer us something, entertainment, or
information,
that we wouldn't have had otherwise. That's an idea that we'll continue to
play with over the course of the day, but wanted to get it out there because it's
not something that folks often think about when they make these kinds of decisions.
With that start,
let's dive in to social networks.
