How specific can you be when you’re looking for connections?

I had the great pleasure to attend the Business Buzz conference recently where Andy Lopata was the speaker.

He spoke on the power of professional relationships and as always gave us some really useful take aways. It was a taster of his book Connected Leadership which I can heartily recommend. He talks about how making connection isn’t enough … you have to nurture the relationship to move someone from one who knows you to one who is a supporter and advocate.

During his presentation Andy showed how well connected we all are by getting the room to play 6 degrees of separation. The concept stems back to 1929, when Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy wrote the short story Chains. In the story the characters play a game, trying to figure out how they would contact a random person on the planet using no more than five people in a chain.

The theory was then tested out by social psychologist Stanley Milgram in the 1960’s when he arranged for letters to be sent from Nebraska to a Stockbroker in Boston. They were to write their name on the letter and then send it to someone they knew who might get the letter one step closer to the stockbroker. Each person who received the letter was to do the same until it arrived with the stockbroker (who then sent it back to Milgram). Milgram found that of those that arrived, they had gone through no more than 6 people to get to their destination, and over half had gone through the same 3 people!

Andy got us to choose 4 living and well-known people and each table had to see who they knew who could get them as close as possible to one of the 4 of individuals. We selected a singer, two sportsmen and the Dalai Lama. And in a room of 50’ish people we got to two degrees from all of them. I’ve seen this work before but even I thought the Dalai Lama was going to be difficult. Turned out that 2 people in the room were only 2 degrees from him with one of them having a relative that lived next door to his sibling!

This really does show you how being specific can bear fruit in the world of networking. If you work out the name or job title of the person you want to meet tell other networkers or your colleagues. You may find they live next door to the very person you want to meet!