By Zoë Billington, UX Research & Customer Insights, Los Angeles, California, zbillington@gmail.com
Glenna Crooks, PhD, The NetworkSage, glenna@glennacrooks.com
This quarter, Zoë spoke with Glenna Crooks, PhD. Crooks is a social scientist turned policy strategist who solves health and well-being problems for governments and organizations globally.
Zoë: Can you share some examples of how others have used their network mind maps to transform their lives or others’?
Glenna: My only goal at the start was to help talented people remain in the workforce, and I’m pleased to say it worked. At the 10-year mark, I told their stories in The NetworkSage: Realize Your Network Superpower. It describes a three-step process I call ACTSage. In the first step, people become Aware of their connections. In the second step, they Clarify what they need and want from these connections. In the third stage, they Transform their networks based on what they’ve learned.
Nearly everyone downsized. Some withdrew from community leadership or volunteer roles to focus on their family or career. Others opted for picnics and potlucks rather than dinner parties, which are tougher to pull off after a long week of work or travel. Some dropped social media. Everyone found gaps to fill, like a man who hadn’t replaced the dentist who retired three years earlier. A majority saw that, lacking an attorney, they didn’t have a will or guardianship arrangements for their children. Parents of children with food allergies identified people whose help they needed to protect their child’s health when parents were not around. One business-owning mom showed her map to her husband and said, “Here’s what I’m doing. How about if you take care of my car?” Another woman enlarged her map and hung it on her bathroom wall to contemplate as she soaked in the tub. Within six months, she tripled the footprint of her retail business, negotiated a better rent with her landlord, and started a foundation to help women with breast cancer. One couple decided against joining three other families to create a time-shared mountain cabin when mapping showed them the workload involved.
Much to my surprise, people found ways to use this in their work, too. That took me back to healthcare to expand on patient journey research and to identify the most trusted COVID-19 vaccine messengers for different population segments. It created a new way to describe the burden of an illness and, therefore, the value of therapy. A luxury brand retailer used it to create a new sales training program. It showed first-generation college students where to build the connections they needed for their future. Several people demonstrated their value to prospective employers by mapping their career connections. I’m happy to report that they left interviews with jobs in hand because they were able to demonstrate the value of their relationships, which is typically a hard thing to commoditize.
Then, seniors read the book, and some changed their retirement plans because of it. They wanted insights tailored to their stage of life. Curious about that, I added them to my research and have followed some for five years. That will be the subject of my next book, Longevity Pioneering: Building Networks to Remain in Control of Your Life. I have proof of concept that building robust networks helps, and I want to show more people how to do that.
People also reinterpreted life experiences through this new lens and had helpful “aha” moments—me included—and it’s yet another example of how “blind” we can be to realities before our eyes. In my case, I saw that the biggest setbacks in my career came from being a homeowner. Here’s why. When you buy a home, everybody talks about the money and whether you can afford the downpayment, the mortgage, and the new roof you’ll need in five years. Nobody asks if you have the bandwidth to manage 20 people. For example, for internal maintenance alone, you will, at some point, need a plumber, electrician, painter/wallpaper installer, HVAC technician, appliance repair technician, chimney sweep and firewood supplier if you have a fireplace, carpet cleaner, heating oil company, dryer vent cleaner, and exterminator for indoor pests (e.g., ants, roaches). For external maintenance, add a roofer, shrub/tree trimmer, grass cutter, window washier, gutter cleaner, snow remover, driveway sealer, mason (for some exteriors), exterminator for outdoor pests (e.g., bats, squirrels), and trash company (in some places). If you ever renovate, which I did, add 10.
No employer would ever expect someone to have 20 or 30 direct reports, but that’s what it takes to own a home. Only in retrospect did I see the connection load home ownership requires. How I wish I could reclaim that energy for my career and social life. Lacking a framework for understanding connections and networks, I missed meaningful data because I couldn’t “see” it.
I’m not unusual, as I’ve learned in my longitudinal research. We take on adulting a little bit at a time, squeezing more into each day until we hit a crisis or burnout. It’s like that metaphor about cooking a frog: if a frog is placed in boiling water, it will jump out, but if it is placed in tepid water that is gradually heated, it will not notice the temperature increase until it is too late and boil to death. That means it’s rarely a question of “whether” but “when” we’ll get cooked. I’m pleased to say that when that happens, people who map their networks do not wrongly blame their bosses, their jobs, or their marriages. Mapping allows them to see life in a new way so they can identify and resolve the real drivers of being overwhelmed. I’d be happier when we all do it proactively, though, and avoid burnout.
Zoë: Do you have any parting words of advice for our readers, who I’m sure are now thinking about their own networks and how to examine or leverage them better?
Glenna: I’ll come back to my goal of keeping talented people in the workforce and say, I’m concerned about women. They carry network workloads for others at work and outside of it, especially if they have kids, kids with special needs or talents, or are caregivers. This is why I’m impatient with typical work-life balance discussions. It’s hard to balance when we’re all blind to the nature and scope of the network connection dynamics, and we’ve blown past Dunbar’s 150 number long ago. In the movie I Don’t Know How She Does It, Sarah Jessica Parker stars as a married woman with two kids and a job that requires travel. She is so overwhelmed managing the 35 connections shown in the film that she quits work. Based on my research, a woman with those demographic characteristics connects with not 35 but 350 people.
I don’t know how they do it. I want this work to help them.
The single best thing anyone can do is become aware of their connections. Even that first Awareness step is psychoactive. As someone said, “You liberated me. You gave me data, and now that I have it, I know what to do.” It’s easier to develop that awareness now than it was for me 15 years ago because there’s a network framework to help. In summary, it’ll help readers in four ways:
- They will see they have far more support than they realize. Valuable assets they can use to improve their personal and work lives are hiding in plain sight.
- They will see any mismatch between how they spend their resources and their personal and professional life goals. Most people see that some connections don’t serve them well, even when they’re paying customers. So, they find alternatives.
- They will identify gaps they need to fill with important but missing connections, like attorneys and backup babysitters.
- Lastly, they will have new insights into the lives of others, including their employees and customers. If they bring this awareness into their work, they will find new product and service ideas to satisfy customers. If they’re market researchers, they will find valuable new insights for clients.
Zoë: Thank you so much for sharing your journey with us, Glenna. I hope this article inspires readers to explore their networks and use this new knowledge to improve their
personal and professional lives.
REFERENCES
(1) Footnote for gorilla x-ray study: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/
articles/PMC3964612, Trafton Drew, Melissa L. H. Vo, and Jeremy M. Wolfe, “The invisible gorilla strikes again: Sustained inattentional blindness in expert observers,” Psychol Sci. 2013 Sep; 24(9): 1848–1853.
(2) Robin Dunbar’s 150 connections: Dunbar, Robin.
How Many Friends Does One Person Need: Dunbar’s Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.
(3) Christakis has a TED Talk, which is the most easily accessible way to see the basic premise of his research: www.ted.com/talks/nicholas_christakis_the_hidden_influence_of_social_networks?
subtitle=en. He also has a variety of publications on the topic:
- Christakis, NA; Allison, PD (2006). “Mortality after the Hospitalization of a Spouse” (PDF). New England Journal of Medicine. 354 (7): 719–730.
- Christakis, NA; Fowler, JH (2007). “The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network Over 32 Years” (PDF). New England Journal of Medicine. 357 (4): 370–379.
- Christakis, NA; Fowler, JH (2008). “Quitting in Droves: Collective Dynamics of Smoking Behavior in a Large Social Network” (PDF). New England Journal of Medicine. 358 (21): 2249–2258.
- Fowler, JH; Christakis, NA (2009). “The Dynamic Spread of Happiness in a Large Social Network” (PDF). British Medical Journal. 337 (768): a2338.
- Fowler, JH; Christakis, NA (2010). “Cooperative Behavior Cascades in Human Social Networks.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 107 (12): 5334–8.
- Rand, DG; Arbesman, S; Christakis, NA (2011). “Dynamic Social Networks Promote Cooperation in Experiments with Humans.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 108 (48): 19193–8.
- Apicella, CL; Marlowe, FW; Fowler, JH; Christakis, NA (2012). “Social Networks and Cooperation in Hunter-Gatherers” (PDF). Nature. 481 (7382): 497–501.
