Network Your Way to a Green Thumb

Hi there, happy Thursday!

Welcome to another issue of the Network Wrangler. Here’s our structure in today’s issue (if you want to skip ahead, but I don’t think you want to!):

1. MANAGE: Thoughts on managing your existing network

2. GROW: Insights on growing your network

3. INSPIRE: A business idea that leverages networks

4. SCROLL: Quick links to items related to networking

MANAGE: Your Network As Your Garden

I’m so over winter already, and we haven’t even made it to Groundhog Day.

I’m distracting myself with visions of Spring and all the cool things I’m going to plant in my container garden. Peppers, peas, tomatoes, herbs… the works!

And as I’ve been planning ahead, I realize so many parallels exist between managing your network and growing plants in a garden (or indoors). It stands to reason: if your network is your garden, your connections are your plants, and your net worth is your harvest.

Following along?

If so, we can learn a lot by applying good gardening practices to our network. (If not, please re-read the paragraph above).

You don’t need a green thumb (naturally) to be successful in the garden. You need to follow a light structure, respond to what works, and stop doing what doesn’t work. The same applies to whatever the green thumb equivalent is for being a successful networker (reply with your suggestions!).

• PREPARE

  • 🪴 the garden: Forecast your harvest, design the layout, pick the plants, and amend the soil.

  • 🧑‍🤝‍🧑🧑‍🤝‍🧑 the network: Imagine your best network, map your connections, discover gaps and redundancies, and create a growth strategy.

• GROW

  • 🪴 the garden: Follow the design, plant the plants, feed, water, and weed.

  • 🧑‍🤝‍🧑🧑‍🤝‍🧑 the network: Follow the strategy, make new connections, create value for your connections, connect your connections, and prune poor connections.

• HARVEST 

  • 🪴 the garden: pick what’s ripe, share what’s plentiful

  • 🧑‍🤝‍🧑🧑‍🤝‍🧑 the network: extract value (recommendations, referrals, introductions)

The more significant lesson here is that we reap what we sow in both our gardening and our networking management.

🪴 If we leave things to happen naturally in the garden, then we’ll have an unruly, overrun by weeds green space that likely won’t result in the harvest we were hoping for.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑🧑‍🤝‍🧑 If we leave things to happen naturally in our networking, through spontaneous and serendipitous connections, then we’ll have a bunch of connections (did you look at your LinkedIn connections list lately? How about Facebook?) but we won’t be recognizing the value that should come from a network that size.

Remember: just knowing more people—particularly when those people are very similar to you—doesn’t create more value; it simply creates more work. An intention around your connections (who and why) is where the return on investment comes.

Yes, spring is just around the corner! I can’t think of a better time to be intentional about growing our gardens and our networks together. Stay tuned.

GROW: Sweet Party Trick to Find a Talking Partner

Enough talking about Spring. I invite you to take a moment and think back to the holiday season just past and all the gatherings you attended.

How many new people did you meet?

Of that number, how many new connections did you make?

How many times did you walk out of a networking event with exactly the same number of connections as you walked in because you didn’t talk to anyone new?

Hmmm. I bet we can do better going forward. Here’s how.

When I attend an event and walk in to find it’s a sea of people I don’t know, my heart races a little bit as I figure out how to dive in. The noise and the feeling all eyes must be on me means I must overcome my natural inclination to seek safe harbor at the bar and adopt a specific cognitive framework that transforms the experience.

The cognitive framework is this: people almost always interact with each other in pairs, otherwise known as dyads.

Think of it: we’re biologically and socially wired to interact as dyads with two eyes that point in a single direction and an auditory processing system that lets us hone in on a single voice in a crowd (called, literally, the cocktail party effect).

So, when I walk into a crowded room and sea that wall of people, I look for small clusters of people within the crowd. Those clusters are always there, and they’re usually found near a piece of furniture. Amongst the clusters, I look specifically for a cluster with an odd number of people in it (one, three, five, etc). There’s where I can find my conversation partner.

By joining the odd-numbered cluster, I create a numerical balance, which helps reduce the entire cluster's anxiety as all pairs are now complete. The conversation flows better, and the opportunity to create a new valuable connection is ripe for the picking.

Try it next time you’re in a room of folks and looking for a conversation partner.

INSPIRE: Back Country Water Quality Network

I grew up last Century (in the 1900s!) backpacking in the Rocky Mountains in New Mexico and Colorado. I spent so many nights in a tent in the remote wilderness that if I close my eyes, I can still see the shape of the Milky Way in the dark sky above my campsite. Such good times so far away from civilization.

One of the survival lessons I had to learn early to succeed as a backpacker was finding and purifying water from local sources.

There were best practices for sourcing the water, such as flowing rather than still, being closer to the spring source than further away, and being upstream from any free-ranging livestock.

And there were best practices to purifying the sourced water: boiling for ten minutes or using iodine tablets.

There were even some handy shortcuts in a pinch: suck on (non-yellow) snow or icicles, lick the condensation on the tent fly, or capture the water as it tumbled out of a cliff-side spring. I don’t think I ever got too much belly distress from trying any of those. I was lucky.

Now, we live in a world where there are plentiful methods for water purification in addition to boiling and chemical treatments. There are water filters, water purifiers, and UV light systems.

This week’s networking business idea builds off the filter/purifier solutions, and it’s a way to leverage the crowd (the network of backpackers) to create a water quality tracking system where much of our water ultimately originates: the backcountry,

The business has two components: the hardware and the network of users.

The hardware consists of a typical lightweight handheld water filter that holds an embedded diagnostics chipset with a chemical sensor, a GPS tracker, and a wireless communications port. Thanks to technological advances, the chipset only adds a few ounces, at most, to the water filter solution, so the impact on a backpack's contents weight is negligible.

The network of users are typical backpackers who spend time outdoors and need to use a filtration device to clean water from anything but a tap or well.

Now, whenever a backpacker uses the water filter to purify water out in the woods, the quality of the water is captured, along with a timestamp and GPS coordinate for the source. The quality of each source is logged and then once the backpacker returns to civilization (by this I mean: access to internets!), the results of the trip’s water sourcing are uploaded to a central database.

The business is all about capturing data about the watersheds in back countries that otherwise are not measured and monetizing this knowledge. I can think of at least three ways:

• Valuable to water utilities and municipalities that need to monitor the quality of their water source and plan treatments accordingly.

• Useful to the Bureau of Land Management to understand the impact of free-ranging livestock on public lands (just how polluted are they making our streams and lakes?) and to price the free-ranging permits accordingly.

• Informative to eco-minded scientists everywhere to know what kinds of air-borne and earth-borne contaminants are infiltrating the water system at the source where it’s supposed to be purest.

Why is this a networking business idea? We’re leveraging an existing network of outdoors-minded people who are already venturing to places nearest the sources of our water. By equipping them with a passive measuring device, the solution is in the workstream (pun intended!) of purifying water for consumption. The business will be about monetizing the knowledge of where the water was taken and what was extracted in the purification process.

SCROLL: This Week’s Quick Hits

• Friendships at work can boost happiness. Here’s how to nurture them. (National Public Radio)

• Creating value for your network doesn’t always mean it’s about money. Here’s a hierarchy of 30 different elements of value for consumers like you and me. (Harvard Business Review)

• Everything you wanted to know about strong and weak ties. (digital book excerpt from chapter 3 of Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning about a Highly Connected World. By David Easley and Jon Kleinberg.)

That’s all for this week. See you next Thursday!

— Thomas

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