2nd
14/90: Spheres of influence
Recently, I had a very good meeting with someone who was actively looking for people doing work similar to what I do at my institution. This individual was towards the end of his search, and only found out about me because a colleague at an institution 2000 miles away talked about my work in a recent conference keynote.
This experience highlighted the role distance can play on the salience of information. Distance seems to weaken ties, causing the information that flows across those weak ties to seem all the more important. Among the locals, the work I’m doing was totally lost in the noise; there are simply too many good things going on to keep track of. However, the project in question was relevant enough that it was carried across the weakened tied, causing it to be rediscovered by the person conducting the local investigation.
This experience makes me wonder if there are other advantages/implications for expertise location in geographically distributed networks. In this case, the fact that my project achieved some sort of ‘escape velocity’ caused it to be discovered by an organizational insider when it was introduced by an outsider. In one way, distance introduced a process of reflection that both selected and validated work being done locally. How can this be systematically leveraged to apply external filters to information that might otherwise be buried by organizational biases?
