Social Network for RSA Fellows

As long as the ties that bind us together are stronger than those that would tear us apart, all will be well

In the Summer 2010 edition of the RSA Journal, under the title, “The House of Unreason”, Charles Handy says this:

When I stood up to deliver my first chairman’s lecture to the RSA 23 years ago, I said that its greatest asset was its 20,000-strong army of Fellows. It is [sic] true then and it is true today, when the army is even bigger. As I was soon to discover, however, it is one thing to have an army but quite another to engage it in action, particularly if it is a volunteer army.

It would be very difficult indeed to imagine a network of people with greater potential to be vibrant, alive, energetic, productive and socially useful than the RSA Fellowship, and yet, on the ground, in its constituencies, it is not. But why is this? What is preventing us being one of the most influential local networks this country has? How is it we are quiescent even when we host some of the greatest minds in our society who tell us about how society works and speak wisely about the power and importance of social networks? How are we not making a significant contribution and tapping into civic capacity, locally in the regions where the vast bulk of the RSA Fellowship exists? Especially when our Chief Executive in his recent blog quotes that distinguished economist, Paul Ormerod as saying,

Social networks are important; understanding and using them can make a significant contribution to tapping into civic capacity and meeting public policy goals. Social networks are complex and the way they operate unpredictable.

Perhaps it is because social networks are complex and unpredictable, or, perhaps, it is because the forces that keep us apart are stronger than the ties that should bind us together? In this paper, I seek to examine both.

Although Robin Dunbar, Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University, who held the floor at No. 8 John Adam Street recently, tells us that, in common with all primates, humans have a natural limit to the number of relationships they can reasonably handle, based on the size of the human neocortex, he also tells us that this highly developed part of our brains is where our desire for socialising exists. In nature, “Birds of a feather flock together” and humans display this desire too. It is a strong desire: we have an innate tendency to form communities in areas of common interest. Dunbar observes that social networks consist of a series of layers, tending to triple as each layer is added and Professor Stanley Milgram of Yale University tapped the power of this in 1960 when he discovered that, typically, only five or six others separate us from another person.

Networks are what society is all about and understanding their nature is becoming increasingly important in our complex and fast-moving world. As Barabási puts it:

Networks are only the skeleton of complexity, the highways for the various processes that make our world hum. To describe society, we must dress the links of the social network with actual dynamical interactions between people.

Social networks are dynamic systems that change constantly. People compete for connections because links represent survival in a connected world: Companies compete for customers, actors strive for opportunities to perform, people vie for social links because it gives them greater influence and security and mathematicians have discovered that networks follow the principle behind Pareto’s 80:20 theory, the Power Law, where the majority of nodes have only a very few links whereas a small number have a disproportionally large number, clustering by geography, common interest, or mutual aid, where those with the gift of being able to add links succeed and those who don’t, miss out. These networks cluster according to ‘Fitness’, a concept measured by the number of links a node has. Fitness is a quantitative measure of the ability to stay ahead of the competition.

In 1973, sociologist, Mark Granovetter at Johns Hopkins University, in his seminal paper, The Strength of Weak Ties, which explored the way people got jobs, showed the mechanism for the diffusion of influence and information in social networks was through the process of overlapping personal networks, through acquaintances (the ‘weak’ ties) as opposed to the strongly tied family or cluster of close friends. Milgram’s packets had leapfrogged over 2,000 kilometres in only five or six steps because people were linking their weakly tied networks of acquaintances, not their families and social clusters.

Malcolm Gladwell in his book The Tipping Point describes people whom he calls Connectors. These people are super-networkers who have mastered the art of the weak tie: they have big Rolodexes. Most of us don’t possess that ability, but the development of social media on the Internet has turned us all into potential Connectors by making it easy for us to spread a message amongst many people in a very short time through Hubs. Hubs are super-connected nodes, they are the network equivalent of Gladwell’s Connectors. Facebook, now increasingly being used by politicians and organisations, is an example of a gigantic Hub, YouTube is another.

In 2009, for the first time in history, these hubs were used for political purposes by Barack Obama in his campaign to become President of the United States of America. At the height of the campaign, Obama had more than 3 million ‘friends’ on Facebook, and his social media campaigning staff, largely drawn from the generation to whom this medium is second nature, were using Facebook, Bebo, Myspace, YouTube, Twitter and a host of other such sites in such an innovative way that they are widely believed to have been instrumental in his election. Network Hubs are the key to connectedness and, as we see from the Internet, they can exist harmoniously with each other in a community, effectively sharing connectivity and nodes and building links by offering a different sort of Fitness.

However, some hubs can become super-dominant and create a Winner Takes All situation. This effect has been demonstrated by Barabási et al as analogous to the Bose-Einstein condensation effect present in quantum mechanics. Extremely large, complex networks can behave like a huge quantum gas where subatomic particles cool, lose energy and ultimately condense into another form. When this happens in networks, their Scale Free, rich-get-richer nature collapses, and domination takes over. Microsoft is an excellent example of this. It is a dominating hub in the PC Operating System market with a near monopoly. Whilst there are many operating systems available for computers, through the extraordinary foresight of Bill Gates and some very clever marketing, Microsoft is in the position of controlling the vast majority of links to consumers of PCs, causing most of us to condense into a large mass of Windows users effectively unable to get out. Microsoft is the spider at the centre of a PC user web, constantly catching new nodes, but such a situation creates stasis and draws energy out of the system. For social networks to function as vibrant, alive, energetic, productive, socially useful mechanisms, we need to avoid the spiders who create webs.

Handy again:

Although most organisations at the time could at least gather working groups together to share key messages - something that would have been impossible for a network as extended as the RSA - we were not unusual in failing to have much upward or sideways communication. What no one seemed to realise at the time was that a one-channel system of communications inevitably led to a centralised and hierarchical organisation.

I repeat, this was 23 years ago. Today, in our fantastically connected age, we still do not have working groups of Fellows physically sharing key messages on the ground, in the regions. In fact, we do not have any working groups all, at least in my region. I cannot speak for others. The enormous intellectual, influential, connecting, bridging, society-changing resource of one of the most eclectic communities of movers, shapers and people with something to say in this country - the RSA Fellowship - is still to all intents and purpose silent and inactive in its communities a quarter of a century after one of the World’s greatest experts on organisational behaviour observed it in his capacity as leader of this 250+ year old British Institution.

The RSA giant remains largely inactive: condensed into a Bose-Einstein form that has it locked into inactivity, just like Gulliver tied down by many small threads that, instead of holding it down, should be binding it together. The RSA will never function as a meaningful social entity unless it is allowed to become one. At present, it can only be likened to the Wellsian Eloi: that frail, naive group of people harvested by others for sustenance. (Currently, the Fellowship of the RSA faithfully and regularly provides around £4M a year which, within a few pounds, is the cost of the RSA wage bill.) The RSA is its Fellows. Surely it is worth much more than this?

Handy, of course, puts his finger on the raw nerve: the RSA has a top-down, one-channel system of communication that prevents the Fellowship knowing each other. Despite the recent introduction of a Fellowship Directory on the RSA website (in which it is impossibly difficult for most people to post their details), there is no easily available means for Fellows to link with each other because communication with Fellows is only allowed through a centralised, top-down, channel from a central secretariat (And one that has demonstrated itself prepared to redact or frustrate messages from the Fellowship to the Fellowship on more than one occasion; even messages from our Regional Chair.)

It is a complete nonsense that a Fellow should not know who other Fellows are in the same town, village, suburb and be able to locate them easily. Those vital cross-links that are the ‘ties that bind’ healthy networks are simply unavailable to us.

In discussing the democratising effect of the Internet, Handy says this:

Wise organisations lapped this up, although some clung to the old ways and merely speeded up the existing one-channel system, keeping the power where they felt it properly belonged. The latter soon discovered that the status quo could no longer be the way forward, because they lost out in the chase for new ideas.

These are telling words for the RSA from a former Chairman, a man of great wisdom and highly respected in his field. The chase for new ideas will only start when intelligent, articulate, animated people like RSA Fellows are able to spark off one another, forming clusters: geographically where they live; in communities of common interest or concern that will reach out across geographical boundaries; for projects either long or short term; for socialisation and friendship; for mutual aid (the very word Fellowship (Gr. koinonia) means “Communion by intimate participation”: interdependence, not independence. What bit of Fellowship are we not understanding here?) And freedom of communication is the catalyst that will start the process. Then projects will emerge amongst like-minded people in communities of interest.

We also need to put energy into the system. Clusters of Fellows across the regions need to be encouraged to form around people with Fitness. It is the 5s and 15s, coming together regularly in the communities where they live, engaging in dynamic interactions, who will form the skeleton of the larger network. We need Connectors to provide the highways of weak ties, the veins and arteries, that will link and empower these clusters; and we need to make innovative use of Web 2.0 technology to leverage that like the Virtual Coffee House hosted by the North East Fellowship.

The RSA needs to start thinking the (hitherto) unthinkable about its ‘army’ of Fellows. As Handy says,

I have always thought of the RSA as a testing ground of ideas for a future society, as the ‘home of unreason’, after George Bernard Shaw. Shaw distinguished between the reasonable person who followed the trends and the unreasonable one who sought to shape the trends by thinking the unlikely and doing the impossible. The future, he concluded, belonged to the unreasonable ones. Frightened organisations expel unreasonable ideas but courageous ones foster them, understanding that not all of them will necessarily work. If Number 8 John Adam Street became known as the House of Unreason, I personally would be delighted.

That would make two of us. Anyone else feel the same?

Kevin Robson FRSA

LinkedIn: http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/kevin-robson/12/a63/a82

Fellowship Directory: http://www.thersa.org/fellowship/fellows-facilities/display-users-i...

1 Dunbar R. (1992) Neocortex size as a constraint on groups size in primates. Journal of Human Evolution

2 Barabási Albert-László (2003) Linked: How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What it Means for Everyday Life Plume, Penguin Group (USA)

3 Granovetter, M. (1973). The Strength of Weak Ties American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 78, Issue 6, May 1973, pp. 1360-1380.

4 Gladwell M. (2000) The tipping point: how little things can make a big difference Abacus. London. ISBN9780349113463

Comment by david ramsay on September 21, 2010 at 14:06: While I agree with the sentiments I often think that the RSA, in part, is slightly divorced from reality in some of its expectations. The Fellowship contains many privileged individuals, in the sense that they have an income and time to spare to help the community at large. It also contains many retired people who have the time and experience to devote to RSA driven projects. However, given the presiding economic climate which is likely to get worse and be prolonged, the Fellowship will also contain many people who spend all their waking hours trying to keep their business afloat, survive an increasingly strained and undermanned corporate environment or deal with the reality of redundancy. Yes, we all want to change the world but sometimes just surviving takes priority.