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Creativity and the Strength of Weak Ties
Dear readers,
I have just completed negotiations for the Artist's Way at Work television series with UPCtv in Amsterdam. I will host the series of 13 half hour shows and each will feature a teaching segment from the AWAW, interviews with creative individuals in the arts, business and science, and a collection of comments from researchers in the field. (We are currently looking for a PBS sponsor. I should know by September.) The series is slated to air next spring and videos will be available then.
Since I am currently compiling a wish list for these interviews, I thought I would solicit your suggestions. Just send them by email to markabryan@aol.com. The list so far contains the heads of major corporations, artists of every media, and scientists from a range of disciplines. Let me know if anyone you feel strongly about comes to mind.
NOW, a few thoughts about Creativity and The Strength of Weak Ties:
Thirty years ago Mark Granovetter (now a professor of sociology at Stanford) published a paper called "The Strength of Weak Ties," (American Journal of Sociology 78, 1360-1380, 1973). In that paper, he used the term "strength of weak ties to refer to an insight he had about our social world and the various communities to which we belong. Researchers had known for a long time that almost all healthy individuals have relatively strong ties to various social networks - our family, friends, people from the neighborhood, our church, synagogue, temple or mosque, our alma mater, our jobs, our gym mates or golf buddies. What Granovetter found is that it is often the person from outside our strong ties that links us to other worlds of possibility and insight.
Perhaps this is the reason that the chance meeting, the casual comment, the introduction to a stranger, a job lead from someone we do not know very well, often provides important information for us. Maybe knowing about the "strength of weak ties" can motivate us to do better follow-up with our casual acquaintances, to stay more alert for new opportunity whenever we meet someone. I know I need to do better.
My co-producer on the up-coming AWAW television series is a man I met at a dinner party in Washington, D.C. four years ago. He shoots a lot of television for PBS on educational issues. We sat beside each other that night at dinner, said goodbye, and did not speak again until he called me "out of the blue" last winter -- the day after UPCtv called to express their interest in shooting an educational series about the AWAW. Is the world fun or what?
All the best,
Mark Bryan
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