Six Degrees of Separation refers to the idea that every person on earth is connected to every other person on earth by a chain that is not longer than six. For example, George Bush and the person reading this post are connected through a chain not longer than six. So, the person reading this blog, knows person A, who knows B, who in turn knows C, who in turn knows D, who in turn knows E, who knows in turn knows George Bush. As you may guess, there are no empirical proofs for this. However, there have been several experiments conducted in the past which tell us that six is the average length of the chain. You can read more about Six Degrees of Separation on Wikipedia.
The idea of six degrees of separation dates back to early 1900s. Those were the days when most people did not have access to tele-communication. Lets keep phone and mobiles aside, today, Internet has played a very important role in connecting people worldwide and social networks have helped enormously. So it possible that six degrees of separation has come to down to five or maybe even four. We should analyze popular social networks like Facebook (add the “Six Degrees of Separation” application on facebook) or orkut to figure out what the right degree is today. I would probably like to call this new degree – Six Degrees of Separation 2.0.
Now, the idea of this post is not to coin a new term, but to elaborate its importance in today’s product development organization. Yes, I am talking about the application of Six Degrees of Separation to large organizations. Let me elaborate with an example. Consider a small organization, of say, about 20 people. The average degree of separation would be 1 or at the maximum 2. As the size of the organization increases, the degrees of separation increase up to a maximum of 6. More often than not, information in a large organization is spread over people and not the corporate internet. When one needs help, they end up calling the friends they know. This is called phone-a-friend model as pointed out by David Haimes in this post (which actually motivated me to write this post). This is a very interesting model used in every other product development organization. Its important for product development organization to use Web 2.0 to create internet portals or something that will encapsulate the information that people have into a non people dependent form – say for example blogs, forms and mailing lists. This is called Product Development 2.0. Read David’s post for more information on this.
In any product development organization, phone-a-friend model of working is very important and attributes to a great deal of productivity. Employee productivity is higher when there is a good network within the organization. Yes, you can also argue that employee productivity decreases when they know too many people. But Six Degrees of Separation is not about knowing too many people, its about the length of the chain. The lower the length the easier is the information to access and thereby increasing productivity. Its important to measure the average degrees of separation within your organization. A very low degree and a very high degree are both equally bad. I don’t have to explain why a very high degree of separation is not good. However, what I need to explain is why a low degree is bad or rather not advisable. The main reason is that, for a large organizations, a low degree of separation like 1 or 2 is practically impossible to achieve. And even if you try to achieve that, you will end ensuring that your employees spend a good amount on time on communication, thereby reducing their productivity. I would say a degree of 3 is very optimum and a degree of 4 is easily achievable to have an efficient organization. So, what do you do to ensure that you have an optimum degree of separation in your organization? Social networks, collaboration tools, blogs, instant messengers, etc. An internal social network not only helps in reducing the degree, but also can be used to measure and improve. Degrees of Separation is on of the key components of Product Development 2.0.
Till date, degrees of separation wasn’t really something that has been consciously tried out in the organizations. But if you think about it, that is something we have been trying to achieve implicitly. What I tried to portray is one point of view, of how the idea of degrees of separation can be used to improve productivity. Imagine what you can achieve when you reduce the combined degrees of separation of your employees and customers together. Imagine the possibilities with Product Development 2.0.
