How do you find your weak ties?

Weak ties are very important in your life. You can find some science here. Weak ties are people that are in your network but you don’t talk to them very often. Your strong ties are very important but you’ll get very interesting and more novel information from weak ties than your strong ties.

In the past, I found my weak ties in the office or simply by going out to the supermarket, shopping mall, or restaurant. Today because of the time we are living in (lockdowns and a pandemic) it’s hard to find your weak ties. Being most of the time at home reduces the chances to find those people.

The other place you might be able to find them is online, but this is a complex topic. I feel that leaving the chances of finding a weak tie to an algorithm has not worked very well in the past. There is a chance you find someone while you scrolling, but I guess those algorithms might be optimized to show stuff from your strong ties (to increase engagement and the chance of showing you ads). This could be incorrect but I don’t think there is a lot of value in optimizing for weak ties (or is it?).

I’ve been thinking about how to find these people in a more disciplined and systematic way. There might be an app already or one could use a spreadsheet. I would like to have a way to log the people I interact with on a daily basis. After some time one could find strong and weak ties, and try to reach out to the weak ties. Sometimes just saying Hi to a weak tie is nice.

This method might not help to find all the weak ties. It could leave the very important ones but is a start. Which method are you using today? Happy to hear about it in the comments or on Twitter.