Vinayak Hegde

Introduction
Social networks are all the rage nowadays, with every other me-too startup targeting some kind of relationship and helping people interact online. Social networks give interesting insights into the minds of people which were hitherto unavailable (atleast on a large scale) till a few years back. This post describes an experiment my colleague and I did on a group of people informally. We were a small group of people of 30 people in the team spanning various departments from sales and marketing to engineering and finance.

The Experiment
My friend and I wanted to trace the informal grapevine network from which we used to get the interesting news in the office. Soon the opportunity came in an unexpected manner. The office picnic was being planned and Engineering (4 engineers strong) was given the task of planning and executing it. We came up with a strategy for planning that. We kept the location secret so that everyone would keep guessing it and create a buzz. Other than creating hype, we had an ulterior motive (Ha Ha – They were the guinea pigs !!).

The Actors
We knew there were 3-4 people who would generally speak with people within their department (called Propagators). It was 24×5 office so not everyone worked at the same time. That was one of the reason for some isolation between different departments. Also there were a bunch of people (about 3-4) who were comfortable speaking to almost everyone in the company (called Intersections).

The Plan
So we started a buzz about the secret location. Propagator A was told that we were going to Kabini (nice), Propagator B was told Bannerghatta (moderately good), Propagator C was told some resort on the road to Mysore. Also there was purposeful variance between the location. Kabini was great but slightly far so it would have necessitated overnight stay which some people would be unhappy about. Bannerghatta resort was close to the office but not as great as Kabini. The resort near Mysore was moderately far but any more details were not given. The variance in the locations meant that people will talk about it more. More pros and cons means more gossip. Exactly what we wanted. PA, PB and PC were chosen so that they would talk amongst their group mostly. Soon after we told P[ABC] the information, we started getting queries from people about the possible location. Most people heard from one person the first day. Slowly as the news spread, Intersections (I) came to know about it. They became active, more people started querying us with different locations including those who rarely spoke with us. Soon everyone was confused and the reticent people who wouldn’t talk with people much started getting the news and talking to us. We were at an advantage because we used because our work timings would overlap with all the 3 shifts by some factor so we were always accessible for queries (more datapoints . So we were silently chugging way writing in our little notebook figuring who spoke to whom. Also we were noting who spoke to whom first (the comfort level indicates a stronger bond – makes sense ?). Eventually we announced the secret location (Bannerghatta) a couple of days before the event. Finally, I drew the following graph (obfuscated to department level – Thicker lines indicate stronger bonds -based on comfort level and interaction) based on our little notebook.

Map of the Grapevine

The Conclusion
We can see that Marketing talked most with Sales. The unusually strong bonds between HR and other departments were because we were ramping up during that time. I doubt if such a experiment would work with a bigger setup. Oh Yes, we did see chinese whisper phenomenon at work during the experiment as well.