I attended a talk by Dr. Daniel Blass at the Harvard Business School on Friday. A purely academic talk, one of those in which I find that things that I have taken for granted as generally true have not yet been proven. Colleagues from the Gennova Group got together to ‘debrief’ afterward and that was where the learning happened.

Some things we didn’t know we knew: you need strong ties for exchanging tacit knowledge, and weak ties suffice for exchanging explicit knowledge (plain old communicating). There are really two ways to think about strong vs weak ties. The original definition had to do with redundancy. If you and I each have a ties with a number of the same people, then our tie is strong because there is redundancy.

The newer definition gets into the actual attributes of the tie, that is, if we have known and trusted each other for a long time and go to each other for advice, then we have a strong tie.