Orders of Social Magnitude

To work effectively in today’s collaborative knowledge environments, we need to have communication, presentation, persuasion, listening and learning skills for different levels of social interaction. I think that, a lot of times, the skills are completely different from one level to the next: 1-1, 1-many, many-many, many-1, and then just 1.

I started to write this list with the infinity symbol, which made me realise that there are degrees of many—orders of magnitude, really. Those range from a few people that you know well (say, a team) to lots (community) to most (culture) to everybody (Web).

And then I added the last: one. The truth is, we don’t really know how to listen to ourselves anymore. The idea of hearing the voice in your head is more associated with psychological dysfunction than having a useful inner voice(s), whether it represents your conscience or your expertise.

More about this someday… Meanwhile, check out Dave Snowden's post on " three natural numbers".

• 5 as the effect limit of the short term memory
• 15 as a natural limit on deep trust and
• 150 as a natural limit on acquaintances, normally interpreted as a limited number of individuals in respect of whom one can maintain some degree of knowledge

Comments

[Michael]

The comment about not listening to ourselves caught my interest. Which self or selves? It looks to me like we each have a number of them-familiar postures / arguments / stories that we identify with at a given moment (“I really am a talented person dealing with extraordinary challenges”) and that change frequently (“Who am I kidding—I’m a hopeless shmuck after all”). Putting aside the tempting but I think misleading question of “which is the real me?” I would ask this: Does the quality of how we listen to our selves reflect the quality of how we listen to others? I think it does, which suggest to me that the basic training ground of deeper listening starts with learning how to declare an inner truce.