How to Make Better Decisions with Network Intelligence

A decade ago, Bill Gates wrote: "The most meaningful way to differentiate your company from your competition, the best way to put distance between you and the crowd, is to do an outstanding job with information. How you gather, manage, and use information will determine whether you win or lose." This could not be truer today. But the way we’ve been socialized to think about information and knowledge is radically insufficient. Our educational system trains us to memorize facts stored in textbooks and then regurgitate them on an exam. This formal philosophy of learning treats knowledge like a fixed asset: learn, then you have it forever! But as a modern professional, you can’t acquire knowledge this way, because the knowledge you need isn’t static—it’s always changing. You can’t cram your brain with all the relevant information that might possibly be relevant to your careers, then deploy it on exam day. In the world of work, every day is exam day—every day brings new, unpredictable challenges and decisions. Stockpiling facts won’t get you anywhere. What will get you somewhere is being able to access the information you need, when you need it.

Navigate Professional Challenges With Network Intelligence

How desirable are my skills in the changing market? How do I know when I should pivot into a new industry niche? What are the best job opportunities and how do I exploit them? These are not easy questions. They’re certainly not questions you can answer by merely reflecting for a few minutes or filling out a worksheet.

You get help by talking to people in your network. It’s people who help you understand your assets, aspirations, and the market realities; it’s people who help you vet and get introduced to possible allies and trust connections; it’s people who help you track the risk attached to a given opportunity.

What you get when you tap in to other people’s brains is called network intelligence. There’s plenty of good information to be found in books and magazines and search engines. Yet your network is frequently a better—and sometimes the only—fount of pivotal intelligence. A book can’t tell you what skills you need to excel in a certain market niche. A magazine can’t help you weigh the risks of moving halfway around the world for a job. A search engine can’t introduce you to the networks that dish breakout opportunities. But, your network can.

You have had a network full of intelligence for as long as you’ve had friends. But until very recently, tapping this intelligence required time-intensive tasks like maintaining an up-to-date Rolodex, sending written letters, and arranging in-person meetings. Networks and networking were always associated with job hunting because it was so costly in time and effort to deploy your network that you’d only do it for really important things—like finding a job.But now it’s easy and inexpensive to access the information bouncing around the brains of our connections. With everyone connected, the transaction costs of engaging your network are so low that it makes sense to pull intelligence from your network not only for the big career challenges—like finding a good job—but on a broad range of day-to-day issues.

Your network is an indispensable source of intelligence because people offer private observations and impressions that would never appear in a public place like the Wall Street Journal or even your company newsletter. Only a coworker can clue you in to your boss’s idiosyncratic preferences. Only a friend working in another organization can tell you about an as-yet-unannounced job position being created there.

People also offer personalized, contextualized advice. Friends and acquaintances know your interests and can tailor their information and advice accordingly. For example, if you’re trying to weigh the pros and cons of taking a job that entails a significant drop in salary, people who know you well will be able to judge whether or not you can live a leaner lifestyle.

Finally, people can filter information you get from other sources. People can tell you which books to read; which parts of the article are important; which search results to ignore; which people to trust or not trust. People help focus your attention on the intelligence that’s actionable and relevant. In an age of information overload, this is an incredibly valuable benefit.

Who To Ask, and When

You may have a go-to friend who is good at explaining what’s really happening in the economy. Or you may know someone who’s great at understanding people and emotions and whom you count on for relationship advice or navigating interpersonal challenges. We all have certain people we call upon for advice or information on certain topics or issues, but not everyone knows who in their network to go to for intelligence on various career-related decisions.

One way to start thinking about this is to sort the people you know into three (at times overlapping) categories:

1. Domain experts -- for overall options. These are the pros, the people who really know the topic at hand. Got a question about negotiating your salary? Ask your lawyer friend who has negotiated a million contracts.

2. People who know you well -- for fit. Your mother. Your childhood friend. These are the people who may not be up on the latest industry happenings, but they have a good sense of your priorities, personality, and personal history. They can help you unpack feelings of confusion and sometimes even intuit how you’ll likely feel about various outcomes of your decision.

3. Just really smart people -- to cross-check your gut. These people may not be domain experts in the specific topic area and may not know you well. But occasionally sheer analytical horsepower can be useful. At the least, whatever a really smart outsider says stands a chance of being completely different from anything else you’ll hear.

As a general rule, when facing a career / life decision, begin by asking domain experts, then talk to people with whom you have strong personal relationships. If you’re still not satisfied, or want yet another perspective, then turn to really smart outsiders. If you want to break into the hospitality industry, for example, ping a few people in the industry (regardless of how well you know them) in order to get a sense of your overall options. You may need to ask for an introduction from someone in your network in order to get in front of the industry experts. Then, confer with closer allies who know you well to help prioritize the options and figure out the best personal fit.

Ask Great Questions

Charlene Begley ascended the ranks of GE for more than twenty years, rotating through positions in corporate auditing, aircraft engine design, appliances, and transportation locomotives. Now she’s a senior executive at GE’s corporate headquarters. “In all of these environments, you have to learn as much as you can as fast as you can, and you need to make an impact right away,” says Begley, when asked how she’s thrived in so many unimaginably diverse positions. “The secret to this really isn’t a secret: you have to ask a lot of questions.”

Asking a lot of good questions is the secret to network intelligence, too. It may sound obvious, but if you don’t actually pose your inquiries in ways that generate useful answers, nothing else matters.

Here are some tips for asking better questions:

• Converse, don’t interrogate. Spirited back-and-forth generates the most useful intelligence. If you’re talking to a mentor or someone else obviously superior in status, it may be appropriate and expected for you to ask question after question. But when talking with allies and peers, offer thoughts of your own as a way of encouraging a real conversation. Give some intelligence to the other person and it will nudge them to reciprocate. So even though you want as much helpful information as possible, don’t be a reporter and treat your peers as interviewees. Have an even, true exchange; in the long run, richer information will be exchanged.

• Adjust the lens. A simple example of the difference between a wide-lens question and a narrow-lens question is the difference between asking an architect, “How important is going to graduate school for someone interested in architecture?” versus “How highly rated is Cornell’s graduate program in architecture?” The wide-lens question may elicit a long rant about how the person got screwed over by a pricey graduate program that didn’t deliver the promised career boost. On the other hand, the narrow question invites specific, often factual answers about the specific area of inquiry—and nothing else: “Yes, Cornell is in the top ten architecture schools.” When you’re trying to make a decision, ask wide questions to figure out the criteria you should be using; ask narrow questions to figure out which weight you should give to each. For example, ask primarily domain experts, “What should I be thinking about when assessing the pros and cons of this opportunity?” Then, once you’ve narrowed down your criteria, ask a more select group (including people you know well) for specific information about factors X and Y.

• Frame and prime. Countless studies show that the way an issue is framed or primed influences how that question will be answered. So to get the highest-quality intelligence you’ll want to frame the same question in multiple ways. Ask someone, “What are the top three things you did right when you worked at the company I’m about to join?” Then ask the same person, “What three things did you not get to do at the company and wish you did?” You may well get a more useful answer about someone’s experiences with the negative frame—there’s something about reflecting on regret that leads to honest, useful insights. Another way to prime the answerer is to throw out a few sample answers to give a sense of the type of answer you’re looking for. “What do you see as the pros and cons of architecture school? For example, maybe a pro is that I’ll grow my network of architects?” By offering up the kind of answer that’s helpful, you invite an answer of a similar level of specificity.

• Follow up and probe. It’s rare you’ll get a person’s best intelligence with a single question. Follow up and probe on adjectives and adverbs. If someone says, “It’s really risky to work at Microsoft,” continue with “What does ‘risky’ mean?” If that person says, “There’s not a lot of job security,” ask what “not a lot” means. Dig until a deeper answer takes shape. Some people hesitate to ask too many questions because they fear it will make them look ignorant. It won’t. It’ll make you look like a curious, intelligent person hungering for valuable information.

Finally, remember that if you’re able to pose a very directed, detailed question, you’re already advanced in your thinking and close to an answer. For thorny, big-picture anxieties it’s sometimes hard to articulate a specific question to ask. Maybe there is something you’re vaguely concerned with but you can’t put it into words. Something doesn’t feel right at my job. What’s going on? Even if you can’t translate into precise words the thing that’s gnawing at you, your network can still play a valuable intelligence role, though it’s a more involved process. For vague or nebulous concerns, engage people in person and try to tease out the issues over a long conversation.

Portions of this post were excerpted from The Start-Up of You (Crown Business, 2012).