In one bundle

Recently I came across a book called “Established Connections. A Practical Guide to Networking” [1], written by American marketer Tom Singer in collaboration with Leslie Morris. Being interested in issues of interpersonal communication and sometimes not disdaining to look through “pop” literature, I could not pass by. In fact, the book turned out to be a typical example of American literature, written in the “for dummies” style, stuffed with banal advice and well-known clichés. Nevertheless, the topic stated by the author and the attempts at its humanistic conceptualization turned out to be of interest to me as a scientist and psychologist.

The word “networking,” which is still strange to us, can be translated from English something like this: “work on creating a network.” What kind of networks do Singer and Morris teach to weave? In the book, a network means built-up and ordered two-way communication between a person and people he is interested in (clients, business partners and colleagues). As the authors themselves write, “a network is a wide circle of people who know and respect you personally and understand the essence of your work.” In other words, we are talking about the list of business contacts that almost all of us have. But the American approach is to constantly maintain communication with people from the contact list and exclude from it “dead souls”, as well as those who are not motivated to communicate. At the same time, the authors call for putting the interests of other people above your own and investing time and effort in developing informal relationships with clients and partners.

At first glance, such an altruistic approach to building relationships with people evokes only respect. But as you read on, you realize that Singer and Morris view investing in relationship building as an investment that could one day yield significant returns. They directly advise paying attention to necessary and useful people, including them in your network, so that if necessary, you can turn to them for service or support. And again they call on us to provide all possible assistance to these people and not to skimp on signs of attention. This is how we get a humanistic message with an egoistic overtone.

What does all this have to do with the scientific community and how can the ideas of enterprising Americans be useful to our scientific brother?

Once upon a time, while still a student, I thought that every scientist is an agnostic. Not in the sense in which this term was first used by Thomas Huxley, and not in the understanding that was later assigned to the concept in the philosophy and methodology of science. And in the sense that no researcher will discover the truth on his own. That is, in my understanding, agnosticism was not the value position of a scientist, but the impossibility of knowing the truth alone, being cut off from the scientific community. People engaged in science in isolation from each other are similar to the heroes of the famous parable about the elephant and the blind wise men.

Now I am even more convinced that communication between subjects of science is one of the main conditions for its development. Myths about lone geniuses who learned the secrets of the universe in their secret laboratories are only suitable for fiction. In reality, the lack of communication between scientists leads to the invention of bicycles. The history of science knows many simultaneous discoveries made as a result of a lack of information about who, where and what is researching. When I was choosing a topic for my dissertation in psychology, I managed to find a problem that seemed original, practically unstudied and not described in the literature.

And only thanks to personal contacts, I completely accidentally and, fortunately, learned in time that there are people in the country who are successfully dealing with “my” problem.

This concerns the question of factors in the development of scientific knowledge. If we return to more mundane things, we can say that in the scientific environment, as in business, connections decide a lot in terms of developing a scientific career. Finding an adequate reviewer, submitting, preferably for free, an article to a serious scientific journal, receiving an invitation to an honorary conference or taking part in a grant competition is much easier when you have an extensive network of contacts and regularly maintain relationships with (one would like to say “useful”) people of science.

Now I in no way mean cronyism, bribery or anything like that. We are talking about psychological laws that govern the processes of interpersonal communication. Those who like us or who perceive us as their good friends, consciously or unconsciously, tend to give us preference over people who are not very familiar to them. In addition, having a fairly extensive network of contacts, we simultaneously have access to information owned by our friends or colleagues who are ready to share news from scientific life or inform us about any scientific event. Huge flows of useful information pulsate between people united by one network and are inaccessible to those who are not part of their circles. To access it, you need to become your own person, and this is not always so easy to do. This is where some of the ideas described by Singer and Morris may be useful to those for whom the issue of building relationships with colleagues and creating a network of professional scientific contacts is relevant. Despite the naivety of half of the recipes for networking offered in the book, it encourages us to think about what contribution I personally make or am ready to make to the development of business and personal relationships with my “brothers in mind,” whose scientific interests lie on the same plane as mine, or at least intersect somewhere.

After all, one way or another we all work in the same bundle.

Igor Pavlov

1. Singer T. Established connections: a practical guide to networking / T. Singer, L. Morris; lane from English O. G. Belosheev. - Mn.: Potpourri, 2010. - 192 p.