TED Talks on Networks

This post is a collation of some of the most stand-out TED (and TEDx) talks on Networks that I’ve come across. If you’ve come across another great one, please do share!

We’re all embedded in vast social networks of friends, family, co-workers and more. Nicholas Christakis tracks how a wide variety of traits — from happiness to obesity — can spread from person to person, showing how your location in the network might impact your life in ways you don’t even know.

People often credit their ideas to individual “Eureka!” moments. But Steven Johnson shows how history tells a different story. His fascinating tour takes us from the “liquid networks” of London’s coffee houses to Charles Darwin’s long, slow hunch to today’s high-velocity web.

In his talk, Mark Turrell describes how the power of networks can change the world for the better. Crowdsourcing, the general power of masses via revolution, and mobile phone networks are just the most known examples of how networks can change your business, your social life, and your career directly. One particular experience further proves this: the Global Teacher Prize. Mark explains how networks within networks can help to identify potential candidates. Additionally, he elaborates on the (in)efficient way we use career networks such as LinkedIn these days, and how networking strategies can serve as a completely new toolbox for achieving goals dramatically faster.

In this talk, Christian looks into how communities can generate, nurture, and accelerate ideas and positive change. Based on his experiences at community-driven accelerator Sandbox, as well as his research at the LSE’s Innovation and Co-Creation Lab, he will explore what makes some communities more successful than others in supporting individuals and collectives. He argues that a new articulation of needs, from ‘Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs’ to a ‘Lateral Cycle of Needs’, as well as new technology supporting governance mechanisms such as lateral accountability, will help define how we think about communities and how to reach their respective goals. He argues that facilitating an enlightened self-interest of members, as well as a focus on meaningful relationships (rather than transactions) will not only help us build more impactful communities, but also result in an “enlightened self-interest model of capitalism”.

How does innovation happen? Economic and organizational sociologist Marc Ventresca approaches the world as a series of ethnographic encounters, seeing the microdynamics in big institutional arrangements and recognizing the structural sources of local and immediate interaction. Innovation is as much ‘unbuilding’ legacy systems as it is envisioning new ones; this duality is the source of much mischief, some glee, and sometimes despair. This is a key lesson of great historians, great sleuths, and great Moms. Coupled with an early reading of Foucault and dear friends who study social networks, and after a stint as a public policy analyst where error terms were USD $millions and 000s of children, his research and teaching build up this view of ‘inhabited institutions’.